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ABSTRACT
Educational visits to historical sites related to the Holocaust face significant constraints: Groups have limited time to see the site; guides are meeting students for the first time; they do not know them or what preparation (if any) students have had. Teachers and students expect guides to share their expertise, show them the most important parts of the site, and relate the historical narrative. Guides, similarly, often feel a tremendous responsibility to share their knowledge and impart meaning, perhaps even more so in the case of the Holocaust. All of these factors can lead to highly guide-centered tours and very passive participants. We, the authors, argue that this approach disempowers the learner and may miss opportunities for deeper engagement. Therefore, we propose a more participant-centered approach based on social constructivist pedagogy that encourages deep conversations about ethical issues and in which students are more actively involved in their own meaning-making.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Foster et al., What Students Know and Understand about the Holocaust?, 38. Much has been written about the function of collective memory and socialization in shaping perception and narration of history. For early debates see for example Friedlander, ed. Probing the Limits of Representation. On memory, see for example Wagoner, “Bartlett's concept of schema in reconstruction.”
2 The practice of Holocaust education is very young, and according to Andy Pearce, cannot yet be called a field. It is rather “ … a collection of practices, principles adorned with the garbs associated with a field, but bound together by belief, conviction, and resolution rather than being housed within clear conceptual or empirical frameworks,” see: Pearce, “Challenges, issues and controversies,” 7. Eckmann and Stevick found that “there is much more consensus about the importance of addressing the Holocaust than about ‘why, what and how to teach’ it, and about how to know if those goals have been achieved,” see: Eckmann and Stevick, “General Introduction,” 30.
3 The rationale of the memorial sites created after 1945 was educational, but it took several decades until professional reflection and planning of educational programs began. Large institutions such as Yad Vashem (e.g. Age-Appropriate Holocaust Education), Ghetto Fighters House (e.g. Humanistic Education) and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (e.g. Bringing the Lessons Home) developed highly innovative concepts in the 1990s. In Germany with its vast landscape of memorial sites important platforms were created to generate exchange among professionals and practitioners on the challenges of dealing with the Nazi past, such as the Gedenkstättenrundbrief and annual seminars for memorial staff (Bundesweites Gedenkstättenseminar) and novel concepts developed such as Verunsichernde Orte. Important principles were established, such as the centrality of the survivor testimonies, and the value of personal stories. These are merely examples, all of which informed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's recommendations (IHRA, “Recommendations for teaching and learning about the Holocaust”). However, the IHRA guidelines do not fully resolve important challenges that educators face with issues such as establishing relevance or confronting misconceptions and distortions.
4 Salmons, “Beyond ‘Moral Lessons.’” See also: Salmons, “Universal meaning or historical understanding?”
5 Ibid.
6 Vygotsky, Mind in Society.
7 On the pedagogy of meaning-making, see: Salmons, “Pedagogic Approaches to Holocaust Education”; for a discussion of meaning-making as a practice see: Popa, “Operationalizing Historical Consciousness.”
8 Vygotsky, ibid.
9 Following Frederic Bartlett's understanding of the social psychology of remembering, see Wagoner, “Frederic Bartlett,” and Wertsch, “The Narrative Organization of Collective Memory,” 121: “Bartlett himself argued that memory of individuals is fundamentally influenced by the social context in which they function. Indeed, a central point of his argument is that ‘social organisation gives a persistent framework into which all detailed recall must fit, and it very powerfully influences both the manner and the matter of recall’ (1995:296). In short, he espoused a position that recognized ‘memory in the group, [but] not memory of the group’ (1995:294).”
10 Christian Angerer and Maria Ecker joined Yariv in late 2008.
11 Beyond the incoherence of the assumption that it is possible to simply stick to facts, it is the meaning that society gives to the interpretation of events at memorial sites that justifies investing resources in their maintenance; see also Lapid, “Strassler presentation.”
12 Following the narrative turn, introduced by Hayden White's Metahistory.
13 Lapid, Angerer, and Ecker, “Was hat es mit mir zu tun?”
14 Thereby following a concept of multiperspectivity, see: Grever, “Teaching the War: Reflections on Popular Uses of Difficult Heritage,” 32; Grever and Adriaansen, “Historical Consciousness: The Enigma of Different Paradigms.”
15 See, among others: Uhl, “Das ‘erste Opfer’”; Uhl, “From Victim Myth to Co-Responsibility Thesis”; Pelinka, “Von der Funktionalität von Tabus,” Utgaard, Remembering and forgetting Nazism.
16 For the relevance of inquiry questions see Riley, “Into the Key Stage 3 history garden.”
17 FRA, “Discover the past for the future.”
18 Understanding these challenges better was the purpose of the project “Developing Education at Memorial Sites,” funded by the Europe for Citizens Program of the European Union, see http://www.edums.eu, it's findings being presented in Brachmann, Lapid, and Schmutz, The Challenges of Interaction.
19 For a detailed explanation of how the methodology was initially built from the specifics of the Mauthausen memorial site and its perception in Austrian society, see Lapid, “Strassler presentation.”
20 See note 17.
21 On how such inquiries draw on past-present relationships in historical thinking, especially “historical perspective-taking” and the “ethical dimension” see: Seixas, “A Model of Historical Thinking,” 601–603.
22 See the results of the German Memo studies done by the University of Bielefeld and the EVZ foundation ever since 2018: Papendick et al., MEMO Germany.
23 See Wertsch, “Collective Memory and Narrative Templates.”
24 In this respect, see also Maria Grever's concept of “Historical Distance”: Grever, “Teaching the War,” 36–41.
25 The term joint practice development was first proposed in one of the few studies to examine the transfer of practice between individuals, small teams, schools, local authorities and other institutions. In this study, the authors defined JPD as the process of learning new ways of working through mutual engagement, opening up and sharing practices with others: Fielding et al., Factors Influencing the Transfer of Good Practice, 32.
26 Project report available on academia.edu: KZ-Gedenkstätte Flossenbürg, and Max Mannheimer Studienzentrum Dachau, eds., Geschichte im Dialog.
27 See project website: https://www.ushmm.org/de/einige-waren-nachbarn-taeterschaft-mitlaeufertum-und-widerstand and an article published in the German Gedenkstättenrundbrief: Fishman et al., “Working with the Exhibition Some Were Neighbors.”
28 Isić, Claims Conference Participatory-Learning Symposium 2021–2023: Consulting Report, 2.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Wolfgang Schmutz
Wolfgang Schmutz is an education consultant and lecturer. He started his career in Holocaust education as a guide at Hartheim Castle, and later served as a co-head of education at the Mauthausen Memorial in Austria. He led joint practice development projects at Flossenbürg Memorial, Max-Mannheimer Study Center Dachau, and Hartheim Castle. Together with Karin Schneider, he ran the EU-sponsored project MemAct. He is working as an educational consultant for the USHMM traveling exhibition Some Were Neighbors in Germany. Teaming up with Paul Salmons, he offers symposia on participant-centered learning for organizations funded by the Claims Conference. He is adjunct professor of history for the University of Redlands’ Salzburg program.
Yariv Lapid
Yariv Lapid studied History in Jerusalem and Hamburg. He worked at Israeli NGOs, at Yad Vashem and at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. He was the establishing director of education at the Mauthausen Memorial in Austria, and director of the Center for Humanistic Education at Ghetto Fighters House Museum in Israel. Currently, after serving as director of Levine Institute for Holocaust Education, he leads the conceptualization of a new research center on Holocaust Education at USHMM.
Paul Salmons
Paul Salmons is Director of the exhibition and education company, Paul Salmons Associates He is Chief Curator of the traveling exhibition, Seeing Auschwitz (produced by Musealia for UNESCO and the United Nations), and co-curator of Musealia's international award-winning exhibit, Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away. He helped create the United Kingdom's national Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum; co-founded the Centre for Holocaust Education at University College London; and for 20 years played a leading role in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. He is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's first Leslie and Susan Gonda (Goldschmied) Fellow.