Reading Maus together: Risk, Chaos, and Collective Inquiry
By: Ben Gallagher
As book banning has reared its head once again in the news, we at Addressing Injustices have been reflecting on our experiences reading Maus with grade 8 students. It is a text that we've used twice in Sarah's classroom, each time to powerful effect.
In fact, we are currently putting the finished touches on an article co-written with several of the youth involved in our most recent investigation of Maus. Many of them expressed the importance of education as a way of resisting injustice and fostering change, and all of them were clearly impacted by exploring Maus in a classroom together.
Recalling our time in the classroom with these students has also led me to reflect on some of our frameworks as teachers and researchers. When engaging with potent historical material such as the Holocaust, it is surprisingly easy to slip into a kind of moralizing lecture where the Holocaust is reduced to “a terrible thing that happened in the past,” a fact that can no longer be engaged with or explored. Our approach with Addressing Injustices has been to emphasize the process of inquiry, and to foreground the interconnection between historical traumas and contemporary injustices. In doing so, we are inviting students to ask questions that matter to them about the world they're in, and trust that collectively the relevance of history will come alive through their inquiries.
What this process entails, however, involves some forces that stretch us as teachers and researchers: chaos and risk.
As a culmination of our collective engagement with a topic, students usually work together in small groups, where they are tasked with devising a “creative project” in response to the text we've read as a class. By foregrounding an inquiry process, and when asking students to investigate issues of importance to them through their personal creative practices, we often find ourselves navigating multiple different responses from students at the same time. In our work with Maus, for instance, one group of students wanted to make a tent painted with panels from Maus that presented moments of collective care and support (in the face of Nazi barbarism and repression). Another group made a set of paper maché animal masks to investigate Spiegelman's representational choices in Maus, and to expose the limits of comics at conveying individuality.
In practice, our initial experience of these multiple investigations in the classroom is one of chaos. There is a lot of uncertainty for all of us, as students explore, reject, and refine ideas for projects while we are stretched thin trying to support them all. This messiness, however, is a lot of fun – students offer each other advice, pass materials back and forth as needed, brainstorm what they plan to search for at home to enhance their visions.
This messiness, however, also contains an element of risk. We are taking up issues of deep injustice, after all, and when everyone in the classroom is moving in different directions there is always the possibility of the class itself falling apart. Disagreements over creative visions flare up, some students seem to treat a serious subject matter with frivolity while others work with intensity, and we can't tell whether any of the projects will actually be completed -- let alone what conclusions the students have reached through their investigations.
However, one of the benefits of researching inside of the spaces where we teach is that we are afforded the chance to reflect back on these moments of intensity in the classroom. One thing that has become apparent is that this feeling of riskiness is actually a way of signalling the value of our collective work, and the trust we have in each other in the classroom. As Sarah says, "if the teaching doesn't scare me, I'm bored -- and so are the students." After all, asking people to do something risky is another way of telling them you believe they are capable of handling that risk.
Another revelation that research has offered us is that our felt experience of chaos and uncertainty can sometimes mask the seriousness of the work in the classroom. Students may be laughing as they toss paint and markers to each other, squabble about the details of their projects, or feign disgust as they get covered up to their elbows in paper maché, but their investment in the process and the questions behind their projects was tangible, and the completed projects reflect that seriousness.
Above all, it has taught us that students are more than capable of reading books that deal with the most vital, urgent, and challenging aspects of our world. Banning books out of an urge to “protect” children from challenging content demeans their capabilities, and robs us of their insights. The students we've had the pleasure of working with want us to trust their capacity not just to learn, but to be catalysts for change.