by Kori Street

Recognition for IWitness:

Accreditation from the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) aligns IWitness with National Education Technology Standards. Teachers, a site that reviews educational websites, recommended IWitness. The American Association of School Librarians recognized IWitness as one of the leading sites for teaching and learning.

In the wake of recent recognition of USC Shoah Foundation’s educational website IWitness, a colleague pointed out to me that none of the organizations had recognized our work in teaching the Holocaust, and wondered if I was concerned. These welcome achievements highlighted the work that the Institute’s education team is doing in terms of digital, media, and information literacy, and, of course, providing compelling content, but did not speak to the specific expertise in teaching about the Holocaust. My answer to my colleague was that although I was not concerned, I did respect the impetus that had prompted the question. While our educational focus is on the effective and appropriate use of testimony in the digital classroom, we are working with the testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust. That places us in the field of Holocaust education. At the same time, the nature of audio-visual testimony requires that our online education programs address the 21st-century skills students need to learn. Working with testimony effectively in the classroom requires that we live at the intersection of critical literacies and the historical content we provide. It also requires that we occupy that space with integrity and great care.

Working with testimony effectively in the classroom requires that we live at the intersection of critical literacies and the historical content we provide. It also requires that we occupy that space with integrity and great care.

There is debate—and perhaps no small amount of anxiety—about the nature of Holocaust education and remembrance in schools. The Holocaust education community, of which we are a part, is faced with the loss of the living memory of the witnesses, who have contributed so fully to the classroom experience, and the attendant questions about how to best address that loss. At the same time, teachers around the world are faced with competing and increasing demands on their time and focus. In her article in the upcoming edition of PastForward Spring 2013, Kay Andrews refers to a study published by the Holocaust Education Centre at the Institute of Education, University of London, which suggested that even with all of our efforts, almost 75 percent of teachers and students learn what they know about the Holocaust from cultural sources—feature films, novels. Teachers indicated that they did not feel they had the specific knowledge, nor did they have the time to address the topic well enough or know how to assess the wide variety of resources available to them.

Two broad approaches frame methods in Holocaust education. The first, studying the Holocaust as unique history, treats the Holocaust as an historical subject, and is understood for its uniqueness as a historical moment in its historical context. The other focuses on studying the Holocaust, and other genocides, as universal explorations of human behavior.

Alvin Rosenfeld makes a case for continuing the “unique” treatment of the Holocaust when he says, “The historical character of the crimes that we have come to call the Holocaust is open to alteration under the pressures of a broad range of cultural forces, including political expediency, commercial gain, and popular tastes and preferences.”

He is concerned that despite great fascination for the crimes of the Holocaust, they are subject to unconscious denial. Rosenfeld’s thesis is that our prime obligation is to remember—a remembrance carefully enumerated and understood with historical integrity. Understanding the Holocaust as a historical event—not for shedding light on the present—is key to properly remembering it, and to do otherwise leads to what he identifies as diminishment or unconscious denial.

But educationalists have conducted a wide range of research that supports the positive contribution of Holocaust education to developing students’ understanding of aspects of citizenship in honing their awareness of human rights issues and genocides, the concepts of stereotyping, scapegoating, and general political literacy, such as the exercise of power in local, national, and global contexts. Scholars in this field would say that building specific historical knowledge is part of a process in which students then go on to make cognitive links to the challenges and implications the events present. The importance of knowledge cannot be underestimated but as one side of responsible citizenship. Developing critical thought, respectful attitudes, and thoughtful actions is an outcome of that acquired knowledge.

Driven by the testimonies’ visual nature, the Institute’s work reflects an acknowledgment of both of these perspectives. In order to work with audio-visual testimony effectively and ethically, it is imperative that one understands the content’s historical context and specific detail. What that means in terms of the current collection is that users must understand the historical context of the Holocaust and the 20th century. As the archive grows and includes testimony from other genocides, those historical moments will require their own, unique historical understanding. At the same time, students and teachers who engage with the many sources of media in their daily lives will construct their understanding based on their existing beliefs, worldview, and knowledge structures. They will draw conclusions based on what they view and what they deem is relevant to them. Our research has indicated that when students watch testimony, there is a strong link between knowledge and empathy, critical thinking, and responsible civic engagement, between respect and inspiration. They immediately connect with and hear relevance in the voices to which they are listening.

Today’s students are mobile and connected—to one another and to their technology. Whether for social, recreational, or educational purposes, they are deeply engaged with visual and digital media. Even those who do not have regular access to digital media need the skills and resources to stay competitive. To reach them where they are and to have meaning in their world, we develop teaching and learning applications that capitalize on their mobility, creativity, and connectedness. Today’s 21st-century students must be literate in digital, visual, and media literacies. These are new layers, which build upon and are just as important to students today as are traditional subjects such as reading, writing, and numerical literacy. It is not enough to teach them to search; students must know how to understand the value of what they find, whether in digital, visual, or textual form. They also need to understand the meaning of what they have found in the context of the world around them, and then have the ability to act based on that comprehension.

Educators are looking for ways to engage students at this intersection of literacies and skills in ways that are relevant, sustained, and transformative. In many ways, it is this search that provides an audience for sites such as PowerMyLearning. It is in the present that we make sense of the past. Engaging the testimonies within the context of the present means living at the intersection of multiple literacies, historical specificity, personal empathy, and our wired, complex world. If we can live and learn in that intersection, we will have the ability to bind our communities together. Young people do respond in a very personal way to the compelling stories among the voices in the Visual History Archive. As they listen to those voices—one at a time—they are connected to the past, engaged in their present, and as a result, contribute to making a better future for all of us.

For further reading:

P. Cowan and H. Maitles (Eds) Teaching Controversial Issues in the Classroom: Key Issues and Debates Continuum. Kahn, M. (2010)

Alvin H. Rosenfeld. The End of the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, (2011)

PowerMyLearning: http://www.powermylearning.com

Kori Street is the USC Shoah Foundation’s director of education. She came to the Institute in 2011 from Mount Royal University, where she was an associate professor and served as chair of entrepreneurship, nonprofit studies, international business and aviation in the Bissett School of Business. After completing a master’s in the History of Education and Gender/Feminism at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto, Dr. Street received her PhD in history from the University of Victoria in 2001. Dr. Street’s current work is focused on the preservation and educational use of Holocaust survivor testimonies.

Excerpted from the upcoming issue of PastForward Spring 2013, the USC Shoah Foundation’s biannual digest. Visit http://sfi.usc.edu/pastforward soon to view the full publication.