Teaching with Testimony: A Metalanguage

Abstract

This study advances scholarship that will support educators toward sound pedagogical uses of the testimonial archives that have been established to preserve the life experiences of individuals who experienced Nazi persecution. The preservation work is well established. The work of education scholars and practitioners who are tasked with both problematizing the archive and putting forth recommendations for effective teaching practices is nascent. The chapters in this dissertation explore some of the complexities and critical considerations surrounding the use of testimony in teaching about the Holocaust. This exploration of pedagogical uses of testimony necessarily considers recent and ongoing changes in modes of representation, particularly self-representation, by situating the act of self-representation within the persistent tensions that exist between formal history, cultural memory, pedagogical practice and the politics of the present. The conceptual frames that inform this dissertation are metalanguage (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000), and multimodality (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006). While educators now readily incorporate the voices of witnesses into their curricula, relatively little scholarly work has been published to support the integration of testimonial voices into the teaching of history. This dissertation begins to fill this gap in the scholarly literature.