The Witness as Educator

Illuminates the power in bearing witness as an ethical orientation toward the world and its people.

Illuminates the power in bearing witness as an ethical orientation toward the world and its people.

In The Witness as Educator, David T. Hansen examines the idea of bearing witness. He shows how it constitutes an ethical orientation that heeds human yearnings for justice, beauty, and meaning. He engages the work of three exemplary witnesses: W. G. Sebald, Aimé Césaire, and Walt Whitman. Sebald powerfully confronts the human costs of the violence of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Césaire evokes a creative Black consciousness in the face of European colonialism and attests to this outlook's joyous and painful development. Whitman's witness to American life, alongside his poignant testimony about caring for wounded soldiers during the American Civil War, speaks to a hope deeper than the prospects of democracy. Hansen shows how these witnesses did not "choose" to write about their respective themes. They had to. The circumstances of their lives and the events of their time summoned them to bear witness. Hansen addresses how their efforts, supplemented by those of other witnesses whose testimony he incorporates, hold considerable educational promise in a world marked by continued misunderstanding and discord and yet also by great possibility.

David T. Hansen is the Weinberg Professor in Philosophy and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is the author of Reimagining the Call to Teach: A Witness to Teachers and Teaching and The Teacher and the World: A Study of Cosmopolitanism as Education.

David T. Hansen is the Weinberg Professor in Philosophy and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is the author of Reimagining the Call to Teach: A Witness to Teachers and Teaching and The Teacher and the World: A Study of Cosmopolitanism as Education.

"A brilliant and beautiful book" — James Garrison, coauthor of Democracy and Education Reconsidered: Dewey After One Hundred Years

"An original and powerful piece that is beautifully written. The attention to the particular is fascinating and powerful." — Cara Furman, coeditor of Teachers and Philosophy: Essays on the Contact Zone

"The Witness as Educator stands in a class by itself. It is one of the most innovative and transformative books I have read in years. It directly addresses the most important, pressing, and challenging issues humanity must confront: How does one bear witness to these experiences? And how does bearing witness help educate oneself and others?" — Benjamin Paxton, University of Virginia, School of Education and Human Development