What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Collective conceptions of the Holocaust
2006, emphasis added).Mounting empirical evidence
from a variety of different curriculum contexts
suggests that students are likely to approach any
‘new’ area of study replete with ‘if not knowledge,
then ideas, beliefs, attitudes and images in their
mind’ (Pendry et al. 1997: 20; see also Donovan
and Bransford 2005). Some of these attitudes,
beliefs or ideas may be directly at odds with the
information and understanding that a teacher hopes
to communicate. But as Torney-Purta (1991: 194)
surmises, without an adequate engagement with
students’ starting points, ‘the presentation of “correct
facts” alone’ is unlikely to be very effective
in ‘dislodging’ these.
With that in mind, this chapter begins its analysis
and reporting as a teacher might, by examining
students’ awareness of the Holocaust in the broadest
terms. In doing so, it offers a distinctive perspective
from the chapters that follow and presents its data
through a somewhat wider-angle lens. At this stage
the concern is not so much with the precise factual
content that individual students were able or not to
demonstrate, but rather with overarching patterns
and shared frameworks for understanding. It is these
patterns and framings that are characterised as
students’ collective conceptions of the Holocaust.
Most related literature, at least within the field
of history education, employs a vocabulary of
‘preconceptions’ and/or ‘misconception’, and
focuses on the individual as its primary point of
reference (see, for example, Epstein 2012; Gray
2011; Conway 2006; Husbands and Pendry 2000;
Pendry et al. 1997). There are three important
distinctions in the approach outlined here:
1. Our research draws on responses offered by
students from across all seven years of secondary
education, the majority of whom had already
encountered the Holocaust on at least one
occasion within school. As a consequence, it
would be both misleading and unhelpful to claim
access to a ‘starting point’ in students’ thinking,
to a point that is prior to a specific educational
intervention, as the term ‘preconception’ implies.
2. The term ‘misconception’ specifically denotes
inaccuracies or limitations in student thinking.
While relationships between students’ ideas about
the Holocaust and the existing historical record will
be critically examined in later chapters, this is not
the primary focus of analysis here.
3. Rather than focusing on individuals, this chapter
is centrally concerned with shared forms of
consciousness and with overarching patterns.
For these reasons a theoretical framing that
emphasises social rather than individualised
cognition has been applied.
The notion of ‘schema’ or ‘schemata’, as an
organising structure for thoughts, plays a central role
in the analysis that follows, for it is not just individual
beliefs and ideas that are important but the manner
in which a collection of thoughts become interrelated
and arranged. As Wertsch (2002: 7) describes:
the past several decades of research in the
psychology of memory… [have] shown time and
again memory is more a matter of organising, or
reconstructing, bits of information into a general
scheme than it is a matter of accurate recall of the
isolated bits themselves.
This in turn can have a profound impact on our
understanding of students’ learning or, at the very
least, of their information recall.
In much recent educational theory, the term
‘schema’ is used as though it denotes something
akin to a storage facility that freezes and fixes
information inside an individual’s head. However,
Frederic Bartlett, the English psychologist who
first developed the concept, thought of memory in
‘embodied, dynamic, temporal, holistic, and social’
terms (Wagoner 2013: 553, emphasis added).
Bartlett (1932) did not believe that ‘remembering’
happened exclusively – nor even primarily – ‘in the
head’ but rather through people’s ongoing interaction
with each other and their worlds.
It is this socially situated understanding of memory
and cognition that we want to attend to here. For, as
Chapter 1 has already argued, ‘the Holocaust’ is not
only an object of historical enquiry: in recent years
it has also been constructed and communicated as
a sociocultural phenomenon and powerful symbolic
resource (see Alexander 2003; Cole 1999; Novick
1999). Indeed, ‘all knowledge of the past is social
knowledge’ (Uzell and Blud 1993: 131) and is
therefore both informed by, and in turn reflects,
many of the perspectives and priorities shared by
wider society.
A related theoretical framework is provided by
the Romanian social psychologist Serge Moscovici
(1981, 1984) who employed the term ‘social
representations’ to describe ‘collective systems of
meaning’ (Duveen and Lloyd 1993); ‘knowledge
and information which people share in the form of
common-sense theories about the social world’
(Augoustinos and Innes 1990: 215). While the two
terms, ‘schemata’ and ‘social representations’ are
far from interchangeable, there are a number of
important points of intersection between Bartlett
and Moscovici’s perspectives which are relevant
to discussion here.
In different ways both Bartlett and Moscovici
characterise memory as an ‘effort after meaning’
(Wagoner 2011: 106). From this perspective,
knowledge-acquisition is never a passive process: