Commemoration and Human Rights Pedagogy in the Classroom

Attempts to publicly address past social abuses and genocide increasingly involve public pedagogical processes that aim to commemorate past victims while fostering sensibilities for building a more just society. Various human rights forums include public trials and truth commissions that are often charged with such pedagogical undertakings. Equally significant are museum projects: the preservation and construction of monuments and sites, along with various artistic memorial practices. The proposed paper explores what it means to utilize and teach this range of commemorative forums and remembrance practices. It will consider memory’s key role in defining community and repairing social significance, as well as institutionalizing human rights in the aftermath of gross violations. The paper will discuss how teaching commemoration necessarily negotiates between conflicting, often competitive group trauma investment and shared experience that remains rooted in present-day potentialities of reconciliation and social justice. Motored by the recent experience of teaching an undergraduate course on collective memory, my analysis will bring into conversation how commemorative practices, human rights, and public pedagogy combine to address past wrongs. Furthermore, contrasting case examples will be invoked to elaborate the contested role of memory, wherein representation and human rights instruction operates differently in a museum and a cinema site: Canadian Museum of Human Rights (CMHR) and Chilean Patricio Guzmán’s, recent cinematic work of memory, Nostalgia for the Light (2010). Finally, the paper will consider the “pedagogical insistence” (Simon, 2002, 2006) that sustains the ethics of teaching and learning of commemorative practice. Building upon Rothberg’s (2009) notion of “multi-directional memory,” I propose an alternative pedagogical intervention: one that moves beyond over-determination of “competitive memory” toward relational engagements across heterogeneous memory