Although teachers make frequent decisions about whether and how to address difficult topics, they typically do so with minimal support. This article reports a case study of an inquiry community of 20 educators who engaged in practitioner inquiry as professional learning for addressing the difficult topics that they teach within their curricula or otherwise encounter within their professional practices. Through an inductive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 12 community participants, the article’s authors identified four themes characterizing how the inquiry community supported teachers to lean into the difficult topics they believed they needed to address. The community helped teachers define difficult-topics inquiry while connecting them across divergent political and professional perspectives. The community assisted teachers in engaging difficult topics through purposefully structured inquiry talk, and it prompted them to (re)conceptualize difficult-topics teaching as inquiry. The article demonstrates the potential of difficult-topics inquiry communities as professional learning for turbulent times.

中文翻译：

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深入探讨困难的话题：探究社区作为动荡时期教师的专业学习

尽管教师经常决定是否以及如何解决困难的话题，但他们通常在很少的支持下这样做。本文报道了一个由 20 名教育工作者组成的探究社区的案例研究，他们从事从业者探究作为专业学习，以解决他们在课程中教授的或在专业实践中遇到的困难主题。通过对 12 名社区参与者的半结构化访谈进行归纳主题分析，文章作者确定了四个主题，描述了探究社区如何支持教师深入研究他们认为需要解决的难题。该社区帮助教师定义困难的主题探究，同时将不同的政治和专业观点联系起来。社区通过有目的地结构化的探究性谈话帮助教师参与困难话题，并促使他们将困难话题教学（重新）概念化为探究。本文展示了困难话题探究社区作为动荡时期专业学习的潜力。