What insights can undergraduates gain from historical memoirs about other cultures, diverse points of view, and the wider world? Over the years I have redesigned my comparative global history course based on approaches and strategies I gleaned from the University of Minnesota’s Internationalizing, Teaching, and Learning (ITL) Cohort Program under the direction of Gayle Woodruff. I found the program’s International, Intercultural, Global (IIG) learning model useful, and benefited from Dee Fink’s integrated course design and taxonomy of significant learning.^[1]

I determined through trial and error and through exploration of the scholarly literature that a judiciously selected set of memoirs best serves my purposes in facilitating student discussion of historical methods. Directed reading of these personal narratives can help students develop a global perspective, which is one of the course learning outcomes and the focus of this essay.^[2] Students find these democratic memoirs, contextualized with supplemental readings and class activities, more engaging than secondary sources or traditional textbooks.^[3] As I describe below, these memoirs also present opportunities for student self-reflection on their own intercultural experiences.

The broad topic of “comparative global history” needed a cohesive theme. Out of personal interest and global relevance, I settled upon the topic of genocide, a horrific act throughout history that presents opportunities to explore world cultures and some disturbing yet essential questions about humanity. Each semester, students read and analyze four survival narratives set in different parts of the world. I select the memoirs according to specific criteria; above all, the books need to be credible, accessible, and readable. Based on ample student feedback, I know which narratives tend to resonate with the undergraduates who take my course.

This essay offers reflections on designing a course curriculum that centers on historical memoirs to cultivate a global or intercultural perspective, describing an approach to motivating students to learn about history and think about their connection to people with different backgrounds. It draws upon qualitative data gathered from hundreds of undergraduates who have collectively read about forty memoirs over multiple semesters. These students have agreed to the use of their feedback in this study.

I’ll be referring selectively to students’ comments from course journals, online discussion forums, essays, and, especially, surveys. Since my participation in the ITL Cohort Program over a decade ago, I’ve implemented an “Internationalizing Teaching and Learning” feedback tool on Qualtrics. This “ITL survey” asks two questions that solicit a narrative response:

1. What was/were the most important thing(s) you learned in this course in relation to global/international/intercultural issues?
2. What in this course most helped you learn about global/international/intercultural issues?

I’ve focused on the responses that specifically mention the use of a memoir in the students’ learning or in conjunction with other course activities.^[4] I also draw upon hundreds of comments from a Memoirs Questionnaire, another assessment tool and course assignment. This survey solicits students’ thoughts specifically on the role memoirs played in their learning.^[5] Together, these tools have enabled me to assess effectiveness — what’s working and what’s not — and make adjustments accordingly.

The student feedback has provided me with a great source of further reflection on teaching through memoirs. Below, I explain how my understanding of a global perspective has evolved and how the reading of memoirs can facilitate such a perspective.

Beginning with Self-Reflection on Global Perspective

My history course satisfies the criteria for the Global Perspective theme of general education requirements as outlined by the University of Minnesota (UMN).^[6] Students cover material outside the United States, address particular problems or themes in other countries or cultures, and make connections to relevant issues in today’s world. The overall intention is to foster an appreciation for other perspectives. Specifically, my aim is to help students develop the habit or mindset to place events and issues in the US, both past and present, into a broader context. As an example, when discussing reparations for slavery in the US, we can look outside our own political culture and consult similar national narratives in other countries — learning a great deal, for instance, from South Africa’s painstaking efforts to overcome the legacy of apartheid.

For me, the term global perspective comprises a tripartite approach to broadening one’s outlook, namely, the IIG model that distinguishes international, intercultural, and global components. These overlapping “entry points” to internationalizing a course remind both teacher and students that understanding the world outside our daily experience entails study of historic developments within national borders, an examination of the interconnectedness of systems and patterns beyond these borders, and personal engagement with other cultures.^[7]

The course content in part encourages students to appreciate the perspective and experience of individuals and groups different from their own. This is a challenge easier said than done. Designing a curriculum aimed at developing a student’s global perspective or intercultural competency demands a degree of intellectual and cultural humility, all the more so given the delicate topics we address in class, such as genocide and systems of political oppression. There are potential hazards and pitfalls along the way.

Critical self-reflection and self-cognizance for an instructor who harbors a set of presuppositions and comes from a particular lived experience, like anyone else, are requirements of the job in and outside the classroom. I’ve sought to model a degree of relative objectivity in discussing controversial events and topics. Keeping my own value judgments in check requires constant vigilance. Only others can decide whether I’ve met the challenge.

The course leverages our sense of belonging. The students come from a variety of ethnoreligious backgrounds and might see the world differently from me and each other. I explain at the outset of the semester that while I think of myself as a global citizen, I’m also rooted in a specific culture and come from a particular place. I take pride in my background and try to understand the way it informs my experience. My hope is that I provide an emotional space where the students likewise feel free to express their views and become cognizant of a framework through which they might see other cultures.

Dee Fink’s taxonomy of significant learning, particularly his Human Dimensions Goals and Caring Goals, has challenged me to broaden my understanding of student learning.^[8] My history course is more than a dissemination of knowledge or the learning and application of terms and concepts. The Human Dimensions Goal asks: What should students learn about themselves? The Caring Goal asks: What changes/values do you hope students will adopt? I want students to think deeply about their presuppositions and to work out their own frame of reference as they engage with the course materials. These questions involve feelings, self-cognizance, and interaction with others. They get to a place that college instructors perhaps fear to tread. However, these types of learning outcomes have emboldened me to think beyond the dictates of my discipline and see the students as fellow citizens and human beings. Developing a global perspective requires introspection and reflection on values, a learning process facilitated by the reading of dramatic tales of life and death throughout the semester.

I’ve learned the value of bringing my experience into play when it’s relevant to the discussion. One student in a survey noted the role of the teaching style, videos, guest speakers, memoirs, and class discussions to facilitate learning and reflection. “More importantly, with your lectures on your personal endeavors in Turkey, I was able to gain a lot in regards to their culture and traditions.”^[9] Students seem to appreciate the anecdotes and photos from my travels to countries under discussion in the course. While earlier in my teaching career I might have considered such autobiographical moments counterproductive to academic objectivity, I now see how they open up avenues for dialogue and make me more approachable to students.

The students’ varied life experiences are likewise relevant to classroom discussions in this course. I encourage students to share something about themselves (family, travels, language skills) in class activities. They post a photo and short description of interests on Padlet at the outset of the semester, for instance, or share aspects of their culture in a fishbowl conversation. Ideally, students are connecting at some level with the protagonists in the memoirs and with each other as they discuss them. The culturally diverse student population at my institution offers a wonderful environment to explore these objectives in the classroom.

Exploring the Benefits of Teaching through Memoirs

Scholarship on memoirs, memory, and storytelling has largely informed my decision to use personal narratives to engage students and achieve multiple learning objectives. The secondary literature posits several benefits of using a personal narrative as an educational tool. I’ll highlight a few below.

Emotional connection with the narratives helps students retain and personalize the course content.^[10] Like a dramatic movie, these gripping eyewitness accounts about survival, hardship, grief, and loss can draw them in. A student commented how reading the memoirs gave them “the ability to experience a genocide through the eyes and feelings of a victims.”^[11] “Reading what happened from a person who was a part of the tragedy,” wrote another student, “has really helped me grasp the perspectives.”^[12] Asked about how these memoirs made them feel while reading them, a third student described the need “to stop reading for a day and just sit and reflect on everything I read.”^[13] Each student identifies with some memoirs more than others, but if these personal narratives can stir emotions, stimulate creative imagination, and make the course material come alive for them, they are more motivated to learn.

Engaging the student with a well-crafted survival story serves a larger purpose of sparking discussion on the cultural context of personal narratives. Memoirs can “provoke” students to think “critically about cultural definitions of selfhood and authenticity.”^[14] I think of the memoir as a cultural artifact that conveys the collective outlook and memory of a people. The narratives not only reflect the individual psychological healing of the memoirist/survivor, but are subsumed within a larger political or cultural context that can influence the narrative in both content and style.^[15] “Reading what the victims had to go through in their own words,” wrote a student, “helped me to understand what was going on and how their culture influenced their actions.”^[16] Acknowledging that the memoirs focus on genocide and not necessarily culture, explained another student, “I was able to recognize cultural difference from the text that I would not have been able to pick up on otherwise.”^[17]

Inviting students to interpret the course texts as testimonial narratives gives them a further framework for comparative analysis. An appeal to justice is a common denominator of these memoirs. The memorists are recounting the crimes their people have suffered. They are survivors who turned to writing in part as a way to reclaim their voice and represent “the collective experience of a particular oppressed group.”^[18] They see themselves “as members of a collectivity whose story must be recounted.”^[19] In this sense, the students can examine advocacy for justice in a broader cultural context. When asked at the end of the semester about the emotions these narratives evoked, many students expressed anger at injustice and lack of accountability after most if not all the genocides they examined.

Indeed, students expressed a desire to right the wrongs of the past. Some student feedback in this regard is quite inspirational. One student explained that “by reading these memoirs,” the student is “acknowledging that these horrors occurred” and that “we are moving from being by-standing [sic] who seem to not care, to people who could actually learn from humanity’s mistakes and prevent future horrors.”^[20] In a course journal entry an undergraduate noted that the very act of remembering those who suffered and reading their accounts is a form of activism: “I think our class was able to fight back against all the perpetrators we read about because we remembered those who lost their lives and learned about their past.” Class readings and discussions thwarted the perpetrators’ efforts to snuff out the lives of their victims, who could speak again “through what we learned about.”^[21]

Appealing to readers’ sense of justice is part of the healing process for those who have the courage to tell their tale to the world. Students examine the memoirs also as trauma narratives. Exposing the perpetrators’ crimes and the previously untold suffering of their hapless victims is important for the “restoration of the social order” and giving voice to those who can no longer speak.^[22]  Healing for the survivor involves taking control of their life and regaining agency.^[23] One student wrote that the memoirs helped to better understand “what happened to them and how they healed themselves.”^[24] The undergraduates at my academic institution are pursuing a B.S. in Health Science and are particularly interested in trauma, health, and resilience. They examine the coping mechanisms and survival strategies that range in these narratives from religious faith, forgiveness, and revenge to reflections on the natural world.

A final benefit I’ll mention here delves into historical method and reconstruction of the past. Reading these personal narratives allows the student to “re-experience the affective and cognitive inside of a historical moment.”^[25] That is, while other types of historical sources might tell us what happened, they don’t really give us the emotional experience at the time. The “reconstruction of the thoughts and feelings of individual historical agents” that eyewitness narratives provide is just as important as a historical recounting of events long after the outcome is known.^[26] How did survivors of political violence, say, get through the hardships of social isolation or discriminatory practices? Students’ comments mention the “emotional perspective” of these eyewitness accounts. These texts don’t merely recount what the characters did, but also “the emotions associated with those actions that you can’t get from a history book.” Another student enjoyed seeing the protagonist of a memoir “grow mentally and emotionally throughout the memoir.”^[27]

Using these memoirs in isolation wouldn’t necessarily bring out the benefits outlined above. Encouraging the students to learn more about other cultures, reflect on their own experiences in negotiating differences, and consider the advantages and disadvantages of memoirs as a historical primary source depends on an ensemble of teaching strategies throughout the semester. Still, the memoir is the main text and the central learning tool to facilitate a global (and historical) perspective.

Cultivating a Global Perspective from Specific Memoirs

While a detailed discussion of why I select particular survival narratives and how I provide historical context and background for each of them is beyond the scope of this essay, let’s look at a few examples of student engagement with specific memoirs. These texts have generated rich discussion and analysis of a range of topics including survival strategies, trauma, racism, sexual violence, and culture.

Immaculée Ilibagiza’s theme of forgiveness in her memoir, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, which recounts her harrowing survival of the Rwandan Genocide, contributes to a semester-long examination of survivors’ coping mechanisms.^[28] Immaculée was at the time a young Tutsi woman who survived by hiding in a small bathroom with other women for three months. We discuss how notions of forgiveness can be culturally conditioned and how her Catholic faith serves as a source of consolation and of her will to survive. Many students mention the healing power in her ability to forgive those who murdered her parents and siblings. Most come to admire Immaculée, while others are more critical. For example, one student expressed respect for her religious faith, but said that “to so easily dismiss” the evil deeds empowers the perpetrators. “Were I in her position, I would likely consider it a personal duty to harbor ill feelings toward my victimizers.”^[29]

Overcoming the trauma of a lost childhood is the theme in Kenan Trebinčević’s The Bosnia List: A Memoir of War, Exile, and Return. A family visit to Bosnia decades after he and his family fled Kalashnikov-toting Serbs and found a new home in America made Trebinčević rethink his initial anger and plan to exact revenge. “[B]y admitting my hurt and facing down the people who’d scarred me here,” he explains, “I did feel unburdened.” Penning his thoughts into a narrative helped him “quell [his] emotional turbulence.”^[30] Students trace his personal growth from a desire for revenge against erstwhile neighbors to a more nuanced understanding of the difficult decisions that people made during the war.  One student described their own ability to forgive fairly quickly and move on. However, the student also noted that “sometimes forgiveness doesn’t always need to come right away because it can take time to actually want to forgive.”^[31] Kenan’s work toward healing offers insights about mental health long after a tragic event.

A number of the course memoirs deal with racism, including Halima Bashir’s Tears of the Desert: A Memoir of Survival in Darfur. The author describes the discrimination and violence she faced as a black African and member of the Zaghawa ethnic group in Darfur (Sudan).^[32] Students see that systematic racism can take on different forms in other countries, providing opportunities for a comparative analysis with the history of racial disparities in the United States. One student of African descent expressed anger at the part of the book where Halima goes to school in Khartoum and faces harassment from Arab students and teachers. She could identify with the protagonist. “Living in a country that has a reputation for hating people of skin color,” the student wrote, “I can relate to the injustice she feels because the same things happen to me quite often.”^[33] I should add that Bashir’s effort to become a doctor and the interplay between Western and folk medicine in the narrative are a plus for engaging health science students.

Mark Mathabane’s memoir, Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South, also invites students to think about racism in a comparative sense. One student “was able to understand the day-to-day struggles of someone living through apartheid” and see that systemic racism doesn’t occur only in the United States. A white student born in South Africa wrote about her general knowledge of this topic prior to class but came away from the course with a much better understanding after reading the book.^[34]

Some the texts broach the difficult topic of sexual violence, an unavoidable and important topic given that systematic rape often accompanies a genocide. Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman of northern Iraq captured by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), describes sexual assault and rape in her memoir,  The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State.^[35] “In addition to the physical abuse she experienced,” wrote a student, “[Nadia] also spoke of the psychological trauma and the long-lasting effects it had on her life.” Many students end up writing about trauma and resilience in their analytical essay assignment. We followed up the reading with a short documentary on the treatment of hundreds of Yazidi women at a trauma treatment center in Germany. I should add that the book also offers opportunities to learn about a relatively obscure religion and power dynamics in the Middle East. The Last Girl gave the student above insight into “the intricate political and religious conflicts in the area” and the “value of international engagement in defending defenseless populations during armed conflict.”^[36]

The testimonial narrative, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, brings attention to injustices committed against Indigenous peoples. It allows for an investigation into decoloniality and the ways in which historical knowledge reflect a cultural bias. A Mayan woman recounts the depredations of the Guatemalan military in the early 1980s and her turn to activism. While reading this book, students grapple with an earlier academic controversy that divided anthropologists, considering “errors” or alleged misinformation in Rigoberta’s oral tradition, recorded by an anthropologist, with Western notions of historical accuracy.^[37] This book challenges students to appreciate how different cultures might craft a narrative.

The reading of the course memoirs can help students connect with their family background. “As I continue deep into the memoirs of the Cambodian genocide survival story,” commented a student, “the more I become appreciative of being part Cambodian.”^[38] Reading When Broken Glass Floats^[39] reminded another student of the stories her mother would tell her about Vietnam and being without her parents as a child in Thailand.^[40]

Memoirs can become the source of meaningful discussions with classmates. For instance, one student described her experience reading Fawzia Koofi’s The Favored Daughter: One Woman’s Fight to Lead Afghanistan, which describes the author’s courageous defense of women’s rights in her native Afghanistan.^[41] The student liked how we not only discussed what happened in the memoir but “went deeper.” She wanted to go even further and had regular discussions with a Muslim classmate who “is really good at understanding the cultural differences.” This friend would “teach” her more outside of class.^[42]

The content of the memoirs have stimulated conversations at home. A student wrote of her experience reading a number of memoirs set in Pol Pot’s Cambodia: “I would [otherwise] never have talked with my family members about their experience and learned how there is guilt and trauma that still clutches on to them to this day and many other Cambodians that continue to fight the aftermath.”^[43] She also expressed her renewed appreciation for her culture and her determination as a future health professional to help people overcome the stigma around mental illness among non-Western cultures. One student explained how Paul Rusesabagina’s memoir about his actions as a hotel manager during the Rwandan Genocide, An Ordinary Man^[44] “sparked conversations in my household” and opened the door to sensitive topics about war that the family doesn’t talk about.^[45]

Conclusion

Facilitating self-awareness and critical reflection on the experiences of ethnoreligious and diaspora communities abroad and within the United States is replete with both challenges and rewards. This essay offers some ideas on cultivating a global perspective and the advantages of using memoirs. Designing a curriculum to develop a global perspective starts with introspection on the part of the instructor. Such self-reflection makes for clarity and intentionality in creating assignments and connecting those assignments to applicable assessment tools. While some disciplines might find greater challenges in accommodating a global perspective, the integration of students’ sense of belonging and intercultural experiences can strengthen a course curriculum.

Teaching through memoirs has helped me develop in students an appreciation for other perspectives. They are more apt to engage with a personal narrative and ask questions about the construction of historical knowledge, the causes of cross-cultural conflict, or the trauma and healing of survivors of genocide. Student feedback in surveys and writing assignments give supportive evidence for this claim. Reinforced and contextualized with additional readings, discussions, audio-visual aids, and class activities, eyewitness narratives provide undergraduates fodder for reflection on their meaningful interaction, or lack thereof, with other cultures. As one student wrote: “Reading the memoirs of people who had direct experience with these topics [cultural differences and conflict] helped me create a more nuanced and empathic understanding of other points of view.”^[46]

If a historical perspective provides a check on our seemingly natural inclination to believe we live in either the best or worst of times (we don’t), so a global perspective can keep us from thinking our experiences in the United States, the good and the bad, are unique and perhaps the way of the world (they aren’t). A global perspective means we value other viewpoints and want to place our experience within a broader framework. We should be ever mindful that, as one student put it, “everyone has a story and each story has its own meaning and purpose.”^[47]

References

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Fass, Paula S. “The Memoir Problem.” Reviews in American History 34 (2006): 107-123.

Fink, L. Dee. Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses. Rev. ed. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2013.

Herman, Judith L. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence–from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

Kappler Mikk, Barbara and Inge Ellen Steglitz, eds. Learning Across Cultures: Locally and Globally, 3rd ed. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2017.

Maynes, Mary Jo, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Barbara Laslett. Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.

Sanderson, Gavin. “A Foundation for the Internationalization of the Academic Self.” Journal of Studies in International Education 12 (2008): 276-307.

Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Tuon, Bunkong. “Writing Trauma, Writing Life in Chanrithy Him’s When Broken Glass Floats.” Comparative Literature Studies 52 (2015): 585-612.

Tyung, Chai M., Hafeez U. Amin, Mohamad N.M. Saad, and Aamir S. Malik. “The Influence of Emotion on Learning and  Memory.” Frontiers in Psychology 8 (2017): 1-22.

Wallach, Jennifer Jensen. “Building a Bridge of Words: The Literary Autobiography as Historical Source Material.” Biography 29 (2006): 446-461.

Watson, Jinx Stapleton. “Learning History Through Literary Memoir.” The ALAN Review 29, no. 3 (2002): 10-14.