Professor Sara Jones in the Department of Modern Languages has recently launched two new sets of guidance for practitioners seeking to work with witness accounts in different contexts.
The first Using Testimony in the Classroom is targeted at teachers working with first-person accounts in the delivery of Holocaust education across the curriculum. The guide offers key considerations and lesson sketches for using testimony in different media, including audio-visual, diaries, literature, documentary film, poetry, and theatre. The full pack was released on Holocaust Memorial Day in January 2020 and was updated in May 2020 to incorporate specific advice relating to online/home learning. The update includes a list of new digital resources produced by project partners the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, Holocaust Educational Trust, and National Holocaust Centre and Museum.
The second set of guidance, Testimony in Practice: A Guide, is for artistic practitioners seeking to incorporate testimony into their work. It includes guidance on theory, methods and ethics and was produced in collaboration with the Catalan theatre company La Conquesta del pol sud, Philip Holyman of Little Earthquake, the Romanian and German novelist Carmen-Francesca Banciu, and Irish academic and author Emilie Pine.
Sara Jones with Ruth Barnett, whose autobiographical theatre features in the guide Using Testimony in the Classroom
Both sets of guidance are the outcome of the partnerships and collaborations developed in the AHRC-funded research network Culture and its Uses as Testimony and the AHRC-funded follow-on project Testimony in Practice.