Holocaust Education Research Articles

Emotions in holocaust education - the narrative of a history teacher

Emotions in holocaust education - the narrative of a history teacher

Connecting to History - Connecting to Ourselves. Thoughts about Holocaust Education and Relevancy

This article explores the question of how to teach about the Holocaust as a historical event that is relevant to the reality we face today. This article suggests some methodical principles that allow students to study the Holocaust in a personally meaningful way. In addition, it is recommended to teach about actors (using this term instead of the educationally misleading term bystander) and to analyze their attitudes towards unfolding events. The way actors (institutions as well as individuals) relate to what happens in their milieu, constitutes a strong connection between past and contemporary tragedies

Holocaust Education in Germany: Ensuring relevance and meaning in an increasingly diverse community

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ‘open-door’ policy towards the recent wave of migrants and refugees to Europe shows promise for expanding the workforce and increasing diversity, yet opens up some significant cultural and religious differences. Although the government has created programs to aid in their transition, little attention has been paid to how school curriculum, particularly education on the Holocaust, is presented to students for whom the event lacks personal, religious, or social relevance or who may have been taught that it is a fabrication. This study focuses on how classroom material presents the rise of National Socialism and the Holocaust through a document analysis of curriculum materials from a Gymnasium in Hamburg, Germany. Results show that even at the highest level of the education system, students are not being presented with the material in a way that draws relevance to the present day nor fosters meaning for recent immigrants. For the Holocaust, which is both a significant historical event and a critical lesson in the importance of universal human rights, effective education is imperative in order to combat present global trends of radicalism and intolerance.

Histoire de l’Holocauste et éducation aux droits humains: arrimage réussi au Québec?

This article focuses on the twinning of history teaching and human rights education. The case of the Holocaust illustrates the possibilities and limits of such a relationship, in light of the practices implemented in history and citizenship education classes in Quebec. Organized around four axes of analysis, the results show that the teachers privilege above all an awareness to the human rights and a teaching centered on the knowledge of the rights. Similarly, Holocaust education focuses on the Nazi efforts to persecute Jews without explicit references to human rights issues. Both subjects are studied separately in the same sequence.

Rethinking empathy: Emotions triggered by the Holocaust among the Muslim-minority in Germany

In the last decade there has been widely shared discomfort about the way Muslim minority Germans engage with the Holocaust. They are accused of not showing empathy towards its Jewish victims and, as a result, of not being able to learn the necessary lessons from this massive crime. By focusing on instances in which the emotional reactions of Muslim minority Germans towards the Holocaust are judged as not empathetic enough and morally wrong, this article explores how Holocaust education and contemporary understandings of empathy, in teaching about the worst manifestation of racism in history, can also at times be a mechanism to exclude minorities from the German/European moral makeup and the fold of national belonging. Expanding from Edmund Husserl’s embodied approach to empathy to a socially situated approach, via the process of paarung, allows us to reinterpret expressions of fear and envy, currently seen as failed empathy, as instances of intersubjective connections at work. In my reinterpretation of Husserl’s ideas, the process of paarung that enables empathy to happen is not abstract, but pairs particular experiences happening at particular times and places under particular circumstances to individuals of certain social standing and cultural influences. An analogy can be made to shoes. Anyone has the capacity to imagine themselves in someone else’s shoes. Nevertheless, the emotional reactions the experience triggers in each person will be shaped by individual past experiences and social positioning. Hence, grandchildren of workers who arrived in Germany after World War II to rebuild the country resist an ethnicized Holocaust memory and engage with it keenly through their own subject positions.

Teaching “Other” Genocides: Exploring the Intersection of Global Education and Genocide Studies

Holocaust education in the United States began as a grassroots movement during the 1970s. Today, more than 30 states mandate the teaching of the Holocaust; however, far less attention is given in schools to other 20th-century instances of genocide. Totten has suggested that by neglecting “other” genocides (e.g., Darfur, Rwanda, and Cambodia), these events may not be perceived as significant (when compared to the Holocaust), and moreover, students may fail to realize that genocide has occurred multiple times since 1945 and thus no longer a threat today. Given the implications surrounding Totten’s assertion and the global nature of genocide and its reach, we aim to provide social studies teachers and teacher educators with a series of accessible suggestions for incorporating “other” genocides into their practice—suggestions that are aligned and situated within Hanvey’s seminal conceptual frame for global education.

Hello from the other side: museum educators’ perspectives on teaching the Holocaust

ABSTRACTMuseums often cite supporting teachers and schools as a goal, and museum educators frequently create resources or provide professional development for this audience, though the two entities have little contact. This qualitative study sought to examine the perspectives of museum educators at a regional Holocaust museum as they planned and presented two-week-long professional development workshops for educators. Pre-workshop and post-workshop interviews were conducted with three museum educators responsible for the workshops, which were also observed in their entirety. Findings indicate that all three museum educators believed the Holocaust to be difficult knowledge. However, each approached the topic in a different manner based on their personal experience and understanding of Holocaust education, resulting in three vastly different presentation styles. These varied presentations resulted in an uneven focus on content, with few concrete classroom connections. The article concludes by discussing implications for museum-initiated professional development and avenues for further research.

Holocaust memory and cultural trauma: Israeli adolescents’ poetry and heritage journeys to Poland

ABSTRACTThe objective of this research was to analyse poetry written by Israeli high-school students during or after visiting Poland within the framework of Holocaust education. I describe first the stages of shaping the discourse of Holocaust memory in Israel, and of Holocaust education; the Holocaust’s place in the world of young Israelis; and the journeys to Poland as reflected in research. Following that, I present the results of the research and an analysis of the findings. The paper will discuss how Israeli adolescents cope with a cultural trauma.

Review: Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, Portland, OR

Review: Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, Portland, OR

Holocaust education as a path to prepare preservice social studies teachers to be social justice educators

What lessons does Holocaust education hold for preservice teachers and how does Holocaust education aid their growth as social justice educators? In this qualitative teacher research study we attempt to answer these questions by analyzing the coursework and reflections of 16 social studies preservice teachers (PSTs) as they completed an in-depth study of the Holocaust through historical research, field trips, and reading young adult literature, and designed creative and engaging lessons to teach the Holocaust to secondary social studies students (grades 6-12). Findings reveal “blind spots” in the PSTs Holocaust-related content knowledge, pedagogy, ability to make connections between the historical event and their students’ lives, and their acceptance the role of social justice education (Bazerman & Tenbrunsel, 2011). Over the course of the study, the PSTs improved their content and pedagogical knowledge, and took their first steps towards becoming social justice educators. We also found that for PSTs, taking on the role of Holocaust educators and social justice educators takes time and practice This study broadens scholarship on many common concerns in teacher education, such as dispositions, multicultural education, and teaching for social justice. The findings inform teacher educators, teacher candidates, and practicing teachers on the connections between Holocaust and social justice education, and provide a model for teaching social studies for social justice.

Holocaust Laughter and Edgar Hilsenrath’s The Nazi and the Barber: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Laughter and Humor in Holocaust Education

This article tries to defend the position that Holocaust Education can be enriched by appreciating laughter and humor as critical and transformative forces that not only challenge dominant discourses about the Holocaust and its representational limits, but also reclaim humanity, ethics, and difference from new angles and juxtapositions. Edgar Hilsenrath’s novel The Nazi and the Barber is discussed here as an example of literature that departs from representations of Holocaust as celebration of resilience and survival, portraying a world in which lies, hatred and violence are still perpetuated. Because of its transgressive qualities, Hilsenrath’s narrative of the Holocaust as a satire with elements of black comedy can offer pedagogical openings for using laughter to interrupt normative constructions of the Holocaust as an unspeakable and sacred event that lies outside history, and thus beyond the capacities of human understanding. It is argued that laughter is an important modality for inviting deep thinking about the Holocaust, to move it from a transcendent phenomenon to an immanent event, situated clearly in the realm of human action and worthy of understanding so as to prevent it from happening again.

Six teaching orientations of Holocaust educators as reflections of teaching perspectives and meaning making processes

This study explored processes of curricular reinterpretation made by teachers who teach about the Holocaust. We conducted holistic narrative analyses of in-depth interviews with 31 American Holocaust educators. Six teaching orientations were identified: passionate historical, mythologizing-transforming, social-contemporizing, empathic-personalizing, riveting-shocking, and pragmatic-socializing. We offer vignettes for each orientation and compare them to other teaching perspective typologies, highlighting the novelty and utility of the presented typology. The findings demonstrate how narrative identity, meaning-making processes and teaching perspectives interconnect and lead teachers to reinterpret the Holocaust in their teaching. These findings have implications for teaching complex and value-laden topics.

Fostering Holocaust Education and Remembrance Culture using Geomedia

This paper deals with the integration and promotion of spatial citizenship and public-participation GIS in education – especially in geography lessons – to maintain and improve Holocaust Education. Because of the political shift towards the right in Europe during recent years, the act of maintaining and promoting Holocaust Education is more important than ever. Therefore, it is crucial for schools to educate young students in terms of what the Holocaust was, what happened, how they are connected to the topic (for example through the history of their surroundings), and, most importantly, what can be done in order to prevent such things happening again in the future. Furthermore, the Austrian Curriculum for Secondary Schools (BGBI, 2016) states that one of its highest educational goals is the direct confrontation of a student’s individual identity with the promotion of respect, tolerance and solidary. With this aim in mind, this paper deals with the ‘places of resistance in Salzburg’ project, in which students participate in the expansion of an online archive and the creation of an online tour, both of which will be available for the public. The approach builds on resistance as one part of Holocaust Education: resistance against (local) atrocities, such as the violation of values of tolerance, respect or even human rights, might be truly difficult, but it is possible – and even was so during WWII.

Holocaust Education in Lithuania: Community, Conflict, and the Making of Civil Society. By Christine Beresniova. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017, xxvii, 189 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $90.00, hard bound.

Holocaust Education in Lithuania: Community, Conflict, and the Making of Civil Society. By Christine Beresniova. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017, xxvii, 189 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $90.00, hard bound.

More than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics by Richard Menkis and Harold Troper, and: Playing for Change: The Continuing Struggle for Sport and Recreation ed. by Russel Field

Reviewed by: More than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics by Richard Menkis and Harold Troper, and: Playing for Change: The Continuing Struggle for Sport and Recreation ed. by Russel Field Robert K. Barney Menkis, Richard and Harold Troper – More than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Pp. 280. Field, Russel, ed. – Playing for Change: The Continuing Struggle for Sport and Recreation. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Pp. 466. Almost since governments started directing public tax monies toward sport matters, the question of priority has existed. Whom to select: athletes who train and compete at high levels representing municipalities, provinces, and nations, or the masses, folks like you and me, who pursue exercise options in various "other" sport and recreation programs? It is evident that the elites have won the day. In the midst of such a situation one can often spot the litter of struggle between the voices of discontent, sometimes successful, more often unsuccessful, and their opponents. More than Just Games and Playing for Change are two recent works that deal in part with the effort by various individuals and parties to address the primary debate—the "struggle" of those who feel compromised, indeed disenfranchised, versus those whom government has favoured, indeed empowered. Just when one believes that "everything possible" has appeared on Olympic history's most written-about event, the both "glorious and notorious" Olympic Games of 1936 in Berlin, there arrives More than Just Games, a book I conclude to be the most thorough scholarly treatment available in any language on the events surrounding one country's decision to participate—or not—in those historic competitions some eighty years ago. There have been many excellent (along with [End Page 186] some not quite so superb) examinations of participation at Berlin; most have been articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals or chapters in thematic anthologies; there never has been, to my knowledge, an entire monograph on one country's grappling with the dilemma of whether to "show up or not" for the Games that the Nazis shaped and Adolf Hitler endorsed and that, in the end, Canadian athletes, like their British brethren and American neighbours, dignified with their presence. Bruce Kidd, considered one of the foremost chroniclers and analysts of Canadian sport, and a staunch defender of athletes' rights, in The Struggle for Canadian Sport (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996) brushes aside in two sentences the quest to which the authors of More than Just Games devote some 200+ pages of text, plus 40 more in endnotes. Stated Kidd: "Despite considerable opposition to the 1936 Olympic Games in Nazi Germany, when the British Olympic Association decided to send a team Canadian Olympic officials simply voted to do the same. There was no further discussion" (p. 71). That was "it!" Although the issue of boycotting participation in the United States receives cursory attention from Richard Mandell in The Nazi Olympics (London: Macmillan, 1971), and in Great Britain from Duff Hart-Davis in Hitler's Games (London: Harper & Row, 1986), more penetrating are the treatments by William Murray, George Eizen, and Stephen Wenn. Murray focuses on France: "France, Coubertin and the Nazi Olympics" (Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies, I-1992). Eizen and Wenn explore U.S. boycott events, in Eizen's case: "Voices of Sanity: American Diplomatic Reports from the 1936 Berlin Olympiad" (Journal of Sport History, vol. 26, 1999; in Wenn's: "A Tale of Two Diplomats: GeorgeS. Messersmith and Charles H. Sherrill on Proposed Participation in the 1936 Olympics" (Journal of Sport History, vol. 16, 1989). Far more than Canada's, the U.S. boycott debate aroused widespread attention and opinion on whether "to go or not to go." The idea for More than Just Games, and indeed its title, evolved from the exhibits More than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics and Framing Bodies: Sport and Spectacle in Nazi Germany, both of which opened on October 15, 2009, at Vancouver's Holocaust Education Centre in British Columbia. The writing and research experts for the exhibit More than Just Games were the Jewish-Canadian writers Richard...

‘Can I borrow your glasses?’: a prescription for learning to see the cultural roots of identity terms and implicit categories through others’ lenses

Why is there so much confusion and conflict around common identity labels, a problem that extends well beyond any stereotypes that they may evoke? How do we escape the seeming paradox that we reject racism but still speak frequently of black and white? Who claims the power to determine or name others’ identities? The confusion and conflict about identity that play out on a surface level are often caused by starkly different but implicit understandings that operate beneath the surface. For example, terms like black, Jewish and Muslim may invoke several of our deeper conceptions or categories like race, culture, religion and ethnicity, and to varying degrees in different places. Critically, these categories themselves are culturally rooted. This article shows how our implicit categories can lead to both cross-cultural confusion and problematic misunderstandings in course content. Helping students to recognise and to understand the cultural roots of our implicit categories should be a deliberate learning outcome. This type of cultural understanding can be advanced significantly through guided reflection on experience and explicit instruction; in addition, some subjects and approaches – intercultural education, study abroad and Holocaust education among them – show particular promise for achieving this aim.

What can onto-epistemology reveal about Holocaust education? The case of audio-headsets at Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum

ABSTRACT This article adopts onto-epistemological framework for investigating pedagogical practices, focusing on the specific context of Holocaust education excursions to Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (ABSM) and focusing on pedagogy in and through audio-headsets. It is based on an extensive dataset collected through ethnographic-inspired observations at ABSM, and focusing particularly upon three school-based excursion groups (two Scottish, one Norwegian). Through processes of spatial ordering and intra-action, we argue that the relationships comprising ‘things’ (e.g. students, exhibitions in the Museum, knowledges about the Holocaust) can be explored as more-and-less visible.

Understanding and Teaching Holocaust Education

Understanding and Teaching Holocaust Education

DISCOURSES AND DEPICTIONS OF HOLOCAUST EDUCATION IN LITHUANIAN HISTORY TEXTBOOKS (1992-2012)

The topic of the Holocaust is a relatively new issue in Lithuanian historical education – only with the regained independence from the Soviet Union in 1990 did Lithuanians have a chance include the Holocaust theme into the main school curriculum. Of course, its development through the first two decades have not been steady and even – in the beginning of the creation of the new educational system the Holocaust did not receive so much attention as in later years with the relation to integration with the European Union (2004) and development of historical studies on the Holocaust within the Lithuanian academic community. This article aims to analyse the representation of the Holocaust in Lithuanian educational system during the first two decades after Lithuania regained its independence. So the main basis of empirical data will be all history textbooks for Lithuanian school education (from the 5th grade to the last, 12th grade) published in the period of 1992-2012, and educational programmes presented by the State`s Ministry of Education and Science. In order to objectively evaluate the Lithuanian situation regarding Holocaust education the article will discuss and compare the main trends of Holocaust education development in neighbouring countries, which also suffered from Holocaust and could not freely speak about the issue during the Communist regime.

The Process of the Universalization of Holocaust Education: Problems and Challenges

This article discusses the process of the universalization of Holocaust education and sets its conceptual and educational framework, highlighting its pedagogical challenges and hazards. It explores the phenomenon of the universalization of Holocaust education as a means to combat racism and to analyze how a particularistic educational issue has become the subject of global, universalistic concern. Through reviewing current literature, it argues that the complexity of this approach needs to be considered, particularly with the increasing violence and xenophobia in the world. Drawing on the paradigm of the Holocaust, this universal approach to anti-racist education to promote peace and harmony globally within civil society has been promoted as a way of countering prejudice. However, there are pitfalls to seeking universal lessons from a particularistic event. These challenges can be addressed to advance anti-racist education using the Holocaust as a case study and thus developing a reflective culture of remembrance.