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Many K-12 teachers teach difficult topics as part of their curricula, and discussions of difficult topics are common across grade levels and content areas. As teachers increasingly engage with difficult topics in their classrooms, the need for high-quality professional learning experiences has also grown. In response, the purpose of this article is to introduce an emerging partnership between the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Initiative at Penn State and the Red Lion Area School District (Red Lion, Pennsylvania), conceptualized from the outset with an explicit focus on intentionally engaging in collaborative, inquiry-based professional learning surrounding difficult topics in formalized curricula and within educational practice.

The article briefly describes how the partners came together, then provides a high-level overview of how they approached their first year of collaboration. Next, the partners’ adaptation of inquiry-based professional learning is outlined. The article concludes by discussing lessons learned from the first year of partnering and implications for scholarship in the areas of school-university partnerships, inquiry-based professional learning, and difficult topics.

The article observes that it took educators participating in a difficult-topics inquiry community an entire year to begin shifting ownership of inquiry to K-12 students. It illustrates how school-university partnerships can be used to support difficult-topics inquiry and raises new questions about the role of difficult topics in partnership work.

The article contributes an original example to the literature that demonstrates how inquiry-based professional learning focused on difficult topics can provide a powerful basis for forming a school-university partnership.

Constructive deviance has received increasing attention across the last 20 years. However, because the distinction between constructive and traditional forms of deviance (i.e., destructive) is based on the intent behind the behaviors, it can be difficult to determine which acts are constructive. As an umbrella construct consisting of several forms of deviant acts (e.g., whistle-blowing, employee voice, necessary evils), research into constructive deviance has largely remained focused on the individual behaviors to date. While advancements have been made, this focus has limited the consideration of an overarching understanding of constructive deviance in the workplace. Further, constructs like constructive deviance that straddle the bounds between beneficial and detrimental necessitate the exploration into their antecedents as determined by the employees (i.e., apples), their environments (e.g., barrels), or some combination of the two. The author seeks to advance the research in constructive deviance by proposing a testable model. In which, the author develops an interactionist perspective of the antecedents to reposition constructive deviance as the acts of good employees in restrictive or negative environments. In doing so, the author considers how various aspects of individuals, their organizational environments, and the influence of their leaders interact. The author then develops a multi-stakeholder approach to the outcomes of constructive deviance to consider how the various parties (i.e., organization, coworkers, customers) are expected to respond and how these responses impact the more distal outcomes as well as the likelihood of engaging in future constructive deviance.