Pedagogical Limitations of Knowing and Not Knowing Difficult Histories

• In Event: 46.023 - Becoming Public: A Symposium on Research on Public Pedagogy, Representation, and the Public Sphere

Abstract

Although the term pedagogy is most often equated with what teachers do in classrooms, more recent understandings emanating from critical public pedagogy and cultural studies (Giroux 2004, Hall 1997) define pedagogy in much broader terms. Pedagogy, from those perspectives, is seen as an important theoretical tool for understanding how the production of knowledge and learning ought to involve challenging the production of ideologies and identities. Regardless of where it occurs, the practice of pedagogy, according to this perspective, is an attempt to influence experience and subjectivity and to prompt a more complex understanding of the relationship between individuals and the institutions within which they learn.
Broadly conceived, then, pedagogy could be considered inherent in any message, contained in any form of action, structure, or text either in formal locales of schools or non-formal places including museums. It what ways might we consider how the structuring of learning are important lessons to be carried away from the encounter with knowledge? How do we deal with the difficulties of pedagogy multiplied by the difficulty inherent to the content to be encountered, and where personal and collective identities and histories work to propel and restrict a learners’ inclination to know? Any attempt to teach about difficult historical events, including death, genocide, and trauma, will include information allowed and discouraged, remembered, and forgotten.
In this paper I examine how two museums articulate and call attention to their own traumatic histories presented as their public pedagogical mandates. In particular, I examine the politics of responsibility and culpability in putting genocide on display in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). While there is an obvious, explicit, and critical examination of genocide at the USHMM, it is minimized and even silenced in the NMAI. I ask why it is that the narratives presented in each museum either allows or discourages claims of responsibility, how are the manifested in the exhibitions, and with what pedagogical consequences. I examine this responsibility through the staging of various objects, spatial arrangements, and curatorial configurations as well as the ways in which the narratives each venue conveys, though seemingly quiet different, in fact cohere to tell a larger story about difficult historical events in America’s history. The paper focuses on the role of institutional authority to curate genocide and our own pedagogical responsibility when utilizing such institutions.

Author

• Avner Segall, Michigan State University