ABSTRACT
This chapter explores ethical reading and teaching in English classrooms of middle and secondary schools. It discusses genocide literature to emphasize the importance of ethical reading and teaching because texts that represent genocide ask us, as human beings who share this world, to face the gorgons. The chapter shows that meaning making is a dynamic process that resists measurement. Readers practice becoming conscious of the multitude of actions that shape or attempt to colour our understanding of the world and our place in it. Teachers have an ethical responsibility to teach reading in such a way that students can saturate their consciousness in opportunities to learn their epistemological and ethical responsibility to the text and, in the case of testimonial literature, witness. English teachers have an important role in guiding young readers by teaching an awareness of rhetoricality, cultivating a way of being with others that sees listening as witnessing, and encouraging an imagination for how things ought to be.
