University of Basel

Post-Doc, History Department

Swiss National Science Foundation Grant, Visiting Scholar Harvard Graduate School of Education

About

Why is it important for students to see photographs of atrocities in their history lessons?
Do they really "get the message" best when they view somebody wounded, humiliated, suffering, dead? What is the impact of such images - on trauma cultures, social and individual identification, on remembering... and learning? And, as I am trying to find out in my current research, on the teacher, the students as a group or as individual learners, all of them part of a society coping with trauma? What does it mean then, when/that the actual centerpiece of a lesson, "the message", remains implicit?

As a visiting scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education I started working on my new research project in the Boston area. I wanted to find out how teachers address violence that has happened in their own society in the previous generation. As my first example I chose the Civil Rights Movement.

History classrooms are significant discursive nodes where knowledge, practices, competences, beliefs, identifications and very different social and political agendas intertwine. And the teacher embodies this polyphony in each moment of her teaching. Hence I try to follow the different threads out of the classroom and into current memory cultures.
Being a textbook author who specializes in visual literacy, a historian and occasional lecturer myself, I know that the textbook is a clue, not a key to what happens in classrooms. As a researcher I therefore not only analyze textbooks and online-teaching material, but also conduct interviews with teachers, teachers in training, teacher educators and curriculum experts. I observe classrooms, talk to students, and read their schoolwork. I ask questions about (diverging) memories, legacies, narratives and the function of images therein to curators, journalists and documentary-filmmakers.

My post-doc research is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. It's currently entitled:Teaching Violence. A Case Study on Discourse, Politics and Practice in History Teaching: The Civil Rights Movement.

I draw on findings and concepts from post-conflict education, trauma-research, teaching and emotion (Michalinos Zembylas/ Sara Ahmed), postcolonial studies, whiteness, critical theory and discourse analysis.
In my observations I equally address pedagogy and the cultural mechanisms of doing memory.

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