Struggling to deal with the difficult past: Polish students confront the Holocaust

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between school and cultural knowledge of Second World War in contemporary Poland. Drawing on analysis of 126 student responses to well-known photographs (photo elicitation), the author addresses what it means for schoolchildren to learn about an aspect of a contested past, the Holocaust, within the frame of Second World War in Poland. This research illuminates shared cultural narratives about war. Importantly, this work unearthed dissonant responses from a subset of students who recognized a feature of the photograph that other students overlooked, and experienced the start of a schematic shift in understanding. The author builds on the tenets of schema theory and collective memory in attempting to explain how children learn about controversial events that do not fit social frameworks.

Keywords:

• history education
• difficult past
• dissonance
• Poland
• collective memory

Acknowledgements

Sam Wineburg guided this work and made my research abroad possible. I also thank the generous support of the Jim Joseph Foundation for funding this research, Christine Wotipka and my family for their edits, ideas and support. Any shortcomings remain my own.

Notes

1. The event is called Katyn in Polish parlance. The name comes from one of the sites where Polish officers were killed.

2. This finding warrants future research. I am constructing a research project to address this gender gap in dissonant responses to photographs.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Magdalena H. Gross

Magdalena H. Gross has a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University in the programme in writing and rhetoric. email: [email protected]. She received her PhD in International Comparative Education from Stanford University's Graduate School of Education. She is the author of Reclaiming the Nation: Polish Schooling in Exile During the Second World War, which appeared in History of Education Quarterly in 2013. Her work has also appeared in International Perspectives on Education and Society, European Education, Tablet Magazine and other publications. She focuses on how students come to understand war and ethnic cleansing.