Teaching the Unthinkable: Counter-Narratives, Pedagogy, and Genocide

Cato the Elder, a Roman statesman ended every one of his speeches with the words "Carthago delenda est" or "Carthage must be destroyed". These speech acts helped to foist Rome into the Third Punic War. This war resulted in the evisceration of Carthage. Salt was sown into the soil so no crops grew again. The population was eradicated, and Carthage as a civilization perished. Yet, in the West, we hold Rome up as a bastion of Republican ideals. It is not hard to make the leap from Cato's speeches to the speeches we see in the most reviled regimes seeking to destroy a population. The Rwandan radio that called Tutsis "cockroaches" that must be squashed to the Nazis who called Jews "rats" who should be exterminated used language to compel their citizens to murder millions. The narratives that are most common come from the perpetrators. There are reasons for this; chief among them is the fact that victims of genocide are silenced.It is therefore imperative as teachers that we provide a counternarrative of the victim. We must give victims a voice to share their stories as an alternate perspective. "Teaching the unthinkable" is much like the phrase by Theodore Adorno, who said, "Poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric". Teaching is a kind of poetic performance done throughout the world every day. Teachers of social sciences have the Sisyphean task of explaining why so many horrors have happened. Narratives of mass atrocities can overwhelm teachers and students with imagery of corpses piled like mountains, smoke from crematoriums, mass graves, and skulls from killing fields. Visuals may lead to fatigue, just as when faced with large numbers of victims, many of us become numb. We cannot possibly know them, their stories, and their dashed futures. Paul Slovic (2007) examines this phenomenon in his article "If I look at the mass I will never act Psychic numbing and genocide. There is more of an impact when we see one person in need. The more people you have, the less empathy there is for them. If we are to be successful in instilling hope for the future by teaching the next generation, we need to get through to our students. Broadly, alternative pedagogy is needed to teach mass atrocities along with alternate texts. First, I will address the pedagogy. After, I will take up the text.In education today, much of what makes up pedagogy is a top-down prescriptive model. In this sense, teachers are not creators of their own pedagogy. If one can look at pedagogy as an art form, then we can say that teachers are creators. Using interdisciplinary instruction, especially Understanding by Design (McTighe & Wiggins, 2005), teachers are granted latitude in ways to teach their subjects. By using Understanding by Design, teachers are the authors of learning. They are purposely creating units that spark inquiry, raise essential questions, produce authentic assessment, and learning activities that highlight the process of various content areas. In a class I teach called "Interdisciplinary Instructional Strategies", undergraduate students in their last semester before student teaching leam how to create units based on Understanding by Design. In this class, future teachers are given a wide variety of strategies to use in teaching social studies to promote critical thinking about history, economics, social justice, politics, and community. Students are not and should not be mere receptors of instruction. They must interpret instruction to make meaning. Given the proper cues, students can become performers themselves by authentically responding to instruction. This is shown in Understanding by Design in the Stage 2: Assessments. Asking students to become performers allows them to apply new knowledge to make inferences. One example of this kind of pedagogy was to highlight the importance of counter-narratives.Counter-narratives are important to push back against the Dominant Discourse (the language of those in power) of history that celebrates only the ones who were able to "win". …