Professor  >  Holocaust Education Design

How can we design engaging and relevant Holocaust education? How has Holocaust education developed over time? What is its purpose? And what is its future?

In this course, we consider and debate the complexities and challenges of Holocaust pedagogy, including responding to learners' emotions and misconceptions.

We ask how Holocaust pedagogy can be applied more generally to teaching about histories of atrocity and contemporary injustices. 

We explore the possible goals of educating about the Holocaust, the merits and challenges of addressing all of the Nazis' target groups, and the relationships between Holocaust education, genocide education, and human rights and social justice education.

We study the benefits and challenges of prioritizing specific perspectives, including those of victims, survivors, the second and third generations, rescuers, liberators, bystanders, perpetrators, and collaborators.

Through theoretical texts, fiction, film, witness testimony, school curricula, and museum and online exhibitions, we explore appropriate and inappropriate teaching methods and consider the design of training for Holocaust educators across formal and informal learning environments.

Student learning is assessed through creative responses to course materials, journaling, and open projects, with opportunities for group work.
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School of Education & Social Policy
​The Crown Family Center for Jewish & Israel Studies
Northwestern University