Remembrance Education (RE) indicates “an attitude of active respect in contemporary society based on the collective remembrance of human suffering that is caused by forms of human behavior such as war, intolerance or exploitation, and that must not be forgotten.” Unlike traditional history education, the point of RE is not the straightforward teaching of historical facts (if that is at all possible). Instead, RE’s purpose is to bring learners into a community, a community of memory, where (...) they become witnesses, judges and guardians of the memories of tragic past events. Writings on RE are conspicuously absent from Dewey studies. In this bibliographic essay, I offer an overview of RE, including a sample of its programs, initiatives and curricula. In addition, I propose that Dewey’s educational philosophy can helpfully inform the practice of RE. Rather than articulate a definitive account of Dewey-inspired RE, my intention is only to draw a tentative ground map to motivate future research. (shrink)

(2006). American Educational Studies Association, 2005 George Kneller Lecture: Second Generation Memory and the Phenomenological Structure of Intergenerational Remembrance in Ernest Gaines's Fictional Life-World. Educational Studies: Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 226-245.

. This article examines seven American films from the perspective of the first time the author saw them versus the perspective of today. What I discover is that I do not feel, or think, the same way about the films in question. In the process of making this discovery—of gaining, as it were, a cinematic education—I explore not only the subjectivity of memory but also the subjectivity of criticism; the changes that have occurred in movie viewing over the years, (...) which themselves have affected perception; and the place of the cinema in one’s life—past, present, and beyond. (shrink)

Twenty years since the onset of the traumatic wars of Yugoslav secession, the countries of the Western Balkans continue to nurture narratives of the past that are mutually exclusive, contradictory, and irreconcilable. The troubling ways in which states in the region remember their pasts provide continuing obstacles in the search for acknowledgment and justice. In this essay, I develop an argument for understanding the relationship between justice and remembrance of the past. To illustrate this relationship, I explore ways in (...) which education and memorialization projects contribute to justice efforts. I critically analyze a few ongoing education and memory projects in the region, and then present alternative ideas on mechanisms of public memory that would be more conducive to building the foundational blocks of justice based on trust, respect, and dignity. (shrink)

The form of commemoration offered by Remembrance Day ceremonies works to produce a sense of nationalist patriotism. The ‘public history’ of the nation, as a mode of self-representation, presents a particular narrative of limited scope, occluding all elements that do not fit its ideological framework. Remembrance Day simultaneously invokes and educates Canadian collective memory and public history, mediated through the contemporary power/knowledge discourse on war. The values, structure, and 'tendencies of a society' become evident in collective memory and (...) this cultural heritage of society becomes a site at which it is 'visible to itself'. (shrink)

R K Elliott; Louis Arnaud Reid: a remembrance, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 20, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 3–6, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-97.

R K Elliott; Louis Arnaud Reid: a remembrance, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 20, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 3–6, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-97.

Based on ten years of research, The Touch of the Past considers how historically traumatic events uniquely summon forgetting and remembrance. Within a specific focus on events of systemic mass violence, Roger Simon examines how testimonies of historic events influence learning as communities struggle with "difficult histories." The Touch of the Past is a serious and compelling contribution to research in education, historical consciousness, and memory/trauma studies.

Walter Benjamin wrote extensively on children and childhood, though this aspect of his work has hitherto received scant attention despite continuing and growing interest in his thought. This article makes explicit the connection between his acute observations of childhood and his distinctive messianic philosophy. The twin aspects of redemption in Benjamin's writings: remembrance and now-time, as illustrated in Wim Wender's Wings of Desire, are explored in relation to the ‘task of childhood’. Benjamin asserts the emancipatory potential held within the (...) development of historical consciousness, and leads us to question how our understanding of childhood can foster this potential. (shrink)

David was a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Waikato in New Zealand at the time of his death of cancer with covid complications on 2nd November 2022. David is survived by his wife...

In this paper I explore the connection between narrative ethics and the increasing emphasis on historical consciousness as a way to cultivate moral responsibility in history education. I use Timothy Findley’s World War I novel, The Wars, as an example of how teachers might help students to see history neither simply as a collection of artefacts from the past, nor as an effort to construct an objective view about what went on in those other times and places, but rather (...) as something that makes ethical demands on us here and now. Theoretically, this paper draws on Adam Zachary Newton’s conception of narrative ethics and Roger Simon’s conception of historical consciousness, both of which rest on the Levinasian themes of irreducible difference, the face, and subjectivity as a position of ethical responsibility to and for the other. (shrink)

This article invites the view that the Europeanization of an antitotalitarian “collective memory” of communism reveals the emergence of a field of anticommunism. This transnational field is inextricably tied to the proliferation of state-sponsored and anticommunist memory institutes across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), but cannot be treated as epiphenomenal to their propagation. The diffusion of bodies tasked with establishing the “true” history of communism reflects, first and foremost, a shift in the region’s approach to its past, one driven by (...) the right’s frustration over an allegedly pervasive influence of former communist cliques. Memory institutes spread as the CEE right progressively perceives their emphasis on research and public education as a safer alternative to botched lustration processes. However, the field of anticommunism extends beyond diffusion by seeking to leverage the European Union institutional apparatus to generate previously unavailable forms of symbolic capital for anticommunist narratives. This results in an entirely different challenge, which requires reconciling of disparate ideological and national interests. In this article, I illustrate some of these nationally diverse, but internationally converging, trajectories of communist extrication from the vantage point of its main exponents: theanticommunist memory entrepreneurs, who are invariably found at the helm of memory institutes.Inhabiting the space around the political, historiographic, and Eurocratic fields, anticommunist entrepreneurs weave a complex web of alliances that ultimately help produce an autonomous field of anticommunism. (shrink)

The paper develops a conceptual framework for understanding the work of ethical remembrance in the classroom. Using David Hansen’s recent example of using Sebald’s novels in his classroom to do the work or remembrance, the paper argues that the effect of Sebald’s novels is best understood using Walter Benjamin’s figure of the angel of history. That figure indicates a view of history that goes beyond the progression of everyday time, to one called remembrance. The paper suggests that (...) the work of mourning effects such remembrance, but simultaneously points to hope through the emergence of weak messianic power. (shrink)

Michalinos Zembylas examines how history education can be reconceived in terms of Jacques Derrida's notion of “hauntology,” that is, as an ongoing conversation with the “ghost” — in the case of this essay, the ghosts of disappeared victims of war and dictatorship. Here, Zembylas uses hauntology as both metaphor and pedagogical methodology for deconstructing the orthodoxies of academic history thinking and learning about “the disappeared.” As metaphor, hauntology evokes the figure of the ghost in order both to trouble the (...) hegemonic status of representational modes of knowledge in remembrance practices and to undermine their ontological frames and ideological histories. As pedagogical methodology, hauntology reframes histories of loss and absence and uses them as points of departure to acknowledge the complexities and contradictions that emerge from haunting. Pedagogies of hauntology are constituted as responses to “spectacle pedagogy” in teaching about the disappeared, that is, a ubiquitous form of representation that manifests the ghosts in a sensationalized and ideological manner. (shrink)

Higher education has been changing radically in recent years, with increasing numbers of students, and complaints about declining standards. This volume brings together leading intellectuals from the US and UK to examine the issues involved.