What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Preface
101
Preface
The following three chapters focus on students’
historical knowledge and understanding of the
Holocaust. Chapter 5 looks at students’ knowledge
and understanding of the different victim groups
targeted by the Nazis and their collaborators
while Chapter 6 focuses on the perpetrators and
addresses issues of agency and responsibility.
Chapter 7 reports students’ understanding of when
and where the Holocaust took place and the role
that Britain played during the Holocaust.
Each chapter illustrates and analyses how
students responded to a series of knowledge-based
survey questions focused on key historical facts and
issues. In addition, as a result of a comprehensive
study of focus-group interviews, the chapters offer
rich insights into what historical knowledge and the
understandings students employ to make sense
of the Holocaust. But before moving on to these
detailed analyses, it is important to briefly emphasise
five issues that are relevant across each of these
history-focused chapters.
1. Analysing what students know
Identifying and exploring what young people know
about the past and how they use this knowledge
to frame, interpret and make meaning of historical
events is not a straightforward matter. Fortunately,
a rich body of scholarship focused on students’
historical thinking has emerged over the past four
decades which offers compelling insights into the
complex ways students encounter, acquire and ‘use’
their historical knowledge (Barton 1996; Booth 1993;
Carretero and Voss 1994; Dickinson and Lee 1984;
Harnett 1993; Husbands and Pendry 2000; Lee and
Ashby 2000; Lee 2005; McKeown and Beck 1994;
Seixas 1993b; Shemilt 2009; Vansledright 2004;
Wineburg 1991a, 2001).
In numerous ways this literature has greatly
informed the framework and development of the
next three chapters. In particular, this research
recognises the important relationship between,
on the one hand, students’ substantive knowledge
of the past and, on the other, their conceptual
or second-order understanding. In simple terms,
substantive knowledge refers to the concepts used
to organise and frame any understanding of the past
(such as concepts like authority, power, revolution,
dictatorship). At its most fundamental level,
substantive knowledge can also include knowledge
of key facts, dates, individuals and events.
Second-order, or conceptual, understanding of
the past refers to the application and appreciation of
a number of key historical concepts, all of which have
received attention in important scholarship. They
include such concepts as causation, chronology,
continuity and change, historical interpretation,
significance and empathy (Ashby 2004, 2005; Ashby
and Lee 1987; Barton 1997, 2001, 2002; Barton and
Levstik 1996, 1998; Cercadillo 2001; Dulberg 2002;
Foster and Yeager 1999; Foster et al. 1999; Halldén
1998; Hoge and Foster 2002; Lee et al. 2001; Levstik
2000; Levstik and Barton 1996; Seixas 1994, 1997;
Shemilt 1987; Voss et al. 1998; Vansledright and
Afflerbach 2005; Wineburg 1991b).
What is absolutely critical in relation to these
three chapters and the research that underpins it,
is the relationship between what history students
‘know’ and the sense they make of that knowledge.
For example, it is perfectly possible for young people
to know a raft of key facts about the Holocaust, but
to have no sense of what caused it, how events unfolded
over time or what its significance was. Equally,
it is possible for students to have a reasonable sense
of the long-term causes of the Holocaust, but little
substantive knowledge of key events, individuals and
actions between 1939 and 1945 or, indeed, how
the Holocaust catastrophically impacted on the lives
of ordinary people across Europe. As a result, it is
widely acknowledged that students who are able
to employ both key substantive knowledge and
conceptual understandings are better equipped to
fully appreciate and understand the past (Foster and
Yeager 1999; Lee and Ashby 2000; Seixas 2004;
Shemilt 2009; VanSeldright 2004; Wineburg 2001).
In analysing and exploring students’ knowledge and
understanding of the Holocaust, therefore, serious
attention was paid during our research to considering
the ways in which students implicitly drew on
these relationships to make sense of the past.
It is also important to acknowledge that historical
understanding is acquired and developed in
relation to a galaxy of other factors and influences.
For example, as outlined in Chapter 3, historical
knowledge is rarely fixed and inert. Rather, it is
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