What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Considerations and recommendations
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3. relate to progression in students’ learning
4. help students make the most of engagement with
Holocaust survivors
5. deal with complex issues.
1. Improve students’ knowledge and
understanding
It is strikingly evident that students of all ages do not
have a secure understanding of the answers to
many of the key questions which frame a study of
the Holocaust (including: Who was responsible?
Why did they do it? Who were the victims? Why
were they murdered and persecuted? Why were
the Jews specifically targeted? How did they
respond? When and where did the Holocaust
happen? What was Britain’s role? What is the
significance of the Holocaust?). Furthermore, as
this new research has confirmed, a considerable
gap still exists between the findings of current
academic scholarship and what is often taught
in the classroom.
There is consequently a need for professional
development courses that will help teachers improve
their content knowledge and subject expertise.
Crucially, CPD course providers must find innovative
and pedagogically compelling ways to make
complex historical scholarship accessible to teachers
and students. The UCL Centre for Holocaust
Education has pioneered several CPD initiatives
to help teachers develop their content knowledge
and pedagogical expertise, and these courses
have had considerable impact on the teachers who
have participated in them. But if teachers are to be
meaningfully supported nationwide, much more
investment into programmes of this nature
are required and school leaders need to be
encouraged to make teaching and learning about
the Holocaust a curriculum priority, enabling their
teachers to attend such programmes..
2. Challenge accepted representations
of the Holocaust
As has been reported throughout this study, the
Holocaust enters students’ consciousness in myriad
ways outside the classroom, and this deeply affects
their broader conceptions of the Holocaust. There
is consequently a need for CPD programmes to
provide clear guidance to teachers on how to
challenge and critically evaluate representations and
appropriations of the Holocaust in popular culture
and the media – in art, theatre, TV, cinema, literature,
films, newspaper articles, the Internet, blogs and
social media.
A good example of the need for critical
engagement is the impact of the book and film, The
Boy in Striped Pyjamas. Rather than condemning
and just dismissing them, it is potentially important
for teachers to engage with the story as a cultural
phenomenon, to critique it, discuss and assess its
accuracy and, despite its failings, consider why it has
become so popular. In other words, more attention
needs to be paid to helping teachers mediate
and critically engage with many of the powerful
cultural forces that appear to be shaping students’
understanding of the Holocaust.
Equipping teachers with the skills and expertise
to support young people as they engage with this
traumatic history and the associated atrocity images
that are often encountered on the Internet is also
of vital importance. It entails combining what we
understand about young people and their moral and
spiritual development with intelligent, sensitive and
pedagogically appropriate ways of representing the
experiences and catastrophic losses of the victims
of the Holocaust. It also demands a recognition
that, as Chapter 4 notes, given appropriate
opportunity and support, students are able and
willing to confront complex moral, philosophical
and intellectual questions regarding issues of
‘representation’, ‘memory’ and the ‘truthfulness’
of competing accounts.
3. Relate to progression in students’ learning
This study has shown that students encounter the
Holocaust in a number of subject areas (e.g. religious
education, English, citizenship) and across a range of
age groups. It is therefore vital that teachers working
in all relevant contexts should consider how to
plan and develop their teaching to ensure that new
learning builds on students’ existing knowledge
and understanding.
This is complex but important terrain and requires
teachers to consider a more coherent approach
to teaching about the Holocaust across their
school. Meaningful CPD would, therefore, oblige
teachers to think carefully about aims, content and
assessment, and pedagogical practice. It would
also demand that subject teachers consider, from
their own disciplinary perspective, the particular and
distinctive contribution that their subject can bring to
the study of the Holocaust. Effective CPD would in
turn compel teachers to contemplate how different
subject specialisms might work together to deepen
understandings and what progress might look like
across the school at various key stages.
4. Help students make the most of
engagement with Holocaust survivors
Our research indicates that hearing testimony from
Holocaust survivors often proves a uniquely affecting
experience for young people which can facilitate
distinctive ways of ‘understanding’ and of drawing
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust