The author's eighth-grade ELA curriculum is rich with opportunities for students to bear witness to a variety of experiences. Besides the Holocaust unit, they read "Ghost Boys" by Jewell Parker Rhodes (2018) while exploring police brutality and segregation; "The Giver" by Lois Lowry (1993) while investigating government…

Over the past decade, Terror Management Theory (TMT) has been widely studied for its role in conflict management and in shaping the behavior of target populations, including in the classroom. Emerging from research on the importance of self-esteem, TMT submits that much of our behavior is driven by death anxiety and its effects are particularly…

In a cultural moment when professors experience a debilitating hesitancy about initiating difficult conversations with undergraduate students, and the imperative of trigger warnings sometimes outweighs the will to navigate controversial materials, the fate of "violent films," as worthy of academic study, hangs precariously in the…

Adolescents are often described as egocentric, but a major source of this external behavior is the internal fear of adolescents have about feeling invisible, being different, and even their own mortality. Facing this fear through a curricular focus on death can help to combat this behavior. This can be accomplished through novel studies of books…

In this article, the author uses lesson reflection as a way to consider ethical issues that accompany teaching with texts that include death. More specifically, the article examines the relationship between moral education and analytic or skills-based education.

This article proposes the "badge of complexity"--a model that embodies the arguments for and against Holocaust stories for children--followed by a poetic and thematic mapping of Israeli Holocaust literature for young children.

Sometimes, things don't go to plan. Current events come into the classroom, especially the history classroom. How should students' responses to current affairs be dealt with there? How should students' desire to voice their opinions be handled if their opinion is unpopular. What if the student is simply wrong? How far can moral relativism be…

This paper discusses potential strategies and sources for approaching uncomfortable topics and reviews the challenges facing teachers who choose to do so with the topic of genocide as an example. Using a variety of techniques, including graphic organizers, political cartoons, comic books and graphic novels, films, children's and young adult…

Capital punishment, still practiced in many countries around the world, represents a highly controversial human rights issue. As citizens of the world, the existence of a diversity of death penalties challenges some of the most cherished and universal values. For social studies educators seeking to move their students toward finding their voice as…

A primary rationale for studying the Holocaust (Shoah) involves the opportunity to consider the moral implications that can be drawn from examining the event. Studying the Shoah forces students to consider what it means to be human and humane by examining the full continuum of individual behavior, from "ultimate evil" to "ultimate good". This…

This article addresses the challenges and pathways of Holocaust education in post-communist countries through two case studies. I first examine historiographical, institutional and cultural obstacles to deep and meaningful treatments of the Holocaust within Latvian and Romanian schools. Drawing upon the unique experiences both countries had with…

Alison Stephen, who has wrestled for many years with the challenges of teaching emotional and controversial history within a multiethnic school setting, relished the opportunity to link her school's teaching of the Holocaust with a comparative study of other genocides. As she reports, her aim was to not create a hierarchy of suffering or…

Museums have the capacity to enhance social cohesion, which is the product of a trusting, connected community. History museums and historic sites, in particular, can serve communities by stimulating dialogue on difficult issues, accurately representing all the people of a nation, and creating forums for discussion among groups with disparate…

The head of Arizona State University's film-production program, F. Miguel Valenti, doesn't believe in showing movie clips in his classes, arguing that every scene should be viewed in its full context. So to make a point about why he thinks "Friday the 13th" has destroyed the horror genre, he recently showed the whole bloody mess of a…

Teaching and studying the Holocaust is a complex and sensitive undertaking. The dynamics of dealing with a modern, technologically advanced state's attempt to annihilate all members of a given group of people for racial reasons involves tortuous twists and turns that challenge the most sophisticated of thinkers, leading to a situation in which…