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The essay analyzes students’ personal disclosures in the context of classroom discussion as a public and political—not a private, individual—act. Concerned especially with testimonies of violence, this article asks what it means, not just for students to speak, but for the class to hear personal testimony. Arguing from the premise that subjectivity is dialogic and relational, not individual and sovereign, “Pedagogy of Witness” understands the classroom as a space of bearing witness in which students: 1) engage in the dialogic performance of address and response; and 2) assume both the agency of speaking subjects and the responsibility of ethical witness. While this article uses a psychoanalytic framework for a process of bearing witness that can help teachers negotiate the classroom as testimonial space, the testimony itself cannot be reduced to psycho-therapeutic frames. To the extent that structures of oppression and subordination are maintained by the failure to bear ethical witness, the classroom as a space of encounter and witness makes it possible for students to assume subject positions that resist reproducing these structures. Hence, the testimonial space fostered by pedagogy of encounter and ethical witness is important, not so much for its potentially ‘therapeutic’ value for testifying subjects, but for its socially transformative potential to re-script relations of oppression and subordination.
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