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Genocide Studies International Vol 16.1, Special Issue on The Future of Genocide Education
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- [00:00]
Marshall Po
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast, or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
Kelly McFall
Hi, and welcome to New Books and Genocide Studies, part of the New Books Network of podcasts. My name is Kelly McFall from Newman University, and I'm a host on the show. And as many of you heard me say a couple months ago, New Books and Genocide Studies has partnered with the journal Genocide Studies International. And as part of this, I get the opportunity to interview authors and editors who have published in the journal to get a chance to highlight issues or research that aren't yet available in book form. Today is the first chance to do that, and I'm thrilled to be talking with Maureen Hebert and James Waller, each of whom contributed an article to a special issue of the journal focusing on genocide education. The issue emerges out of a conference of educators who presented and discussed papers about genocide education and its strengths and challenges. It also includes a couple notes from the field from current practitioners offering their own perspectives. I can't, in the time we're in, imagine a more difficult topic to discuss. And so, Maureen and Jim, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us on New Books and Genocide Studies.
- [02:15]
Maureen Hebert
Thanks for having us.
- [02:16]
James Waller
It's great to be here, Kelly. Thank you.
- [02:19]
Kelly McFall
So I want to start with a broad framing question that all of the articles in this issue address in one way or the other, and I'll ask Maureen, you to start, what can we say about the successes and challenges of genocide education over the past few decades?
- [02:34]
Maureen Hebert
I think on the successes side, we've been able to build a cohort of students over several decades now who know at the very least if they're taking undergraduate courses, the basics of what genocide studies is all about, how we define what genocide is, the considerable debates about that, the kinds of cases we include in the universe of what we think genocide is, although that's expanded in interesting ways over time. I think the other thing that I find very gratifying in my role at the Azorian Institute's Genocide and Human Rights University program, which is a graduate summer school that takes place in Toronto every year for two weeks, that we now have over 200 graduates of that program who call themselves groupies, many of whom are hopefully listening to this podcast, might be interviewed on this podcast, and who are now the newer generation of genocide studies scholars and teachers. So I think on that side we've done sort of a good job of educating students about this issue. Where I have some concerns, and this is really just based on my own experience at my university in Western Canada, kind of a smaller university, is that while my course in genocide studies is very popular and it always fills up, it's a third year lecture course, my feeling is that the students who take it are already self selecting. So students who already want to know about the phenomenon for various reasons, and I always find for very genuine reasons, come to learn more about something that they're already interested in. I'm not so sure how well genocide studies has done, attracting students who are less knowledgeable to begin with, less interested. And so if our goal is perhaps to engender greater tolerance and things like that, I'm not sure what kind of a job we're doing. But then I'm basing this on my own experience. And perhaps Jim has a different take on that one.
- [04:47]
James Waller
No, thanks, Maureen. I agree completely about the robustness with which we are educating more and more students. We see the courses offered in more and more colleges and universities like you. I teach in the Toronto program each summer. I do my own summer program here called the Scheidt Family Seminar on Genocide Studies and Prevention. That is for graduate students and emerging, emerging faculty and scholars in genocide studies. So I think all of that is great. But I also agree with you about the question, which is a pivotal one for me, of the efficacy of genocide education. Are we doing well with what we do? And your point about preaching to the choir to some degree, people self Selecting. I think that's true. I teach a course every spring. Introduction genocide studies is 90 students. It's not required of any of them, but it's 90 students who have some interest in this and bring them to the course. So I think when I think of efficacy, on one hand, there's the content issue, our students retaining the content that we are teaching. But I'm actually more interested in the. The transformative issue. Is any. Anything we're doing in the classroom helping reduce stereotypes, bias, discrimination? Is it transforming students understanding of their place in the world and the responsibility for the world? And we just don't have, I mean, we have anecdotal things we can draw on, but I think that as a field, we've not done a good job at measuring the efficacy of education that we just assume has some inherent value. And I do believe it has inherent value, but I don't know to what degree that value is being realized in coursework. I mean, even there's been a lot more measurement about a Holocaust education. But even those measurements are back and forth. You know, they don't know enough. They know more than other things in history. It decreases antisemitism. There's no evidence it decreases antisemitism. So I think we've got work to do to try and establish this assumptive belief that there's an inherent value in what we're doing in genocide education.
- [07:17]
Maureen Hebert
Yeah, I absolutely agree with that.
- [07:19]
Kelly McFall
So let me poke at that a little bit. You suggested a couple goals for genocide education. That's one of the things the authors of the special issue kind of, I don't know, lament or are concerned by is a lack of maybe careful specificity or kind of agreement across the field as to what actually these classes are supposed to do. So, Jim, you listed a couple things. I wonder if you. If those are the two goals that are foremost in your mind, are there other things that you want these courses to do? What are your, what are your goals for genocide education?
- [07:55]
James Waller
Yeah, that's a great question, Kelly. Mine are likely different than many people. I tell my students at very first day of class and it's in the syllabus. My goal is a high one. I want this course to be transformative. I want it to transform their understanding of the world they live in and most importantly, their understanding of their role in the world they live in and the types of responsibility they could have in that world. To me, that's the most important thing I'm doing in the class. And if by the end of the semester Students don't have some greater sense of personal agency. That's my failure. I feel. Now, it was interesting that the conference we had at Rowan a couple years ago, that was the precursor to this special issue. I said this and thought, it's brilliant. There'll be general agreement. It wasn't brilliant. There wasn't general agreement. There were people who were there whose other academics much, you know, brighter than me, better qualified than me, who said, that's not the purpose of this course. That's not the purpose of Holocaust. Genocide education is not to transform people and to emphasize agency. This is a. It's about history lessons. And for me, it's always been more about learning lessons from history than learning about history lessons. But I do think you're right, and I think the editors of the journal are right. I don't know if there's widespread consensus on what the purpose, broadly speaking, of genocide education is. I don't know, Maureen, if you've had different experiences with that or not.
- [09:38]
Maureen Hebert
You know, actually, when you just said now that you want the course to be transformative, I definitely remember you saying that at the concert. At the concert, at the conference. And I was sort of. I never thought about it that way, but it made a lot of sense to me, and it actually stuck with me. So one of the things I tell my students is that aside from, I think you're right, learning from history, not just learning about history, one of the things we're doing is bearing witness. It's after the fact. But in some cases, when we teach more contemporary cases, things that are happening now, I also tell the students, and maybe this is a hubristic thing for me to say, relative to my good colleagues in the Department of Political Science. But I basically say this course is in political science, but it's really more an interdisciplinary course. It's different than learning about voting behavior in 14 democracies. This is a very weighty subject. It deals with some of the most consequential, most disturbing collective human behavior that there is. And so we need to treat this subject matter, and particularly the people that are at the core of what we study, that this is an intensely human experience manifested across time and space, that we need to be sensitive, that this isn't just kind of like a cool look at something that's kind of different and disturbing. We should be disturbed by it, but that we are really here to kind of learn about and maybe tell other people about and then act with this kind of knowledge in, I think, in the way that the JIB has said in this kind of, you know, intentional way that honors the memories of the people lost in the genocides that we study, and that this really should be some kind of a more consequential course. So I'll just sort of end this section by saying that I was struck at the Rowan conference by how equally uncertain the purpose was of genocide studies and how effective it was that I have always felt. So I'm in Western Canada. I'm kind of like Kelly. I'm sort of out at a university all by myself. I'm the only person on the campus who studies this thing. There aren't a lot of other universities around us. And so I have always had lots of doubts about how I teach my course, what the students are getting out of it, how I should revise it, all of those kinds of things. So when we went to this conference, when I said yes to attending, I largely did it because I thought, excellent. Here are some people that I really respect, and I can learn from them and sort of answer these questions in my mind. And I did learn a lot at that conference, and a lot of it was really consequential for me, including Jim's interventions. And I was also, though, in some ways happy to be able to know that I am not alone in my confusion. Everybody is making a good faith effort. But we were all, I think, at this conference mutually trying to figure out what this whole project was about. It was useful, but we did not come to a kind of nice, neat bow we could tie at the end.
- [12:54]
Kelly McFall
Both of you are educators in the sense of working in an educational institution, a school. I wonder how much you think about the way your efforts intersect with other institutions whose goals are at least in part educational. So museums or memorials or something like that. What does it mean? I assume you think of yourselves as implicit or explicit partners with those kind of institutions. Maybe I'm wrong. What does that mean in terms of the way you think about your teaching and your students? And I guess I'll just ask. Let's see, Marine, you ended. So I'll ask you again. Why don't you start? Maureen?
- [13:31]
Maureen Hebert
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, one thing I emphasize to my students as we go through parts of the course, particularly different kinds of cases that there are, you know, here's an excellent museum here. Here's a really kind of affecting monument here that I think that students, you know, if they have an opportunity to visit or engage with, that they should take that opportunity. So I think it is a kind of collective exercise in bearing witness in education. But the one thing I do caution them about, and I think some people feel differently about this than I do, and that is that if you do go to visit particularly sites where genocides have occurred, so Auschwitz, other camps, sites in Rwanda, Cambodia, elsewhere, former residential schools here in Canada, that students and the rest of us need to visit these sites in the right spirit. So it should never be an exercise in voyeurism or just kind of ticking off a visit on a notch, like a notch on a belt, that they need to sort of see those kinds of visits and engagement with these places and spaces as part of their ongoing education and attempt to try to understand this incredibly complex phenomenon, which, as I freely tell my students, I got into. The fact that genocide occurs, as I always tell them, blows my mind. I still can't get my head around it after all these years, and that we're all working together in the classroom to try to understand this extraordinary thing. But that in the outside world there are these other places of engagement, but they should engage with them in a.
- [15:18]
James Waller
Very thoughtful kind of way that's helpful, Maureen. And I think it's. For me, this has been a recent learning. Maybe I'm just slow to get to some stuff, but it's been through the pain of cuts at universities I've taught at, talking with colleagues who have lost their positions, who've always seen themselves as a college university professor within a traditional classroom setting, and learning along with them as they went through that journey of transition. That education takes place in a lot of different spaces, a lot of different spheres, and you can be a very effective educator outside of the traditional bounds of a college classroom and even a summer seminar I mentioned that I do every June, and it's a one week program on genocide studies and prevention. And I've even seen the evolution there. We started off with cohorts of 20 college university faculty, but over time we've included museum educators, NGO educators, educators in policy making, in government. Government does a ton of these type of trainings. We've high school teach. I mean, many high schools in the States require Holocaust and genocide education. So we've started including high school teachers, community college teachers. And I've just been struck by how beautiful it's been to see all the different ways genocide education can be done. And I think when you're a university professor, and it's what I've been for 35 years, you sometimes just get boxed into. It's only in these classrooms that this type of work can happen. But honestly, some of the Most important work in genocide education is happening outside of these classrooms.
- [17:14]
Kelly McFall
Well, each of you contributed an article to this issue, so I'd like to just ask each of you a couple questions about your specific contribution. I'll just start with you, Jim. Your article and your colleague, sorry, Jack Meyerhofer, really framed that contribution around encouraging student agency. So how do you understand student agency and why is that so important to you?
- [17:40]
James Waller
Thank you. I think there are probably personal reasons it's important. I was a first generation college student. For me, college was about some sense of upward mobility, but I was a liberal arts college graduate. And I think the value of a liberal arts education is it breaks the boundaries of just traditional academic understanding. And you really are pushed to help the world in ways that apply some of what you've learned to pressing world issues. And so that's just kind of always been in my DNA, has been to make these connections. But I think really what pushed me and Jack to write this piece was since the advent of social media and then especially exacerbated by Covid, I began to feel that many of the students I was teaching just had. They didn't have any sense of agency. They. They felt, and I think particularly because of COVID that they were being shaped by the world, but they had no sense they could shape the world. And so I felt that some of the things I wanted to do in a classroom that. That bent more toward activism. They just look at the problem of genocide and think, nothing I can do about this. It's. It's interesting to study, as Maureen says, it's important to bear witness. But there was no sense that they could do anything about these terrible things that we go through. And so for me, it just has felt an obligation. And I know it isn't true for everyone, but for me, it felt I had an obligation to help them understand their own agency, to understand that they can shape the world and not just be shaped by it, that they can actually transform the places where they live and where they work and to convince them of the agency that they can have. And it just generationally, I just felt that in past few years, students have really lost that sense. And they feel as if we've been acted upon, but we don't know how to act. And passivity is something I think is important to push them beyond in a classroom, for me.
- [20:12]
Kelly McFall
So let me push you a little bit. So what does that mean in terms of how you teach your class? What strategies do you use to try and encourage agency or make people aware of their agency? What challenges do you have to overcome other than this generational concern that you raised? How do you try and do this in a class?
- [20:29]
James Waller
Yeah, I think for me it's partly in the assignments. They do some policy briefs so they get a sense of, okay, if I have to write a four page brief on something, what would that look like? How is policy made? They'll do an op ed piece. To just have the experience of using voice, of expressing voice, I will often use examples of things students have done previously in class. You know, when I taught in New Hampshire, before I came to University of Connecticut, I had two students in an introduction genocide studies course, neither of whom were from New Hampshire. But we were talking in the course about states that require Holocaust genocide education and have a Genocide Awareness Month and so on. And these two young women just decided we should have that in New Hampshire. Even though they're not from New Hampshire, they thought we should have this, the state should have it. And honestly, Callie, one of my proudest moments as a teacher was sitting there three years later with the governor of New Hampshire, who was then Maggie Hasson, who's now a state senator, and she signed into law Genocide Awareness Month in New Hampshire. And I stood next to those two students and they really had done this on their own, stood next to the two students and just said, you just made law. That's what you did. That's fantastic. Yeah. And it's just so. A lot of times it's just a lack of awareness about the impact they can have if they make the steps. And I'm not at all going to pretend and say this works for every single student in the class, but I think if I can leave a class, and I've got a good number of students who feel like they can shape the world rather than being shaped by it. I like that.
- [22:20]
Kelly McFall
Maureen, yours is about teaching Indigenous genocides, especially teaching people who live in spaces in which or near which genocides occurred or are occurring. So I wonder, first of all, why is this important to you?
- [22:37]
Maureen Hebert
I think it's important to me because in Canada, and of course I'm Canadian, I'm at a Canadian university. The National Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report was released in 2015, and one of its 94 calls to actions is to engage in reconciliation at institutions, including specifically post secondary education and other educational institutions. And so I think it's important as a citizen of the country to take these calls to action seriously. And so we're supposed to engage in policies of reconciliation at our university. And it seemed to me that Even though I had already been teaching Indigenous genocides, I started to think about it in this much more intentional way. And the way I sort of think about it is that, you know, this is Canada, the United States. These are settler colonial states. And the whole kind of Settler colonial project has embedded in it a kind of, you know, as Patrick Wolf says, a logic of elimination. And so when we teach Indigenous genocides, it just can't be reduced to. Canadian government creates residential schools, students attend, bad things happen, forced assimilation occurs, other bad things happen as a result of that. The students need to know that here in Alberta, as I talk about in the article, we are located in a place where there were many residential schools in this province. Some of them are within the city itself. And so the students need to know, mostly as Settler students. Occasionally I do have Indigenous students who are in my classroom, but they need to know that this is our shared story. It's not the same story as Indigenous folks themselves. They have a particular experience. The Settler students and me, as a Settler scholar and instructor, have a different experience. But we have to know that this case is unlike any other one that we study in the course because it is our own case. It is, as I say, it's our original national crime. It is our original shameful act. And I don't do this as a way to kind of intentionally make the students feel bad or to denigrate Canadian history and these kinds of things, but this is really part and parcel of who we are. The settler population, whether they've arrived recently or like my family, have been here a very long time, are immediate and consistent and ongoing beneficiaries of the fact of settler colonialism. The removal of Indigenous people from the land that I'm on right now, the Treaty 7 land of the Blackfoot Confederacy, the land that my family farmed in Saskatchewan on, Treaty 4 land in southern Saskatchewan. And so I think that this is the first case that we do in my class for a reason. And we spend a lot of time on it. I spend a little bit of time on the United States, but I spend a lot of time talking about this province, the southern part of this province, because the students need to know the genocidal history of where we are right now. And they respond to it, I have to say, exceptionally well. When I first started teaching it, I feared that I would have this kind of pushback, that this is kind of, a, this is a genocide, B, you're denigrating Canadian history and so on. But this might be the kind of self selecting aspect that we talked about before, but I was very pleased to see that year after year, the students in the class, overwhelmingly settlers, are willing to hear this story. And some of them come out of other courses in our department in Indigenous politics. Many of them are settler students who take the International Indigenous Studies program that we have on campus. And so I found this to be very challenging. And I kind of outline what those challenges are in the article. But it's one of the parts of the course that I find the most consequential for me and I, and I hope for the students as well.
- [26:49]
James Waller
Yeah.
- [26:50]
Kelly McFall
One of those challenges you identify is this question of positionality and what role you are taking in the classroom, which is explicit in your article, implicit in many of the others. So for those of us in the audience who don't know that term, can you talk about what that means and then talk about some of the ways you have wrestled with this issue? And then, Jim, in a little bit, because you're in somewhat different position, I will ask you a similar question. But Maureen Sure.
- [27:19]
Maureen Hebert
So what I mean by positionality is that I need to, as the instructor in the classroom, make clear in many ways my own identity. So when I'm teaching this section on Indigenous genocides, I make it clear that I am a settler. I'm not Indigenous myself. I do actually tell a little recap of my family history and how I got to be our families got to be in Canada and how I came to be living here in southern Alberta. And then so I do that because the students need to know where I fit in this settler colonial context. You know, that I am, as I'd said before, a beneficiary of the system. I never implicate them. I always kind of try to point out their positionality by pointing out mine, basically. And then I kind of go from there to say that we need to see where we are in relation to these larger historical and current processes. But the thing that I find that has been difficult and that I've continually kind of wrestled with, that I play out in the article, is that on the one hand, I'm teaching Indigenous genocides for the purposes that we've just talked about as a white settler scholar and middle aged woman at this university. But because I am not Indigenous myself, I cannot truly relate what the actual experience of being Indigenous in Canada is like or what it would have been like in previous generations, while, let's say the residential schools were open. And so you need to be able to try to figure out how to tell that story without appropriating the story without relying unduly on your indigenous colleagues to kind of educate you and educate the students, because that is a burden that you cannot ask colleagues, I think, in that position to undertake. One should not rely on indigenous students in the classroom necessarily to fill in these details. And the other thing I talked about is that we often, you know, people who are. Are willing to understand what has happened to indigenous peoples as genocidal, often feel terrible about it. But the one thing that you should not do is bring this emotional baggage into the classroom and dump it all over everybody in the classroom, especially indigenous students. So it's not their role to make me feel better or to kind of support me either inside the classroom or outside the classroom. Obviously, there's going to be, you know, high emotions in genocide studies classrooms. It's the only course that I teach in which crying is a regular feature. Right. So when I teach, like my, you know, law and politics class, no one's crying. They might be bored out of their minds, but no one's crying. Right. So that's kind of what I mean about the positionality. Trying to teach this course without being indigenous, trying to have a full understanding of what the experience was like, trying to draw on indigenous resources, but without exploiting them. And then again, not expecting the students to kind of support me emotionally, and certainly not indigenous students.
- [30:43]
Kelly McFall
Yeah.
- [30:44]
Maureen Hebert
Diego prime big deal days. Congrandesipe del pancion abrefaso al baron del brioche al visconte del viscocho y alconte de los cuernitos miyambro. The prime Juan. In prime big deal days. Diego prime big deal days. Para que consigas grandes of hertas para un nuevo espa de piez te transformara en la reina de la relaxion porciento menos in prime big deal days. Limu imu.
- [31:32]
James Waller
Here we have the Limu IMU in.
- [31:35]
Kelly McFall
Its natural habitat, helping people customize their.
- [31:38]
Maureen Hebert
Car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual.
- [31:43]
James Waller
Fascinating.
- [31:44]
Marshall Po
It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug Limu.
- [31:48]
Maureen Hebert
Is that guy with the binoculars watching us?
- [31:50]
James Waller
Cut the camera. They see us.
- [31:51]
Kelly McFall
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty.
- [31:55]
Maureen Hebert
Liberty.
- [31:56]
Marshall Po
Liberty Savings.
- [31:57]
Kelly McFall
Very unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates excludes Massachusetts. You raise an interesting point that I was going to get to. Some of the listeners who have been with us for a while have heard me occasionally comment about the reacting to the past module. I've written up asking students to. To assume a role in the Security Council in 1994 or surrounding the Journal and try and hash out what to be, what is to be done about reports of increasing violence in Rwanda. And I similarly encounter students crying or reporting nightmares. And this is a subject where teaching effectively seems to me requires a kind of emotional intelligence that may not be so necessary if you're teaching. Maybe I'm. Maybe I'm not giving other disciplines or other subjects enough credit, but it does seem to me I don't usually see people crying in my World Civ class. I sometimes do in my genocide class. Jim, I'll just ask you, and then maybe Maureen may want to comment. How have you wrestled with those questions about how to encounter the emotional responses in the course in the students or yourself?
- [33:06]
James Waller
Yeah, I think that word wrestle Kelly used this perfect one. This is a constant wrestling act. I think one of the occupational hazards now, having worked in the field of genocide studies for over three decades, is there is a possibility you build a callousness up in ways that your students don't have that protective device. So in other words, to survive as a teacher, scholar in the field, you do have to develop mechanisms, compartmentalization, whatever it is, that help you survive in this work. My students don't have those mechanisms. And I constantly have to remind myself when I'm choosing reading materials, when I'm choosing visual materials, when I'm doing the lectures, that they don't have the mechanisms I've developed over the years to cope with much of what we're going to present here. So that's always at the front of my mind, and particularly Kelly, you know, the class I teach is a class of 90 students. So to be able to monitor how students are receiving this, how they're reacting, is incredibly difficult. They have open access, obviously, during office hours in the syllabus. I communicate. Email me anytime you have something you want to talk about that this course is raised. They know they have the freedom to leave a class without penalty if the material has become too difficult. I'm very clear on the syllabus about where mental health support services are, because I also, I need to recognize my limitations. I'm not a therapist, and this may certainly raise some issues for them that they would need to see someone who is a therapist. So for me, it's having a sensitivity to recognize I've had a very long time to develop the coping mechanisms that help me work in this field. They haven't had that, and I need to respect and appreciate that. And they're all coming from places where they've. Every one of them has had some wound of some type. And recognizing that trying to be sensitive to it, trying to be aware of it is very important. I have had students write and share journal entries with me that are disturbing and they're disturbed by. And disturbed by things they're dreaming about and so on. And so I think it's Joyce Apsl who once said this that I think is very helpful. When you study this material and you work in it, you have to step into the material and remember to step out of it. You have to just find that balance. And for me, it's why I never bring work home. I don't want this to be what I do at home. I want to step out of it when I leave here. And so I do. I am pretty active encouraging my students to remember to step out of this, to not let this define their semester or their year. And hopefully that's, that's been helpful. I don't know, Maureen, you. You probably have some similar experiences, probably some different ones as well, with, with how to deal. Because I love. Maureen, what you, how you work with indigenous issues in Canada and First nations and the American Indian genocide is a. Is my first case study in my course. And I always. And you hit on this. I don't want them to leave that case study with a sense of guilt. I want them to leave it with a sense of responsibility and recognition of what it means to live in a country founded on the twin evils of genocide of one people and the enslavement of another people. So it's not guilt I'm after there, it's more the responsibility that comes with that knowledge. And that really resonated with me as you were describing what you do in your class.
- [37:19]
Maureen Hebert
That's really exactly what I'm trying to get at. And a lot of the mechanisms that you just talked about are exactly the ones that I kind of try to engage in myself and I try to use with, with the students. And so I, I tell them as a. Just a suggestion that when they're writing their papers, when they're doing their readings, when they're preparing for tests, that they might want to do this earlier in the day and try to avoid doing it after dinner. So that might help prevent the problem of having, you know, disturbed sleep, nightmares, that kind of stuff. This is exactly my practice. So I do exactly the same thing as Jim. I only work on my own research or teaching preparation. Anything genocide studies related is. Always happens before, you know, about five o' clock in the, in the afternoon. But I basically agree with everything that Jim has said. You know, it's it isn't about making the students feel bad, but I am. I would be more concerned about having students in the class which I have not yet discovered or encountered, rather, who seem to be completely unmoved by the material. I would find that very, very worrying. And if I were to ever, ever find that, that was my response, like Jim is exactly right. We've all developed this kind of set of coping mechanisms and we've become a little bit not desensitized, but we have had. We have ways of distancing ourselves from the material. But the moment that for me, I cease to feel anything about this subject, that's the moment that I need to stop teaching this subject and I need to stop doing research into it. So I want the students to have an emotional engagement, but not one that's overwhelming to them. And I absolutely agree that what I hope to spur is some kind of a sense of purpose. So in the Indigenous Genocides unit, it really is to say that this journey of reconciliation that we're all supposed to be on is not just a passive one. So this gets back to the student agency thing, that by taking this course and other courses in Indigenous Studies, that as settlers we can become part of that process of reconciliation and possibly decolonization to some extent. But, you know, like this sort of gets back to my original kind of comment. The Genocide Studies course really is quite different, I think, than so many other kinds of courses. And the students need to engage in self care. We need to engage in that kind of self care. I sometimes say to them, when we're doing our cases and we've already done kind of like the historical precursors, and now the bad stuff is going to happen. I always say we're all going to get in the hole together. We go down into the hole, bad stuff happens. And then at the end of class, even if we're not done talking about all that stuff, I say now we're all going to get out of the hole together, and I want you to go out and enjoy the rest of your day. And I want you to kind of close the book, so to speak, on what we just talked about. Don't spend too much time thinking about it. We'll have time to do that when we come back next time. I hope that that works. I know some students do find it quite challenging, and I do the same thing that Jim has suggested. I always say that students are free to leave if they wish and that the most explicit readings they can choose for themselves what they feel they can read and want to engage with and other things. If it's just too much, that's completely fine for them to decide what they want to engage with and what they like to leave to the side.
- [41:08]
Kelly McFall
Yeah. It was genocide teaching genocide studies that. That led me to a practice that I mostly use in genocide studies course now, which is an assignment for every student where at least once in the semester they are to bring in a moment of joy. Usually the first day of the week. And it might be a cat video, it might be a birthday celebration, but something that reminds us that in all of the depression and death and horror that we are engaged in, there are moments of beauty and passion and we.
- [41:37]
James Waller
Need to remember that it's beautiful.
- [41:41]
Maureen Hebert
Yeah. What I find, just very quickly, is that the course actually builds a really excellent sense of solidarity by the end. Mine is a little bit smaller, so it has 50 students in it, but usually the students who are regular attenders, they come to have kind of a tight bond with each other, just like it happens at the ghrup.
- [42:02]
Kelly McFall
So both of you attended the conference, I wonder. It's been a while, but not too long. Maureen, you already hit one of these, so maybe I'll ask Jim to start, and then if you have something to contribute, you can. What is one or two insights or ideas or responses that you left the conference with that has stuck with you?
- [42:22]
James Waller
I think two things I left with. One was just the diversity of approaches people bring to genocide studies. Every single person who spoke at that conference. And Maureen, I think you were there virtually for that one, right? Yeah, every single person. I sat there and I thought, God, I'd love to take a class with that person because.
- [42:44]
Maureen Hebert
Exactly.
- [42:45]
James Waller
Yeah. It's just different lenses on the same topic. And I thought such a richness. And I think the second thing I took was, you know, I. I went, as I said earlier, with the assumption that we teach these courses because we want them to be transformative for our students. We want them to be part of a. Of a collective that tries to make never again a reality and to realize there were other people at the conference who thought, no, it's not the purpose of my course at all. That was a good challenge for me to just realize, okay, that's just my assumption. It's how I work. It's how I think about the course. It's not how everybody thinks about it. It doesn't mean their course has less value than my course. It's just a different perspective on teaching. And oddly enough, and maybe you both have this experience as university teachers, we just Spend so little time talking to other people about teaching. And so, you know, it's easy to get lost in our assumption. So I enjoyed having that assumption checked and having me pushing me to really think deeply about how committed I am to thinking of my course in this way.
- [44:01]
Maureen Hebert
You know, what I really got out of that conference was exactly this opportunity for the first time to be much more intentional about the teaching of this subject. I've always had these doubts about how I've done the courses I said before. But because I'm in the research stream at my university and not the teaching stream, I don't actually have really any background in pedagogy. So this is the very first time I've spent any time really thinking about what university teaching is like, what it should be like, and how I really had to kind of deconstruct how I teach and not just this course. I mean, that's what the conference is all about. When I came, you know, when it was done at the conference, it gave me a chance to kind of reflect on my teaching. And it's not just sort of like, you know, we all have research expertise and we got hired into our jobs because those were our research expertise. And here's some courses that, you know, the university thinks we can teach and then we can develop some along the way. So I really appreciated this opportunity to think actually more systematically and explicitly about my teaching in genocide studies and generally the other thing, as I said before, I did appreciate everybody's confusion. It kind of reminded me of the title of the famous Maimonides book, Guide for the Perplexed. And so I thought, okay, this is good. I am perplexed, Others are perplexed. But I really enjoyed that kind of collective attempt to kind of think through. And then the last thing I took away from it, which is a very small thing that was particular to me. So, Jim, I don't know if you remember that I was the one who said I don't use any visual content in my class, right? I don't play any videos. If I do show photos on slides, it's always of people who will become victimized, but before it happens. So in their kind of full life, before it happens. And then maybe survivors. And the only people kind of during I show pictures of are the perpetrators but not doing the act. And so that was a sort of minority view. And I was kind of given a permission from other people who attended to maybe not be quite so concerned about showing that kind of material. And so since then, I have integrated a bit more on the kind of audio visual side than I used to. So I found that kind of very helpful that other colleagues who take more of a visual approach, that that can actually be a really important part of teaching a course on genocide studies. That it's not all going to be sort of like voyeurism or the traumatizing of the students, which is the two things that I'd really been concerned about. So I was, I found that very, very helpful to kind of get myself out of this little cul de sac I had found myself in, to kind of give me this permission to think a little bit more expansively about what might be good for the students to see and that it wouldn't be a terrible thing for them to see.
- [47:13]
Kelly McFall
So we're coming toward the end of our time. But I would be remiss if I didn't point out one of the things that shows up in almost every article, which is awareness of the political cultural context that surrounds us as we teach. And that context has changed significantly over the past 10 years and even 10 months. So I wonder, and Jim, you can start. I wonder how you think about the political and cultural context as you think about teaching genocide studies.
- [47:45]
James Waller
You know, in some ways I think it has made the student connection with the material easier. And what I mean by that is we're at our lowest level of global democracy in 50 years. The US is at a very low level of democracy. Our democratic institutions are under threat. So when we talk about the risk factors of genocide and the process, at least to genocide, which often involves the erosion of democracy, the lack of promotion and protection of human rights, the othering of people we consider a threat, these aren't abstract concepts anymore really. They've never been abstract concepts. But particularly at this point in US history, every student can identify these as real time relevant concepts to their life. In my classes here at the University of Connecticut, I'll probably have 30, 35% students of color, large number of them, first generation immigrant students. They, they, I don't have to work hard to, for them to understand the connection of what we're studying with their lived experience. So it has, you know, the time, the article, title of my article, and the issue is about the urgency. I don't, I feel I don't have to work as hard to communicate the urgency as I used to because we're living in urgent times. And the question is, how do we meet this moment? And involving students and answering that question, I think is the excitement and privilege of genocide education for me.
- [49:32]
Maureen Hebert
Yeah, I think in A similar way. The other thing that we don't have to do anymore to convince the students that this is an important subject is to say these things that have happened in the past are still important things from which we can learn lessons. Because around the globe, there are all sorts of cases of active genocides going on right now. And so the students can see for themselves how genocide manifests itself, that it is still, unfortunately, something this old scourge that is still with us. I think the students do make the connection to what's going on in the United States. So the Canadian politics, for the moment at least, is more quiescent and more democratic and rule of law in the way that it's been for a long time. But I had a very interesting experience with the students. It was actually during the first Trump administration. So I was describing, of course, this is political science course. I spent a lot of time on the kind of political collapse of Weimar Germany. So I was explaining how this system falls apart. So I'm talking away, and I look at the students, and then I said to them, are you guys thinking about the United States right now? And they also started to nod. And so I think that's only even more so now. They are very easily able to make that kind of connection, not so much to Canadian politics at the moment, but they can certainly make it to what's happening in the US which from across the border, is a very shocking thing. Right. So, you know, to sort of see your neighbor, your friend, go through this period of what seems like democratic backsliding is a really painful thing to watch. It's a very concerning thing to watch. And so the issues we talk about in the course are very, very proximate for them now. I wish that were not the case. I often joke to the students that I wish that genocide studies scholars were all turned into historians, but that's certainly not where we are right now.
- [51:36]
Kelly McFall
That seems a good place to end with a reminder of the relevance and necessity of genocide education. We've been talking with Jim Waller and Maureen Hebert, authors of articles in the brand new special issue of Genocide Studies International titled the Future of Genocide Education. If you're not familiar with the journal, you can go to the publisher, the University of Toronto Press, to find out more, to subscribe, to get this issue in particular, or just to learn more. Jim and Reed, thank you so much. I really appreciate it, and I hope that we will have a chance to have you on the podcast again sometime.
- [52:13]
Maureen Hebert
Thank you so much.
- [52:14]
James Waller
Thank you. It was a pleasure.