Pedagogies of Public Memory: Teaching Writing and Rhetoric at Museums, Memorials, and Archives

Pedagogies of Public Memory explores opportunities for writing and rhetorical education at museums, archives, and memorials. Readers will follow students working and writing at well-known sites of international interest (e.g., the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum), at local sites (e.g., vernacular memorials in and around Muncie, Indiana and the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania), and in digital spaces (e.g., Florida State University’s Postcard Archive and The Women’s Archive Project at the University of Nebraska Omaha). From composing and delivering museum tours, to designing online memorials that challenge traditional practices of public grief, to producing and publishing a magazine containing the photographs and stories of individuals who lived through historic moments in the Freedom Struggle, to expanding and creating new public archives – the pedagogical projects described in this volume create richly textured learning opportunities for students at all levels – from first-year writers to graduate students. The students and faculty whose work is represented in this volume undertake to reposition the past in the present and to imagine possible new futures for themselves and their communities. By exploring the production of public memory, this volume raises important new questions about the intersection of rhetoric and remembrance.

Jane Greer is Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, USA. She is the editor of Girls and Literacy in America (2003), and her scholarship has been published in College English, College Composition and Communication, English Journal, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and numerous edited collections.

Laurie Grobman is Professor of English and Women's Studies at Pennsylvania State University Berks, USA. She is the 2014 Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Outstanding Baccalaureate Colleges Professor of the Year. Grobman has published two books, Multicultural Hybridity: Transforming American Literary Scholarship and Pedagogy (2007) and Teaching at the Crossroads: Cultures and Critical Perspectives in Literature by Women of Color (2001), and edited Undergraduate Research in English Studies (2010) and On Location: Theory and Practice in Classroom-Based Writing Tutoring (2005).