Teaching, Learning, and the Holocaust

Ronald Weisberger, Howard Tinberg

Description

Lessons learned from teaching about the Holocaust

Classroom study of the Holocaust evokes strong emotions in teachers and students. Teaching, Learning, and the Holocaust assesses challenges and approaches to teaching about the Holocaust through history and literature. Howard Tinberg and Ronald Weisberger apply methods and insights of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning to examine issues in interdisciplinary teaching, with a focus on the community college setting. They discuss student learning and teacher effectiveness and offer guidance for teaching courses on the Holocaust, with relevance for other contexts involving trauma and atrocity.

Introduction
1. Contexts
2. Discipline
3. What We Knew and When We Knew It
4. Bystanders and Agents
5. Witnesses
6. Trauma
7. Reclaiming Faith
Appendix A: Course Syllabus
Appendix B: Reading Journal Template
Appendix C: Critical Research Project
Appendix D: Midterm and Final Exams

Sujets

• 20th Century
• Modern
• Holocaust
• HISTORY
• EDUCATION
• Histoire
• The Holocaust
• Higher
• Modern history
• Level
• School
• Higher education
• Research
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Holocauste

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253011466
• Langue: English

Extrait

TEACHING, LEARNING, AND THE HOLOCAUST
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Jennifer Meta Robinson
Whitney M. Schlegel
Mary Taylor Huber
Pat Hutchings
editors
TEACHING, LEARNING, AND THE HOLOCAUST
AN INTEGRATIVE APPROACH
HOWARD TINBERG RONALD WEISBERGER
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796
Fax orders 812-855-7931
2014 by Howard Tinberg and Ronald Weisberger
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tinberg, Howard B., [date]
Teaching, learning, and the Holocaust: an integrative approach / Howard Tinberg and Ronald Weisberger.
pages cm. - (Scholarship of teaching and learning)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01132-9 (cl: alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01133-6 (pb: alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01146-6 (eb) 1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)-Study and teaching. I. Weisberger, Ronald. II. Title.
D804.33.T56 2013
940.53 18071-dc23
2013022244
1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15 14
For my mother and father, who began from the ashes-and for the grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins whom I never knew HT
For those relatives left in the old world and those who survived in the new to carry on the memory of our ancient tradition RW
We speak in their stead, by proxy. Primo Levi, Shame
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Contexts
2 Discipline
3 What We Knew and When We Knew It
4 Bystanders and Agents
5 Witnesses
6 Trauma
7 Reclaiming Faith
Appendix A: Course Syllabus
Appendix B: Reading Journal Template
Appendix C: Critical Research Project
Appendix D: Midterm and Final Exams
Works Cited
Index
PREFACE
Ever since the publication of Ernest Boyer s College: The Undergraduate Experience, and particularly Scholarship Reconsidered, the idea that research on teaching and learning could be a legitimate form of scholarship has been debated in the academy. The scholarship of teaching and learning, often referred to as SoTL, looks to the classroom as a rich source of knowledge. Sadly, SoTL has not always been given the same prestige or recognition as other forms of research. It was the goal of Scholarship Reconsidered to move beyond the teaching versus research debate and give scholarship a broader, more efficacious meaning (Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff ix). Although strides have been made in recognizing SoTL, it still often lacks the backing of committees on tenure and promotion, particularly in baccalaureate and traditional research institutions.
Those of us teaching at community colleges face additional hurdles. In these institutions teaching is supposed to be the main function of the faculty. However, one of the main obstacles to SoTL at two-year schools is a bias against research, even if that research includes teaching as its subject. In fact, spending precious time reflecting on one s teaching in an organized and disciplined way and sharing such knowledge through conferences and publications are often seen as luxuries. The majority of instructors in such schools do not see themselves as researchers nor are they viewed as such by administrators. We believe that teaching separated from reflective practice and collegial exchange runs the risk of stultification and that community college faculty who are afforded little time, few resources, and only nominal recognition to engage in scholarly reflection will see their own professional identities as knowledge makers diminished-in essence, they are becoming mere delivery systems. In this age of proliferating online instruction (including freely dispensed fare such as massive open online courses), such a threat is no longer merely an abstraction.
The situation at public community colleges has worsened as state and federal budget cuts have decreased the number of full-time instructors, thus increasing the burden of full-time faculty in the form of increased committee work and other administrative functions. Faculty at many community colleges are now teaching five or more courses, making it even more difficult to do necessary research. Often they work alone, with little opportunity to share their experience with colleagues. The majority of teaching is now done by adjunct faculty, who clearly have little time to do classroom research as they struggle to just make a living teaching in a variety of institutions that give them little support.
Even as public colleges have seen funding decreases, faculty have experienced increased pressure to assess what they are doing and to push for higher completion rates, particularly at community colleges. One way, of course, to facilitate retention and increase graduation is to promote excellence in teaching, a fact that brings us to the scholarship of teaching and learning. It is only through organized inquiry, reflection, and critical exchange-all hallmarks of SoTL-that we can determine which forms of pedagogy work best. Two year-college faculty have an advantage over their four-year peers in that classes tend to be much smaller-and, although students who come from diverse backgrounds may be more challenging, that very diversity makes them rich subjects for scholarly inquiry.
Those teaching at two-year institutions also have an advantage over their four-year colleagues in that community college faculty face less pressure to engage in specific disciplinary research and thus have opportunities to do the type of research promoted by SoTL. Fortunately, despite tight budgets and ambivalence toward research as a teaching-focused activity, there has been some important movement toward sharing information about teaching. At our college, for example, we were able to obtain a large grant to establish a center for teaching and learning. The center was retained after the end of the grant and remains a place where faculty can come together to share ideas and engage in classroom research across the curriculum. During the life of our grant, a journal was published, helping to facilitate the exchange of pedagogical ideas across disciplines. It was discontinued due to fiscal constraints, but we hope that it will be revived. Meanwhile, faculty at two-year colleges continue to engage in and facilitate scholarly conversations. Howard was the editor of a peer-reviewed national journal, Teaching English at the Two-Year College, which remains an important venue for the exchange of scholarly reflection on teaching in English. Other subject areas boast their own scholarly forums. Now online sites such as blogs make this sort of exchange easier-and, of course, less expensive-than in the past.
Another development fostering SoTL at two-year institutions, as well as four-year colleges, is the acceptance of learning communities. These arrangements promote integrative learning, facilitate critical learning, and promote cross-disciplinary discussion among faculty. Yet it should also be noted that learning communities offer two year-college faculty perhaps the first opportunity since graduate school to examine their own assumptions as to what it means to do work in their own disciplines. Such realizations are likely to occur, we have found, when faculty engage in conversations with colleagues outside their own disciplines.
For students in learning communities, the payoff is rich indeed. Students become part of a supportive cohort, and at the same time gain an appreciation both of the nature of disciplinary thinking and of the interconnectedness among varied disciplines-such as English and psychology or astronomy and mathematics.
Such interconnectedness is the subject of this book, in which we describe our efforts to integrate two subjects in one course, in this case literature and history. Although challenges (in part budgetary) to instituting learning communities across the curriculum still exist, the rewards for doing so are great. Studies have shown that learning communities help to promote retention and critical thinking (Engstrom and Tinto). They also promote, as we have suggested, intense faculty conversations about the disciplines and the connections between them. This occurs in the planning stage, in which conversations are both rich and complex, but also in the ongoing process as the course proceeds.
The connection between learning communities and SoTL is clear. Learning communities provide a wonderful opportunity and a rich source of research material for classroom research. Written assignments as well as examinations can be discussed among participating colleagues and sharp assessments made of student work. Of course, for such work to be a scholarly product that expands our understanding of teaching and learning, we must establish a clear process for conducting and assessing the research. As Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff point out in regard to acceptable research, All works of scholarship involve a common sequence of u