Unusual Approaches to Teaching the Holocaust. Jan Láníček, Andy

Láníček, J., Pearce, A., Raffaele, D., Rathbone, K. & Westermann, E. “Unusual Approaches to Teaching the Holocaust”. Australian Journal of Jewish Studies XXXIII (2020): 80-117 Unusual Approaches to Teaching the Holocaust. Jan Láníček, Andy Pearce, Danielle Raffaele, Keith Rathbone & Edward Westermann Introduction (Láníček) Holocaust pedagogy keeps evolving. Educators all over the world develop new lecture materials and in-class exercises, select new resources to engage emerging generations of students with the topic, and design assessment tasks that test diverse skills, but also challenge students to re-think perhaps familiar topics. In an era when students can easily access a large volume of resources online – often of problematic quality, and when the film industry keeps producing Holocaust blockbusters in large numbers – we as educators need to be selective in our decisions about the material we use in face-to-face or virtual classrooms. Apart from technological advances in the last decades which facilitate but also complicate our efforts, we are now quickly approaching the post-witness era, the time when we will not be able to rely on those who “were there”. This major milestone carries various challenges that we need to consider when preparing our curriculum in the following years. But we have reason to be optimistic. Student interest in Holocaust courses remains high, and also the general public and governmental agencies recognize and support the need for education in the history of genocides. If we focus on Australia alone, a new Holocaust museum was just open in Adelaide, South Australia, and there are progressing plans to open Holocaust museums in Brisbane and Perth, the capitals of Queensland and Western Australia. All of these institutions have received financial support from the budget of the federal government. Soon most of the Australian states will host a permanent Holocaust exhibition. With this groundwork available, and with the support of the federal and state governments for secondary Holocaust education, the ball is in the educators’ court. There is a large amount of literature on Holocaust pedagogy now available, and the aim of this co-authored article is to further contribute to this discussion.1 It includes contributions from five Holocaust educators, who discuss what we call “unusual” approaches to teaching the Holocaust. The term “unusual” carries diverse meanings for each author. Some of them discuss particular approaches to student-centred learning, in terms of formative and summative assessments, or in-class exercises. Others discuss “unusual” resources that they use in the classroom to facilitate student learning. The further benefit of this contribution stems from the fact that the authors teach in different geographic and educational settings. They represent educators from the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. Although most of them lecture to University students, one contributor teaches at the secondary level. The aim of the article is to stimulate discussions about 80 Láníček, J. et al – Australian Journal of Jewish Studies XXXIII (2020): 80-117 various educational approaches, their benefits, but also their pitfalls. In 2020, educational systems all over the world suffered unprecedented challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is possible that this crisis will forever change the way in which we deliver information and how we engage with students. In some cases, it has hastened the move to online teaching, which had started years ago, but now even educators who had been reluctant to enter the online space have had no other option available. After receiving crash courses of several hours, they were thrown into the deep water of online teaching. The forced move to Zoom, Blackboard Collaborate Ultra or Teams unleashed energy among educators who tried to design new approaches to student learning, benefitting from the immense amount of online opportunities. Not all of the approaches discussed in this contribution have to be delivered online and they can easily be implemented in face-to-face settings as well. But hopefully these ideas – coming from highly-esteemed educators as well as junior scholars – will be of interest to our colleagues and will contribute to the development of teaching strategies globally. Using primary sources for blended learning in the Holocaust classroom (Westermann) Throughout higher education across the globe, the novel coronavirus forced a change in the widespread paradigm of face-to-face instruction. Even prior to the outbreak, some scholars had identified the need for “disruptive change” within higher education, including a call for a new era of “technology enabled” competition and innovation in which virtual delivery would supplant the in-class experience (Christensen and Eyring, 2011: 10). Concerns about classroom safety for both students and faculty have created a renewed emphasis on online course delivery, or at least efforts to create hybrid classes in which in-class time is limited to once a week with an additional on-line assignment as a supplement to the face-to-face session. Regardless, of the model chosen, hybrid or online-only, one of the key challenges involves identifying teaching methodologies and assignments that engage student learning and promote critical thinking skills. This part of the article provides techniques for incorporating primary sources, written and visual, in a hybrid or online-only environment that have proven successful in my teaching of courses on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany at Texas A&M University San-Antonio, a majority-minority university serving a traditionally underrepresented Latinx population on the city’s southside. One of the key transitions made by students from secondary school instruction to undergraduate and graduate programs involves the increased requirement for long-form reading, including textbooks, articles, and scholarly monographs (Duda, 2019). While these assignments allow for broader coverage and increased levels of analysis and argumentation, they also tend to prove more challenging for students to analyze and evaluate in an online format, absent direct dialogue and discourse with the professor and 81 Unusual Approaches to Teaching the Holocaust their fellow students. In a hybrid class, the assignment of long-form reading is therefore most effective when it occurs in conjunction with the face-to-face portion of the class. In contrast, the use of textual and visual primary sources to include official documents, diaries or memoirs, propaganda images, survivor artwork, military orders, and video recorded testimony, provides an extremely effective means for engaging student learning online. The effective use of discussion boards for the online portion of a hybrid course is especially important for ensuring student learning. Discussion boards consist of a question or questions posted by the instructor in a Learning Management System such as Blackboard, in which the student is required to evaluate a source and post a response. The expectations, structure, and content associated with student posts requires a deliberate approach. In my courses, I provide the following guidance on discussion boards in the course syllabus for my students: “Student responses should be at least one complete paragraph of no less than 150 words. The discussion grade will be based upon four factors: (1) evidence used to support your response, (2) level of analysis (3) length/completeness of the response, and (4) writing style/proofreading.” The minimum word requirement provides a means for insuring that the student provides enough detail to include a specific element of evidence (for example, brief citation, image element, etc.) from the source that is instrumental to an analysis of its historical significance. With regard to writing style and proofreading, discussion boards are treated primarily as “low stakes” versus “high stakes” writing in which the emphasis is more focused on reflection and what the students are learning from the specific sources based on their own analysis versus a strict adherence to grammar (Elbow, 2012: 291). While I do note cases in which grammar and proofreading mistakes detract from the post, the most key aspect of these assignments is that they allow students to model the fundamental skill of a historian by interpreting the source within their own cognitive framework and placing it within the broader context of the Shoah. There are two critical steps related to the posting of the student responses. First, I use the option in Blackboard that requires the student to post their response prior to being able to view the responses of their peers. This condition allows the individual student to engage with the source on their own, without being influenced by earlier posts, and it prevents the student from only reading other student posts rather than the source associated with the assignment. Second, I always reply to student’s post individually, which allows me to highlight a particularly insightful or salient point as well as to pose additional questions, to correct factual issues, or to challenge elements of the analysis. Similarly, after having answered each of the posts, I reopen the discussion board to allow students to read my responses and I highlight several student responses as “noteworthy” based on the insights or evidence provided. and encourage their peers to review these responses. The reposting 82 Láníček, J. et al – Australian Journal of Jewish Studies XXXIII (2020): 80-117 process stimulates

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