University of Cincinnati

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI Date:___________________ I, _________________________________________________________, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in: It is entitled: This work and its defense approved by: Chair: _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ Framing the Holocaust in English Class: Secondary Teachers and Students Reading Holocaust Literature A dissertation submitted to the Division of Research and Advanced Studies University of Cincinnati In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTORATE OF EDUCATION (Ed.D.) Division of Teacher Education College of Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services 2005 Karen Spector M.Ed., University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 1988 B.A. University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 1986 Dr. Chester Laine (Co-Chair) Dr. Keith Barton (Co-Chair) Dr. Annette Hemmings Dr. Robert Burroughs Dr. Deborah Hicks Abstract In this qualitative research study of three secondary school Holocaust literature units in the Midwest, I examined responses from 3 teachers and 126 students as they constructed the Holocaust in English class. The participants at the first site, Adams 2003, were part of a middle class suburban community and were within a school with 98% Whites. I returned to this site in 2004 to co-teach the Holocaust literature unit with the teacher with a critical literacy focus. Over the two years, 91 8th grade students and 1 teacher participated in the study at Adams. The second site, River Hill 2004, was in a high poverty urban center with 98% Blacks. The total number of participants at River Hill was 35 10th graders and 2 teachers. I spent 369 observational hours within the three schools, and I tape recorded class sessions, small group discussions, and interviews with teachers and students. I also collected all written or drawn artifacts that the students produced. I began analyzing data by looking for the narrative frames (Ricoeur, 1984, 1988) participants used to interpret the Holocaust. Within these frames, I used critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995; Gee, 1997; Rogers, 2004) to further analyze the data. I found that teachers and 79 of 126 students at both schools used religious narrative frames to interpret Night (Wiesel, 1982), sometimes with lethal implications for Jews. I also found that students at Adams in 2003 and 2004 used narratives of hope to interpret the The Diary of Anne Frank (Goodrich & Hackett, 1994). In order to maintain their hopeful narratives, students eviscerated Anne from her treacherous surroundings and even stashed her death in what Morris (2001) referred to as “memory holes.” Students in all three units also enfigured Hitler as the sole, and demonic, perpetrator of the Holocaust, enfigured Jews as sheep being led to the slaughter, and claimed to learn 368 different lessons. As for the teachers, they each wanted their students to learn lessons of tolerance through their study of the Holocaust, and none of the three teachers taught students the history of antisemitism before the 20th century. All RIGHTS RESERVED BY KAREN SPECTOR Copyright, 2005 Acknowledgments Without my husband, Jerry, I never would have pursued this degree. Thank you for your loving support and for being willing to sleep with all the lights on as I wrote. My three sons Zach, Sam, and Caleb threw their backpacks off—in the entryway—and bounded up the stairs to my room every day after school to ask me, “Are you almost done with your dissertation?” The day I told them I had written my last chapter they jumped around for a minute, and then asked me for a snack—a little anticlimactic after all. All four of you make my life happy. I love you. The members of my dissertation committee have supported my work for the last three years. I thank you not only for your support as committee members but for influencing me throughout my doctoral program. Annette, thank you for leading me on an exploration of social identity; Bob, for your year-long course that brought our cohort together to share research; Deborah, for a whole vista of new ideas, for critiques, and for support—always profoundly helpful and kind. I would like to give special thanks to my Co-Chairs, Chet Laine and Keith Barton. Chet, you are the kindest person I ever met and a man of great integrity. In addition to your tireless work with me throughout my time at the University of Cincinnati, you mentored me, supervised me, and strongly advocated for me within the department. I am fortunate to have worked so closely with you. Thank you. Keith, there is no one who has spent more time critiquing my work than you have. Your guidance and feedback always moved me in profitable directions that I hadn’t yet considered. I marvel at your ability to do this through my various versions and revisions. I am extremely grateful to you for your accessibility and incisive advice. One day soon you will stop getting emails with the reference line “Quick Question.” I hope! Thank you. I would like to thank the Division for Research and Advanced Studies for giving me the Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship for 2004-2005, which afforded me the luxury of one unencumbered year in which to finish and write up my dissertation research. And special thanks to Keith Barton and Richard Kretschmer who helped me in the process of applying for the fellowship. I have had the support of many friends, some helped with my children, baked me brownies, or let me talk to them about my research. Many thanks to all of you but especially to Alissa Ashworth, Mary Dwyer, Charlotte Schaengold, and Rachel Wolf. To colleagues N.F. Louise, Stephanie Jones, and Lane Clarke—I am thankful for all the chapter drafts you read of this dissertation and my earlier writing, your friendship, crazy train rides in San Diego, Sad Words, and “I get to…”. You made this whole adventure more worthwhile. Without my fabulous teacher and student participants none of this would have been possible. You fearlessly let me into your rooms and into your thoughts. There is no thanks big enough for that great generosity. I also want to thank Holocaust survivors Si F., Roma K., Annie Y., Matt Y., and Esther L. who shared their stories with me and whose own narrative frames pushed them to construct new and vibrant lives in the U.S. 1 Table of Contents Chapter 1 Introduction: One May Think about the Unthinkable………………….2 Chapter 2: Research Review……………………………………………………..…..22 Chapter 3: Methods………………………………………………………………..…50 Chapter 4: Adams Context, Teachers, and Narrative Frames…………………….67 Chapter 5: River Hill Context, Teachers, and Narrative Frames………..….…...106 Chapter 6: God on the Gallows: Students’ Religious Responses to Night………150 Chapter 7: Anne Could Frolic at Bergen-Belsen: Excising Frames of Horror, Incising Frames of Hope........................................................................187 Chapter 8: Elements of Narrative Framing: Enfiguring Hitler, Asking Questions, Learning Lessons……….………………………………………….…...220 Chapter 9: Narratively Framing the Holocaust in English Class………………..254 References……………………………………………………….………………..…280 Appendices..................................................................................................................304 2 Chapter 1 One May Think about the Unthinkable Not only may one think about the unthinkable, but perhaps even more important, one may think about how people think about the unthinkable. ~Gottlieb (1990, p. 349) Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with: they hold above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts. Language…is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve. ~Wordsworth, Essays Upon Epitaphs (1974, pp. 84-85) It is curious how little effort has gone into discovering how humans come to construct the social world and the things that transpire therein. ~Bruner, The Narrative Construction of Reality (1991, p. 4) 3 Anneliese Leopold Yosafat was only five when she and her parents went into hiding in Germany in 1942. In a second floor apartment where one of her rescuers lived, Anneliese had to sit quietly on the bed, day and night, for six weeks. She actually remembers this hiding place as happy because she spent all day with her parents, and her mother read to her for hours at a time. One day, the world her parents had created for her was torn apart. The family heard the loud rapping of rifle butts on the door in a bottom apartment. Anneliese saw the terror in her parents’ eyes. Without a word, her mother scooped her up, and they all hid under the bed, completely silent and still. Soon the door to their rescuers’ apartment flew open. Next, the door to their room was shoved open. Anneliese saw one black leather boot of the Nazi who paused briefly in front of her line of vision as he walked heavily from one end of the room to the next. That is all she could see from beneath the bed. Anneliese told me this story when I interviewed her for a Yom ha Shoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) exhibit in 2002.1 I began to think of this small part of Anneliese’s story as a good metaphor for secondary students studying the Shoah in public schools. Because of the inherent difficulties of historical and literary representation (Ezrahi, 1992; Rosenfeld & Greenberg, 1978; White, 1981; White, 1992), added to teacher and student perspectives derived from cultural and social discourses

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