Interdisciplinary Teaching 7/17

Hmm at the moment there is nothing that I “commonly teach”, (I have taught what I have taught uhh… once and only once). However, I do get the premise here, so here goes..

The Holocaust is one of the most important subjects that any social science teacher can teach. With all of the information that is available on the subject it’s relatively easy to find something to bring to class. Yet, that is also the challenge… with everything that is available, there is a certain responsibility to create a meaningful lesson… something that goes beyond the horrors of an event that occurred some 70 years ago. You can take the short cut telling students over the course of a single class that yes, between 1938 and 1945, Germans killed a lot of Jews because the Germans blamed the Jews for everything bad that had occurred recently in Germany. Or you could include a variety of resources and give the students the ability to reach their own conclusions about this horrific of events. Having students read a first person account of their Holocaust experience could be one way to enrich understanding of the subject.

There are a variety of books available about the holocaust. One of the most well known is “Night” an autobiographical account by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.

One possible way to teach the holocaust might be to read night over the period of a 5-7 days, while covering some of the historical record (dates, events, locations), while analyzing Wiesel’s book. Students could take a small passage, something like,

            “Crammed into the cattle cars by the Hungarian police, they cried silently. Standing on the station platform, we too were crying. The train disappeared over the horizon; all that was left was thick dirty smoke

            Behind me, someone said, sighing, ‘What do you expect? That’s war…’

            The deportees were quickly forgotten. A few days after they left, it was rumored that they were in Galicia, working, and even that they were content with their fate” (page 6)

 In the interest of space I’ll stop here. I would continue with this single page, asking students, possibly to do a Quick Write on how they interpret the scene that Wiesel describes on the page.

“Night” is available online as an ebook. It is available for sale at http://books.google.com/books?id=ELbHiPmYSM4C&dq=isbn:9780553272536. It is possible to scan the first few pages, if you wish to find the source quoted above.

Another resource for students is art. There is an abundance of art, from German propaganda materials (films, posters, etc.) to drawings and sketches by concentration camp prisoners, that is available to teachers and anyone interested in the Holocaust. The University of South Florida provides a great deal of this type of visual experience for students, (http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/arts/artVicti.htm).

Depending on which type of art that you wish to use you can have students reflect on how Germans treated Jews in the months and years preceding the Holocaust. You can have students describe what they see in camp art, having them respond to a prompt in an essay or presentation.

On a further note, (I used this tool in teaching a lesson and therefore didn’t feel that it would be an appropriate source), our very own Joan Peterson has a wonderful collection of posters that makes any classroom lesson feel like a walk in a Holocaust museum. Joan has a collect of some 40+ posters that she obtained from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Through these posters students see visual images up close and in graphic detail, in a way that is quite different from seeing one or two images in a text book, or having a few images projected onto a screen.

While the Holocaust is an important topic, teaching it must be done with care. Students can be insensitive to the ethnic and religious differences of cultures that they are not familiar with. The over all maturity level of the classroom must be taken into consideration when working with such emotion prompting images. I would suggest that a fair amount of warning (even consider sending out a permission slip or at least a notification that you will be teaching a subject with very sensitive materials). However, by using some of the many, many resources that are available to teachers on this subject, an educator can help to broaden a students understanding of both the Holocaust and its causes.

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