Grasping the Scope of Individual Human Devastation in War: Life Writing’s Place in Mapping in the Classroom

In Dr Katherine Roseau’s spring 2020 course on Nazi-occupied France, students learned to trace memory and experience by reading letters and diaries, identifying authors’ identity trajectories and creating visual narratives with ArcGIS StoryMaps. As a Civilization course taught in French, the student learning objectives included establishing an understanding of the Occupation and the Holocaust, and analyzing and discussing primary sources in the target language. Students delved into the life writings of Jews and Resistance fighters to explore how World War II and the Holocaust shaped their memories of newly hostile places (as the authors were forbidden from them or the places were occupied by Nazi bodies), challenged their ideas of belonging, and led them to project themselves into imagined or future places. With these texts, the student learning objectives shifted from achieving a basic (and fact-based) understanding to evaluating the scope of impact on individual lives. We believe that the significance of life writing lies in its ability to tell us how events “were initially determined as they unfolded by the schematic ways in which they were apprehended, expressed, and then acted upon.”1 We coupled our study of life writing with an introduction to environmental-psychology theories on how people become affectively attached to places.2 We considered the authors’ expressions of self-identity with regard to place in light of Harold Proshansky’s definition of place identity: “those dimensions of self that define the individual’s personal identity in relation to the physical environment by means of a complex pattern of conscious and unconscious ideas, beliefs, preferences, feelings, values, goals, and behavioral tendencies and skills relevant to this environment.”3 Rather than only considering how Nazis changed the physical environment, we thought about how the authors and their places continually shaped each other. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2022.2154442