How to teach the Holocaust

Teaming up with other subjects at university is a great way for trainee teachers to promote cross-curricular understanding and to make more friends on the course. This year’s highly successful teaching the Holocaust session teamed up with students teachers from our (Secondary) English PGCE and (Secondary) History PGCE to explore some of the challenges and opportunities teaching this topic.

Student teachers began with exploring a rationale for teaching the Holocaust, which aspects to learn about and what we want pupils to know or feel by the end. One of the things to consider when teaching about the Holocaust is how to convey the scale and also enable pupils to understand the human stories behind the statistics. Using an idea from the Holocaust Memorial Trust they looked at the use of personal effects by taking off their shoes and recognising how much a shoe says about the owner, seeing the vast numbers of shoes which survived their owners at death camps.

We also examined photographs and stories, the memorialisation of the Holocaust and misconceptions about the topic. For a subject-specific session, we were treated to a practical session run by the Martin Gilbert Learning Centre which introduces pupils to the experience of refugees from Europe when they arrived in Britain, with wider applications for the experience of refugees today.

By the end of the day trainees felt equipped to adapt Holocaust lessons to their own schools and to respond to any challenges which might happen in the classroom.

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