“She’s going to ask me 10 million questions”:the impact of school-based Holocaust education across generations (original) (raw)
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More open to diversity?: the longer term citizenship impact of learning about the Holocaust
This is the third stage of a longitudinal study that investigates the learning of the Holocaust on pupils' citizenship values. We firstly compared primary pupils' values before and after their learning of the Holocaust; and secondly tracked these pupils into secondary to compare their attitudes with their peers who had not studied the Holocaust in primary school. It involves 200 pupils from a predominantly white rural community in the West of Scotland with very few ethnic minority pupils. The core group are now aged 15-16 years and this study continues to investigate their citizenship values using a values survey. This study is of interest to those involved in citizenship education, Holocaust education, antiracist and values education.
Previous research on teaching the Holocaust, notably case studies in the primary contribution to citizenship by developing pupils' understandings of justice, tolerance, human rights issues, and the many forms of racism and discrimination. Yet, there have been no longitudinal studies into its impact on primary pupils. before and after Holocaust teaching using data from questionnaires 1 . Results show an improvement in pupils' values and attitudes after learning about the Holocaust in almost every category related to minority groups, ethnic or the need for further investigation.
March of the Living, a Holocaust Educational Tour: Effect on Adolescent Jewish Identity
2013
March of the Living (MOTL) is a worldwide two-week trip for high school seniors to learn about the Holocaust by traveling to sites of concentration/death camps and Jewish historical sites in Poland and Israel. The mission statement of MOTL International states that participants will be able to ''bolster their Jewish identity by acquainting them with the rich Jewish heritage in prewar Eastern Europe.'' However, this claim has never been studied quantitatively. Therefore, 152 adolescents who participated in MOTL voluntarily completed an initial background questionnaire, a Jewish Identity Survey and a Global Domains Survey pre-MOTL, end-Poland and end-Israel. Results suggest that Jewish identity did not substantially increase overall or from one time period to the next.
Abstract This classroom ethnography examines the engagement of fifth-grade children in a year-long study of rights, respect, and responsibility, which culminated in a focused study of tolerance and intolerance organized around literature regarding the Holocaust. A close examination of one teacher’s approach to teaching about the Holocaust, the study highlights the importance of long-term engagements, a layered curriculum that supports children in building understandings over time, and varied opportunities for making meaning together. This approach included empathy-building, a focus on rescue and resistance and the bystander response, building a knowledge base about the Holocaust, stories of individual experiences, and opportunities to make personal connections. Drawing on samples of student talk, writing, and art, the article illustrates how children built upon academic and social practices established from the first days of school to expand their repertoire of meanings, language, and actions of (in)tolerance, gaining more complex understandings of the social, political, and moral implications of the Holocaust. Students in this bilingual class also developed individual and social actions in speaking out against social injustice in their own communities. The author argues that this classroom experience supported students as critical citizens who conscientiously and compassionately participate in the day-to-day building of more equitable communities.
Samuel Milek Batalion, having survived the Holocaust in Russia, began in 1945 working in several DP Camps in American-occupied Germany, and where he became greatly sensitive to the fate of young Jewish boys who had survived like himself. They either had been in concentration camps, with partisans in the woods or in constant flight. He realized these boys, most of whom were 15-25 years old and had come from Poland and Romania, had been largely wandering around aimlessly and without any hope or vision of their future. To make matters worse, they had no formal education or professional training. Feeling these boys' intense despair and sensing that "they were freed but not free," in 1947 Batalion created a vocational school in the middle of the free city Darmstadt. This was established in the spirit of Betar (emphasizing more of an accompanying Zionism instead of religious education). He further provided them with suitable accommodations where they would be able to begin their new life and quietly study. He used the ideology of a Kibbutz, assigning a youth leader or Madrich who would take care of their physical, but also emotional and spiritual needs. Additionally, four young women came to the school. But they chose not to study and rather provided supportive help. The end result was that this school helped transform dozens of young despondent Holocaust-surviving boys into young men with a new identify, self-respect, strength of personality and hope for the future. They were now fully inspired to emigrate to Palestine where they could be gainfully employed, raise a family and could make a contribution to a new Jewish homeland of Eretz Israel. The lecture's main focus will be on the younger students, aged 18 and under, sharing the compelling stories of their life from before and after 1945, plus how the school was a great example of post-war rehabilitation and identity building for these youngsters.
The Legacies of the Holocaust and European Identity after 1989
2010
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Who is a Survivor? Child Holocaust Survivors and the Development of a Generational Identity
In April 1983, the first American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors brought together thousands of adult survivors, child survivors, and children of survivors in the largest event of its kind ever held. This article explores the role of the Gathering in establishing a sense of generational belonging for child Holocaust survivors: encounters at the Gathering forced child survivors to confront their relationship with the concept of the "survivor", and it was only after the Gathering that the term "child survivor" entered widespread usage, and the first support groups for child survivors formed. Using oral history collected at the Gathering, in combination with interviews conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the article explores how events such as the Gathering can have a catalytic effect on the development of a generational consciousness. It argues that the construction of generational identities hinges not (or not only) on the formative events of youth, but on an active process of engaging with and narrating a sense of generational belonging that can take place much later in the life cycle. It posits that child survivors only began to see themselves as a distinct group when – in the historical moment of the 1980s – they could locate their experiences in a broader story about who constituted a survivor.
The Holocaust at School, between Remembrance and Oblivion
2020
In the context of a broader reflection on memory, the paper analyzes, some didactic experiences of teaching the Shoah in different formats in three Italian regions. . The value dimension of individual and collective memory, its ethical value, the study of its transmission methods through the generations, also in relation to the intercultural changes that have taken place in our society since the 1980s, are the main object of interest of this project. The objectives indicated by the project are analyzed in their realization and implementation. Among these, of special importance are: transforming superficial information and simple commemorative memory into meaningful learning; enabling memory to become active participation; contributing to the linkage of the emotional and cognitive dimensions.