Teaching and Testimony: Witnessing and Bearing Witness to Racisms in Culturally Diverse Classrooms

Abstract

This article is an effort to understand some patterns of student response in four sections of a cultural diversity course I taught during two subsequent spring semesters. I wanted to understand why students in one of the two sections each semester were quite receptive to the multicultural and antiracist perspectives of the course, and the tone and feeling in those sections were quite positive throughout, while in the two other sections both I and most of the students, from the outset, experienced the course as a difficult, somewhat aversive, ongoing struggle. I also wanted to understand why students in both the difficult and receptive second semester sections were much more satisfied with and impacted by the course than were their first semester counterparts. I wondered if I had learned something about teaching this course that I did not yet understand.

I, a woman of European descent, explore these questions in terms of a framework explicated in Testimony, a book that seeks to understand surviving victims’, perpetrators’, and bystanders’ way of thinking and not thinking about the Holocaust. My effort is to make sense of my experiences and the experiences of the White students and the small minority of Latino, Asian American, mixed heritage, and African American students by looking at them in terms of witnessing institutional and personal racisms and bearing witness to them both outside and inside our classrooms, and the powerful forces that militate against our knowing and our telling.