TOPIA 10 53 Julie Rak Do Witness: Don’t: A Woman’s Word and Trauma as Pedagogy 1 ABSTRACT This paper considers the implications of teaching narratives about trauma in a university setting. As researchers begin to teach narratives which are part of what is beginning to be called “trauma studies,” it is necessary to think about how to teach narratives about atroc- ity.I argue that narratives like Elly Danica’s Don’t: A Woman’s Word do not portray trauma in a confessional mode, but seek to enact secondary trauma within readers or viewers as part of an individual or social transformation. This enacting produces a specific type of silence. In this silence, the readers or viewers are called into being as witnesses in very special ways. The pedagogical challenge which teachers of testimonial narratives of trauma face is twofold. First, there is the challenge of silence as a necessary part of the response to trauma, and second, there is the ethical challenge of bearing witness to trauma in a classroom situation. I consider work by Dori Laub on trauma witnessing and challenge assumptions by Shoshana Felman about teaching to a crisis in order to see how students can become witnesses. Canadian academic culture in the humanities is founded on the belief that the writ- ten and spoken word is essential to the learning process. In this context, silence in the environment of the smaller seminar can be understood as a terrifying moment for some teachers. Silence can happen when the fragile relationship between teacher and students seems to break down. This is not what is supposed to constitute good teach- ing, and so when instructors are taught to teach, silence (if it is discussed at all) is seen as something which instructors need to learn to “break.”In my Western, white and middle-class cultural context,which is also the context of most university-level peda- gogy, silence must be broken because it appears to be unproductive or damaging to self-development. 2 In the university where I work for example, the academic teach- ing unit offers numerous seminars about how to get students to talk, but none which deal with silence as a way to learn. I think that is because silence is implicitly under- stood in the humanities classroom to be a way to withhold information. It is under- stood to be an indicator of fear, boredom, resistance or ignorance. For many teachers