Describing difference or explaining it?

Troublesome knowledge and comparative reasoning in a short-format teaching context

Abstract

Teachers across disciplines ask students to perform conceptual operations they seldom state, and short-format teaching rarely yields the evidence SoTL conventionally expects. I reflect on a ninety-minute online guest lecture delivered within a Comparative Political Institutions course at a Dutch university. The session compared constitutional election disputes in Zimbabwe and Malawi and aimed to move students from descriptive case comparison toward explanatory reasoning about judicial institutions and political context. Although students engaged actively and correctly identified doctrinal differences between the two judgments, the explanatory connections I anticipated were absent from the discussion. Reading the episode through Meyer and Land's account of troublesome knowledge, I suggest that the step from describing difference to explaining it remains tacit, held within a scholarly community and seldom stated to students entering it. I present this as an interpretive possibility raised by the experience and not as a finding. Finally, I also weigh what making such conceptual demands explicit might cost as well as offer.