The opportunities you can miss for some great teaching and learning if you’re too well-prepared. I could have just done, as on the scheme of work, Cutting Edge pages 126 to 129…
Holocaust Memorial Day
Holocaust Memorial Day, today Thursday 27th January 2011, gives us the opportunity to recognise, not just this horrible event in our world’s history, but the atrocities before and since then (some that are still going on to this day). That anyone can deny this particular series of events is beyond me, not to mention how it was left unstopped for so long… But that is really food for thought on a more political blog, as I’d like to share how I got a little bit inspired today.
First of all, at a routine meeting I noticed some interesting things stuck up on the wall. They had be put there by a colleague at the college where I work: different testimonies given by people who had been affected by atrocities in different places. Everywhere, the blazon HMD. A little bit of investigation, and asking my colleague about them, an answer: Holocaust Memorial Day. Suddenly an idea for this morning’s lesson sparked in my head. A quick bit of Googling later, I had my source:
I had a quick look round at college (this was about 5pm yesterday), checked out some of the education resources on the site and then left for home.
I got home to read a really interesting and insightful post by Mark Andrews on exactly this topic (including a really rather distasteful t-shirt). The spark had become a small flame.
I now really wanted to see how I could introduce the events commemorated on HMD and the related issues in a sensitive way. To do this, I took a number of elements from the HMD Trust produced resources and tried to weave them together in a way that made sense for the language classroom. Here’s a little bit of how I went about it.
First I took this image of an empty book from the HMD campaign resources, and displayed it using an overhead projector linked to the class PC. As the students arrived, I asked them to look at the picture and think about how it made them feel. They also made comments about what it reminded them of. Some said that it made them feel empty (as empty as the book), others thought it looked like a bible. I asked what they would do with a book like this: draw in it, fill it with writing.
Next, I showed the students a map of part of the world. We checked they understood North, South, East and West. Then I asked them what they knew about 5 different places: Germany, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.
Checking their general knowledge about these places what quite easy (especially when looking at the geography of the places). We clicked into Google Maps and saw the relative sizes of these places, the borders they shared with other countries, their position in relation to the UK. By this point, they had already brought up the current situation in Darfur. However, we didn’t look too much into the issues going on there (I need to research and learn about these places and the contexts more myself, so didn’t feel comfortable talking too much about them in the class at this point). I felt I could tackle certain aspects looking at the Holocaust itself, though.
(Those in the top-right picture are waiting to be taken to Auschwitz – the biggest and most well-known of the concentration camps; the man in the bottom-left picture is a Holocaust survivor)
I had downloaded a few podcasts of eye-witness accounts of people affected during the Holocaust, of being taken in trains and wagons from the bank that the HMDT have on iTunes (just search for Holocaust Memorial Day Trust in the store, or click here for the web page), but what also interested me was an extract from the book ‘The Book Thief’ by Markus Zusak. I read this myself a couple of years ago and highly recommend it to you. It’s in the same vein as ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’, which although I haven’t read, I have seen the film version. Both works take a fable-ised approach to tackling this tricky subject and those who were affected by it.
I gave half the class (4 of 8 in total) a copy of the book extract and set them away with dictionaries; the other half I gave copies of two of the eye-witness accounts with the same dictionary brief. I then set some questions for each groups to guide their discussion. Students from each group were then paired up with each other to talk about what they had read.
I asked the students if they knew any stories about the Holocaust. We elicited the film version of ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’, which I had also seen myself; ‘Schindler’s List’ (which I haven’t seen yet); ‘Escape from Sobibor’, which I saw while studying History for GCSE; and the book ‘The Book Thief’. I flicked back to the image of the unwritten book used at the start of the lesson, while we discussed which of these stories were fact and which were fiction. I told the students the theme of HMD this year was Untold Stories and encouraged them to look at these films and books themselves.
A final piece of the jigsaw that didn’t end up fitting was the podcast of one of the eye-witness accounts, which I hadn’t properly checked, and didn’t match up to those I had printed out for the students. My plan for next week is to look at the quote by Niemoller (the last slide in the presentation below), hand out a copy of the book extract for each student and carry on the discussion on Monday.
A copy of this is also available on Google docs here (sharing and editing privileges granted).
Related links
Animation of Anne Frank, the graphic biography on YouTube (via Anne Hodgson)
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So good to react to something and to have the courage and confidence to take it into the classroom on the anniversary of such an important event which has now become international holocaust remembrance day Mike.
Great too to work so much on putting together the materials.
Have always believed that all educators have a responsibility to find ways of working through this with students, it’s just a case of finding appropriate moments in appropriate places with appropriate age groups. Would love to know the reactions of your students at the end of your work with them on this to see in which ways it has made them think deeper about these issues. It had a massive impact on me when I was confronted with a concentration camp for the first time. Great to read this and good luck with the follow-up
Thanks for the comment, Mark.
It was actually your post about using Katy Perry’s song ‘Baby, You’re a Firework’ together with other resources is the series of lessons you posted about here: http://markandrews.edublogs.org/2010/12/17/baby-youre-a-firework/, as well as the post about HMD, and my colleagues good work in putting up the resources about it, that inspired me to take this into the classroom.
I really believe that sometimes fantastic oppotunities for real discussion, thinking and learning can be missed if we just follow what we have been given to teach. Where I work we produce schemes of work as a plan for what we will be teaching. I usually do this for the next half term (about 6 weeks). They are useful, for example, whenever a teacher is a way, as they provide a guide as to what the class has done and what they are preparing for, but sometimes there needs to be more scope to react to things. Real learning comes from the everyday, but it also comes from the ‘not everyday’, so I think it is so important to include as much as we can about days like HMD in our teaching as we can.
Thanks for really making me think about my teaching.
Mike =)
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by mark andrews, Mike Harrison. Mike Harrison said: Just blogged: Looking at Holocaust Memorial Day with ESOL students http://bit.ly/gW81kT #hmd2011 #discussion #esol #elt #fb [...]
Wow. I liked how you were sparked by an idea and then “weaved” important images with a smart classroom approach to present an interesting and pertinent lesson.
Every few classes I would risk “putting myself out there a bit” and invite my students to react to thought-provoking issues. This was in China and it, more so there but really anywhere, it needs to be done intelligently, or else it can just be a contrived or awkward experience.
How did the students react? Was it the same group as your last blog post w/ the computer problems…?
Thanks for the comment, Brad.
I think that this kind of lesson is something I haven’t always done, or done well, in the past. That’s something I’d like to change, as I agree with you and Mark about tackling deeper issues from time to time, and not just the surface gloss of other lessons.
This was a different group to the one I mentioned in my previous post. They were pre-intermediate, while the group above were intermediate to upper int. I agree with what Mark said to me when I first talked about this lesson in an email: you have to find appropriate moments with appropriate groups to tackle these topics well and in a sensitive manner. Were I to cover the same topic with the pre ints I might have to find a slightly different approach.
As for the students’ reaction(s), I will be looking at HMD a little bit more on Monday. I hope to gauge what their response is then and report back here.
Best
Mike =)
Look forward to hearing how it goes.
And yes, Mark has a great point to take advantage of the appropriate moments for deeper issues. There’s nothing worse than forcing an issue when it’s just not right. Even if the intention is to raise awareness or sensitivity, it can have the opposite effect because it’s contrived, awkward and thus leaves little to no room for real dialogue.
cheers, b
Hi Brad and Mike,
Connecting what goes on inside the classroom and what is going on outside the classroom is, for me, one of the variables of what makes something appropriate. Remembering is a way we make sense of our lives, personally with birthdays and anniversaries. Beyond this there is enormous scope for choosing the things we want to remember.
Remembering the holocaust is, I think, a responsibility that all educators share. If we can find a personal entry point to this, in my case the visit to Buchenwald, but it could be reading a book or watching a film or meeting somebody, or going somewhere, then we give something of ourselves in class. This in itself can capture the interest of students and personal anecdotes can be very powerful.
Another variable is the students themselves and we need to tap into their experienes of which there may be many.
And in an ELT context we need to be aware of language levels and the culture of the classroom that we happen to be in ,which ourselves have a role in shaping.
On my blog I like to remember people and events as I did yesterday with Jackson Pollock http://markandrews.edublogs.org/2011/01/28/jackson-pollocksplattering-paint-language-and-learning-opportunities/
and then to find an interesting teacher training or classroom language learning angle to explore.
Finally, I think ELT is enormously enhanced by connecting to wider cultural contexts such as music, literature, and architecture and dealling with the holocaust is one one these. The issues related to the holocaust will always be relevant to living together peacefully and respecting each others’ cultures and if this discussion can encourage other ELT practitioners to find a place to do similar things then that’s great.
Thanks Mike and Brad for taking this up.
Hi Mike, how about making a language plant of the poem? Good sentence structure, also morphology – “ist”. You could make that by hand pretty quickly, I’m sure, then your students could try to work out the poem first. Anyway, a great lesson you’ve described here.
What a good idea. Will have a go at that now. Must find some colours.
Thanks, David.
Mike =)
Thanks for sharing more, Mark.
I like how you approach the notion of remembrance and underline its importance as inherent to our human experience.
Cheers, b
Hi again Mike, I try to attach new words to ones they already know, so for example, they might not know “union”, but they’d know Manchester United, same root, bit of chat about being a team, the plant is of “unite”, the verb, “united”, verb and adjective, and “union”, noun. maybe even “unify” and “unified”.
With “social”, there are lots too. Good luck.
Thanks for helping to make it a bit clearer. I used the ideas you mention to introduce the substitution activity of deciphering the poem. The fruit of this labour can be seen in the later post.
Mike =)
[...] HMD 2011 - This was one of those definite ‘drop the coursebook/syllabus’ moments and take a cue for the lesson material and activities from what was going on at the time. I saw a poster in the corridor about Holocaust Memorial Day and was inspired. One evening’s searching on the internet yielded this lesson, and two follow up posts, and even a collaboration with the Language Gardener, David Warr. [...]