Towards an oral history of Hiroshima. Part Two: Witnessing

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Interviewees from Hiroshima 2014

Elizabeth Chappell, The Open University, and interviewees

‘We live in an era of the witness’, wrote Annette Wienorka in her 2006 book, The Era of the Witness. I recently gave a talk on witnessing the survivors of Hiroshima for the English department of the Open University Post Graduate Research conference held on 22 November 2014 at the OU’s Camden Centre. I spent the last part of my travel grant, provided by the Great British Sasakawa Foundation, on a trip to Hiroshima in September this year. During this trip I interviewed about a dozen witnesses — known as hibakusha in Japanese — as well as those who work with or study the history of the hibakusha, (from hibaku, explosion, and sha, person, in Japanese).

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Blog 3. The interviews are nearly done!

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Emma Rothero, The Open University

Emma Rothero, The Open University

In my previous post, I wrote that we were ready to ask the questions but I was worried no one would want to answer.

Well, I needn’t have been concerned. We’ve completed 14 semi-structured interviews and have two more to do. We have written up the interviews we’ve done as draft case studies and I am just sorting out the process of getting the interviews transcribed.

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Teaching for social justice? Or social work? Ghanaian student teachers’ perceptions of a teacher’s role in a rural community.

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Alison Buckler, The Open University

This post is shared from the OU’s Education Futures blog.

Earlier this year I blogged about a new research project I’m working on which is trying to understand student teachers’ perceptions of themselves as agents of social justice in low income countries. The research stems from the increasingly worrying body of evidence which suggests that millions of children across the world are spending several years in school, yet learning nothing.

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