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Tiêu đề
Students' affective responses to studying the holocaust: Pedagogical issues and an interview process
Tác giả
Shapiro A.H.
Năm xuất bản
2007
Source title
Testimony, Tensions, and Tikkun: Teaching the Holocaust in Colleges and Universities
Số trích dẫn
0
DOI
Liên kết
Tóm tắt
This chapter is about the role of the affective dimension in students' learning about the Holocaust-as an expression of the ways in which students give value to and take responsibility for their knowledge and understanding, and as a means for instructors to help students toward better integration of the knowledge they have gained through study of the Holocaust. Student populations are changing, and in any one classroom there is a widening range of diverse perspectives. These changes in turn have raised pedagogical issues that indicate how important it is for students to learn in contexts where they not only feel safe but can also find their own means of connecting with the course material. When these pedagogical issues are considered in the design of classroom learning, what is studied becomes more personally valuable to students and is more freely transformed into lessons and knowledge learned for life. If this is true for students generally, it is doubly so for those who choose to study the Holocaust. The teaching of the Holocaust presents unique pedagogical challenges. One of those challenges has to do with the affective dimensions of learning. Holocaust study, genocide studies, the study of evil, and the like, conducted as part of a general liberal arts curriculum, all raise the question of how much of the learning needs to involve individual responses from students. For instance, too much information, graphic details, and 193 endless lists of facts can allow students to "know" without thinking or genuinely connecting with the material, and yet too little information can support superficial and banal understanding. As teachers, we must determine the parameters of what we teach so that we can limit the topic and thus make it accessible to our students. In teaching about the Holocaust, we are also confronted with the potential for extensive emotional and psychological responses to such material. This chapter demonstrates how I have used students' affective responses to advance their learning. The intellectual connections that some students make between themselves and the material of the Holocaust are often found in the affective dimension of their learning, though these connections are dicult to assess. This affective dimension of learning is expressed through emotional responses, metaphorical understanding, and psychological insights rather than, for example, in papers that theorize about causes or historical connections. It is true that employing students' affective responses can often deepen their learning and lead them to produce well-crafted research papers, but the affective dimension is often where students actually take responsibility for what they have learned. There is too much at stake in students' learning for educators not to be clear about what they see happening. Regardless of whether courses on the Holocaust allow students to articulate personal connections to the material, students taking such courses often experience a dramatic loss of hope for humanity, along with confusion about what it means to live and act in a world that created the Holocaust. Often the more knowledge students acquire, and the more abilities they develop as a result of the intellectual pursuit of understanding, the greater their emotional responses to the study of the Holocaust. Though I haven't done any research studies to establish a direct correlation between the amount students have learned about the Holocaust and the strength of their emotional responses, I would venture to say that students' emotional responses are deepened as a result of the extent of their research into the material. I have found that it is not unusual for students to experience a kind of emotional paralysis partway through the semester, once they have become immersed in the material. And such paralysis is not necessarily negative. It can be a symptom of latent intellectual or psychological insight. In a final assessment in one of my courses on the Holocaust, a student reflected on a choice she had confronted as a result of studying the material: To "curse the darkness" of ignorance or to "light a candle" and illuminate the world. In order to light a candle and illuminate the world, she claimed, one had to encounter the darkness of ignorance. The idea of cursing the darkness held, for her, a pessimistic approach to living in the world; she needed to find a way to live in the world after having learned about the Holocaust. To illuminate the world meant to reveal the evil and then to act from her awareness of it. Even the language that this student used to express the options she perceived indicates that there can be powerful affective dimensions of learning, and that these affective dimensions have significance for the integration of knowledge into a student's life. We can see how this student felt, and how her feelings led her to a sense of connection with and responsibility to the world. What is also significant is the student's choice of language to describe her emotional response and the way in which it reflected her intellectual understanding of the material. She was responding to a poem that relied on the Jewish practice of the Yahrzeit. She had incorporated the imagery of the poem and the concept of the memorial candle into her understanding of the choice she felt she was making. Though she herself was not Jewish, her affective response found voice in the use of imagery specific to Jewish experience, and it demonstrated the use of intellectual understanding as a means of articulating both an affective and an ethical grasp of the issues important to her. I want to emphasize this affective component of the study of the Holocaust, not only because it actually concerns our students but also because it is linked to the idea of students becoming responsible for their learning. There are many diverse styles of teaching, and educators may have a need to conduct the teaching of the Holocaust in as emotionally antiseptic an atmosphere as possible. (Whether this is appropriate is a matter for another discussion.) It has been my experience that no matter how I teach the Holocaust, the majority of my students, regardless of my intentions, will respond emotionally to their study of the event. Moreover, sometimes when emotion is lacking, I find correlated with this flat response some gross deficiency in intellectual understanding. One might also point out that when students' emotional reactions are extremely strong, to the point of displacing the search for understanding through adequate exploration of the material, it becomes extremely difficult to teach such students. Interestingly, I have not experienced this kind of superficial response in my students, though on occasion I have seen students use their study of the Holocaust for the purpose of advancing and privileging their own emotional displays. Class dynamics often preclude the privileging of emotional expression, partly because everyone in the class is involved in the pursuit of the same learning. But this can be a problem when affective responses either are not acknowledged or are overacknowledged at the expense of real intellectual pursuit. It is a pedagogical responsibility to explore what one should do with students' affect, but it is also important not to allow affect to take the place of real learning. As a consequence of exploring the pedagogical issues involved in students' emotional and psychological responses to the study of the Holocaust, I am obliged to safeguard their learning and help them treat emotions as a means to deeper understanding and greater knowledge. To safeguard students' learning means to acknowledge their emotional and psychological responses to the material. We acknowledge not only the emotions that arise in the context of Holocaust study but also the psychology that arises in the context of the individual who is studying the material. In this regard, safeguarding students' learning involves respecting individual students' responses and their need to express (or not to express) the emotions they experience. In looking for ways to safeguard students' learning and tap their affective responses, I've tried to find methods of directing their emotional responses into places where students can apply their knowledge without falling into either false hope for the future or crippling despair born of what their knowledge signifies to them about the world. To this end, I use an interview process that, I believe, helps students continue their learning and employs their affective responses to further their understanding and intellectual development. As I describe the interview process, I will also explain part of the educational rationale behind its use, the results I see in my students, and the implications that this particular process has for our understanding of the role played by affective learning in study of the Holocaust. I am not recommending this interview process for use in other classes. I offer it to illustrate the role of affect in promoting students' learning. The process was designed for a particular student population and a particular course, and it works in those conditions. To understand the context of the interview process, it is important for the reader to know that I teach at a women's college and that the great majority of my students are women. Those who take my course on the Holocaust are upper-level students who have demonstrated four developmental levels of each of the eight abilities identified by the college as defining a liberal arts education.1 The students have been prepared for advanced work in the humanities, and I can expect them to be grounded in the frameworks of a variety of disciplines and to be independently and creatively able to explore a range of disciplinary frameworks in approaching a field of study. © 2007 University of Washington Press. All rights reserved.
Từ khóa
Tài liệu tham khảo
Pres T.D., The Survivor: Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, (1976); Rittner C., Roth J.K., Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, (1993)
Nơi xuất bản
University of Washington Press
Hình thức xuất bản
Book chapter
Open Access
Nguồn
Scopus