Teaching to remember. Memorials of repression in Argentina and its impact on students

During the period of 1976 to 1983, Argentina experienced the worst dictatorship in its history. Roughly 30,000 people were disappeared in the military junta’s clandestine system of terror that included the kidnapping, detention, and the posterior killing and disappearance of thousands. Once democracy was reinstalled in 1983 and in particular throughout the last few years, many actions have been undertaken to bring justice and initiate a process of collective memory. Various actors fight for collective remembrance of this recent traumatic past to deny its repetition. They remember through art, memorials, organizations or marches, by remembering dates, respecting places, honoring people, and fighting for justice. Memory has become an official government policy and is today the main area of work of most human rights organizations. During the “Social Movements and Human Rights” Study Abroad program students observe and participate in acts of remembrance and visit sites of memory. Students’ reactions to these experiences are varied. This paper analyzes the impact of memorials in the teaching process of human rights. The first part of this paper will consist of a brief description of the concept of collective memory and an introduction of the history of the last dictatorship in Argentina. In the second part we describe the different types of memorials that have been developed in reaction to the last dictatorship with particular emphasis in two types of memorials: “the March of the 24th” and the resignification of clandestine centers. In the last part we consider these subjects from a pedagogic perspective. Through the analysis of field journal entries, we examine the impact of these memorials on the learning process of Study Abroad students