Professor, School of Education, University of California, Berkeley

Rwanda: How to teach a country’s history after genocide

Sarah Warshauer Freedman is Professor of Education at the University of California, Berkeley and has been a senior researcher at the Human Rights Center at the University of California Berkeley. She directed the National Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy from 1985-1996. She has a PhD in education and an MA in linguistics from Stanford as well as an MA in English from the University of Chicago. Research interests include international education, with a special focus on education in the context of multicultural or multinational conflicts; literacy learning in urban, multicultural schools; and teacher research, participatory action research, and teacher education.

Freedman recently completed a project with researchers at the U.C. Berkeley Human Rights Center and academics and human rights workers in Bosnia-Hertzegovina, Croatia, and Rwanda, studying the role of education in the reconstruction of societies after genocide and conceptualizing participatory action research projects to strengthen that role. The first phase of this work, as well as work from the collaborative project, is presented in My Neighbor, My Enemy: Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Freedman has been a fellow twice at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, a resident at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center, has chaired the board of trustees for the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Research Foundation, the NCTE Committee on Research, and the American Educational Research Association’s Special Interest Group in Writing.