“Assurance that the world holds far more good than bad”:The Pedagogy of Memory at the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum

Abstract

The Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum (OKCNMM) must balance respectful remembrance with broad education about the 1995 terrorist attack that killed one hundred and sixty-eight people. Epideictic and material rhetorics prevail throughout the OKCNMM, communicating uplifting messages about the effects of the bombing while also prompting visitors to create their own complex, productively uncomfortable pathways toward understanding. In this process, civic engagement through rhetorical processes is encouraged; the museum models and creates space to practice reflective dwelling, critical thinking, discussion, and composition, offering a rhetorical education that can circulate far beyond this single site.

Notes

¹ Thank you to RR reviewers Fred Reynolds and Tammie Kennedy for their feedback. The article is stronger for their thoughtful engagement as reviewers. My interview research was approved as exempt by my Institutional Review Board and assigned protocol number 2011E0010.

² In various places, Jay Winter has detailed what he calls the “memory boom” of the twentieth century. He observes a “contemporary obsession with memory” and an “efflorescence of interest in the subject of memory inside the academy and beyond it” (“The Generation of Memory” 364; Remembering War 1). While Winter focuses on the “memory boom” among historians, it has traveled widely through other disciplines, as well.

³ Collective memory is a term typically traced back to Maurice Halbwachs, a French sociologist who wrote the book On Collective Memory in 1950. In this book, Halbwachs argues that there is memory outside of the individual; groups within a society create their own frameworks for memory, and an individual’s understanding of the past is thus situated in and influenced by this larger group-based memory and consciousness. He defines collective memory as a social process shaped by groups of people, large and small, and distinct from history, which aims for a more universal and objective truth.In the late twentieth century, concerns have been raised about the homogeneity embedded in notions of the collective, and “public memory” became a common alternative since this term could, as Guy Beiner puts it, “signify the battleground between dominant and subordinate social frameworks” (107). Edward Casey views public memory as important because it brings discussions and debates about memory itself out into the open; public memory comes from an interchange of ideas and beliefs, and is thus inherently rhetorical.

⁴ The “Survivor Tree” has a powerful presence at the OKCNMM, referenced in various exhibits and promotional materials. It is also part of the Memorial. Memorial tours meet under this tree and learn its story and significance.

⁵ While they are not directly cited in this article, I would like to thank the staff at the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum for participating in interviews with me during my research process, including Kari Watkins, Lynne Roller, Pam Bell, and Helen Stiefmiller. Their thinking, commentary, and dedication to the complex memory of the bombing and the community in Oklahoma City informs much of my writing in this piece and my thinking about public memory pedagogies more generally.

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Lauren Obermark

Lauren Obermark is an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where she teaches courses about rhetoric, writing, disability studies, and public memory to undergraduate and graduate students. At the heart of all her work is an ongoing investigation of how rhetoric informs twenty-first century practices of civic engagement, social justice, and pedagogy. She has recently published articles on writing program administration, disability studies, and public rhetoric in/about Ferguson, Missouri. She welcomes correspondence about her work via email at [email protected].