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March 28, 2003/Adar2 24 5763, Vol. 55, No. 31
Teaching educators
BETH OLSON
Staff Writer
Holocaust survivor Betty Schimmel addresses an audience of educators at the 2003 Conference on the Holocaust.
Photo by Susan Frank
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On March 3, teachers became students.
The Bureau of Jewish Education's 11th annual Conference on the Holocaust brought together more than 130 English and social studies teachers from the Valley's public and private schools to gain understanding about how to better teach about the Holocaust.
Between a talk by keynote speaker Rabbi Moshe Tutnauer and a Holocaust Memorial Concert by the Arizona Arts Chorale, there were a variety of workshops that covered topics from survivor testimony to Holocaust literature to methodology of teaching the Holocaust.
The event, hosted by Beth El Congregation, was co-sponsored by the BJE, the Phoenix Holocaust Survivors' Association, Arizona State University College of Education, Arizona Council for the Social Studies and Northern Arizona University's Martin Springer Institute for Teaching the Holocaust.
Elaine Hirsch of the BJE served as director of the conference. The conference originally started after the release of the film "Shindler's List" - when Hirsch realized a need to instruct educators how to teach about the Holocaust.
"It's very important because the Holocaust is a benchmark for teaching about genocide," Hirsch says.
Kim Klett, an English teacher at Dobson High School in Mesa, attended the conference for the fourth time. At a previous Holocaust conference, Klett heard speaker Pete Fredlake, a high school teacher who teaches a Holocaust literature class in a public school. His presentation inspired Klett to begin a Holocaust literature class at Dobson.
"The first time I heard (Fredlake) I thought it would be kind of interesting to do in high school, but I wasn't sure. I took a Holocaust lit class at ASU and (thought) it was really heavy for kids," she explains. "The more I thought about it, I realized I could really make it work."
For the past two years, Klett has been teaching three sections of the course each fall and two each spring, mostly to seniors. She was recently informed that an additional section will be added next year. The semester-long course includes history and background information and the reading of four or five books plus a textbook each semester. Students also do a research project on a topic related to the Holocaust.
"One of the things I have them do is a journal entry - a reading log - and for a week they write down stuff they hear in the halls that's prejudiced or stereotyped," explains Klett. "They are shocked sometimes at what they hear out of their friends' mouths and even out of their own."
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