Teaching the Weight of Words

Writing as Ethical Witness During Genocide Remembrance Month

Each April, Genocide Remembrance Month invites us to pause and remember histories of violence that too often fade into abstraction or silence. Several major genocides have key anniversaries in April—the Armenian Genocide beginning April 24, 1915, the Rwandan Genocide beginning April 7, 1994, and the Khmer Rouge’s takeover of Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. Holocaust remembrance days also often fall during this period: the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Other Commemorations include the Anfal campaign against Iraqi Kurds and atrocities in Darfur.

For teachers of Language Arts, the month raises a quiet but persistent question: What does it mean to ask students to engage with language of harm, resistance, and repair; what does it mean to write in the presence of such histories and the violence that persists in our lives?

In English classrooms, writing is often framed as a skill to practice or a product to refine. Yet when we encounter testimonies of genocide, writing begins to feel like something else entirely. It becomes slower, heavier. The page becomes a place where students grapple not simply with language, but with memory, responsibility, and the fragile work of witnessing.

When students read survivor testimonies—whether from the Holocaust, the genocide in Bosnia, or the stories carried by the Mothers of Srebrenica—they encounter voices shaped by loss, endurance, and the long struggle to have one’s story heard. Writing in response to such narratives is not merely an academic exercise. It asks students to sit with another person’s history and to consider what it means to respond with care.

I have learned that in these moments, the writing classroom becomes less about producing polished arguments and more about cultivating ethical attention, especially when we pair April’s other work with National Poetry Month. With a focus on language, students begin to ask questions that feel larger than the assignment: How do we write about suffering that is not our own? What responsibilities do we carry as readers of testimony? What does it mean to speak, and when must we simply listen?

The work of the teacher, then, is not to rush toward answers. It is to create space where these questions can live.

Writing as Ethical Encounter

Over the past several years, I have been thinking more intentionally about the role English language arts classrooms can play in genocide education. While history classes often carry the responsibility of teaching these events, ELA classrooms hold a different but equally vital space: the place where students encounter human stories, wrestle with language, and respond through writing. In my forthcoming book on ethical literacy, I explore a framework that centers survivor testimony, reflective writing, and relational care as essential elements of genocide education. The work of ELA teachers, I have come to believe, is not simply to teach about these histories but to help students develop the language, attention, and ethical awareness required to encounter them and imagine what language can do to name and repair the harm.

Writing in response to histories of genocide asks something different of students—and of us as teachers.

It asks us to slow down.
It asks us to recognize that language carries historical weight.
It asks us to consider writing not as performance, but as relationship.

When students compose open letters in response to public rhetoric—such as Colin Powell’s 2004 speech naming the Darfur atrocities “genocide”—they begin to see writing as participation in an ongoing moral conversation. Their letters are not simply arguments; they are acts of response to history.

Similarly, when students engage in multigenre research or creative genres after reading young adult literature that grapples with injustice, they often find themselves moving between analysis and imagination. A poem, a speculative narrative, or a reflective monologue can become a way of exploring questions that straightforward analysis cannot fully hold.

These forms of writing do not replace analytical thinking. Instead, they expand it, inviting students to approach history not only through evidence but through empathy and imagination.

What matters most is not the genre itself, but the orientation behind it: writing as an attempt to understand, to respond, and to hold space for human stories that resist easy conclusions.

The Teacher as Witness

Moments like these also ask something of us.

Teaching about genocide inevitably exposes the limits of our own language. There are days when a student’s question lingers long after the bell rings. Days when a passage from a testimony settles heavily in the room and we are unsure how to move forward.

In those moments, the teacher is not simply an instructor but a witness alongside students.

We read together.
We listen together.
And sometimes, we acknowledge that the work of understanding history is unfinished.

There is a vulnerability in this stance. Yet it is also where the most meaningful learning often begins. When teachers allow space for uncertainty, students begin to see writing not as a performance of certainty but as a way of thinking through difficult truths.

The classroom becomes a place where language is used not to dominate or finalize meaning, but to approach it carefully.

Beginning with Listening

Genocide Remembrance Month does not require elaborate lessons or complex writing assignments. Sometimes the most meaningful entry point is simply making room for testimony and reflection.

A short excerpt from a survivor narrative.
A photograph accompanied by a personal story.
A brief historical context that situates the voices students are about to encounter.

What follows may be quiet. Students may write slowly, unsure at first how to respond.

But within that hesitation lies something essential: the recognition that some stories deserve patience.

In a world where narratives of violence circulate rapidly—often stripped of context or humanity—the work of the writing classroom may begin with something simple and powerful: teaching students how to listen. See the PDF below for a few suggestions. Note: Always review the material before you share it with students and keep your specific context in mind so that the content can be accessible and shared with care.

Try This

If you’d like to acknowledge Genocide Remembrance Month in your classroom, you might begin with a brief moment of reflective writing. After listening to a short testimony excerpt or reading a survivor narrative, invite students to respond to one of these prompts.

Write for five minutes:

What line or moment from the testimony stayed with you, and why?
What questions do you have about the history, people, or places mentioned in this story?
What responsibilities do we have as readers when someone shares a story from lived experience?

Students do not need to resolve these questions immediately. The goal is simply to begin practicing what ethical literacy asks of us: to listen carefully, ask thoughtful questions, and approach human stories with humility and care.