Teaching about the Holocaust as a historical event and as part of our shared human story requires a sound pedagogy for instruction. The pedagogical approaches of Echoes & Reflections are informed by a methodology identified as essential to the effective study of the Holocaust. These methods inform the design and development of all classroom content and professional development programs.
Our methodology is based on six principles:
1) Research-based approaches to teaching about the history of the Holocaust, including antisemitism: The wealth of experience brought into the partnership by Yad Vashem roots Echoes & Reflections in critical historical inquiry. Part of this involves understanding the mechanisms of antisemitism as a precursor to the Holocaust, and emphasizing not only that students learn about prewar Jewish life when studying the Holocaust, but also understanding the centuries-long history of antisemitism that allowed the Holocaust to happen.
2) Focus on the individual: A critical element in Echoes & Reflections methodology is to take a history that affected millions of people and emphasize to students that each of those people was an individual: the story of the Holocaust is not the story of six million Jews who were murdered, but the story of six million murders of individual human beings. In order to do this, we advocate using different resources, including visual history testimony and other primary source materials. Understanding the Holocaust doesn’t only mean understanding the loss of life on a massive scale; it also means appreciating that these masses were mothers, fathers, siblings, grandparents, children, and proud citizens–people just like us.
3) Students as active learners and inquiry-based learning models: In the 21st century classroom, students are active participants rather than passive sponges absorbing knowledge. Echoes & Reflections is designed to harness active learning to help students engage deeply with the content. The instructional strategies employed throughout Echoes & Reflections are rooted in active and inquiry-based learning, positioning students as investigators into the past and tasking them with interpreting the multiple perspectives involved in any complex history.
4) Multimedia primary source materials, including Visual History Testimony, as a critical source of knowledge and inquiry into the past: Replete with primary (and secondary) source materials from different disciplines, Echoes & Reflections encourages students to analyze a wide array of materials from many perspectives in historical context. Photographs, artwork, diary entries, letters, government documents, maps, poems, visual history testimony, and other source materials help students construct an authentic and comprehensive portrait of the past as they frame their own thoughts about what they are seeing or reading, resulting in a deeper level of interest and inquiry. At the same time, the historical background given in Echoes & Reflections allows students to contextualize the primary source materials and root them in the history of a certain place and time.
5) Assessment of Learning: Learning about the Holocaust is a complex task, and assessment of learning is critical to understanding the degree to which our practice has met its goal. Echoes & Reflections classroom lessons provide clear and measurable learning objectives that address national, state, and local standards, allowing teachers to adapt existing forms of assessment to their students’ study of the Holocaust. Student performance on many tasks and assignments in Echoes & Reflections can be met with traditional forms of assessment; however, other material is highly subjective and teachers will need to exercise caution in determining if a student has been successful in meeting learning objectives.
6) Modular Structure: Our content allows teachers the flexibility of using an entire unit, an individual lesson, or several lessons as they build their units of study. The methodology of Echoes and Reflections is predicated on the fact that teachers have varying needs in their classrooms, and the program provides a variety of supports for teachers teaching about the Holocaust, including online resources through the Echoes & Reflections website and IWitness.
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