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…

This paper provides insight into parental attitudes to their primary-aged children learning about the Holocaust. Evidence is based on data from interviews with parents whose children learned about the Holocaust in their last year of primary. Findings show that parents had initial concerns about their children learning about the Holocaust, but that…

This paper examines two research questions: How do teachers refer to historical figures when teaching difficult past events? Which approaches to teaching difficult past events are reflected in teachers' ways of talking about historical figures? The paper is based on an analysis of lessons by three 11th grade history teachers in Israel on the…

Growing polarization in European societies has changed not only political landscapes but also public debates about the past, which has, in turn, had an impact on the way history is taught and talked about in schools. This article explores how these trends are experienced by history educators across Europe and asks which issues history educators…

The Israel-Hamas crisis that started in October of 2023 has led to an increase in hate acts targeted at Jewish and Arab students. In response, the U.S. Department of Education sent a letter reminding educational leaders of their responsibilities to address this behavior. This paper offers examples of the kind of conduct educational leaders are…

This article examines the key category defining multiculturalism in Israeli history education: the representation of North African and Middle Eastern Jewry, aka "Mizrahim." Applying Nordgren's and Johansson's conceptualisation, the article explores the changes in this subject from the establishment of Israel to the present day. The…

Civic education research in different national settings points to how citizenship conceptions act as factors that frame and steer practice. This review of research conducted in Israel over the last 40 years questions a reality in which the choice of a leading civic ideology is controversial, due to the fundamental aspects of citizenship in Israel…

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.

This article explores the relationship between the philosophy of ethics, history education, and young people's historical ethical judgments. In the last two decades, "ethical judgments," which focus on making decisions about the ethics of historical actions, has been acknowledged as a second-order historical thinking concept in history…

Recognizing the need to prepare elementary education teacher-candidates to implement state-mandated curriculum, a Genocide Studies Unit was developed. This study evaluated the effectiveness of the Unit in building preservice teachers' knowledge-base and efficacy levels with a mind toward preparing teachers to implement difficult content more…

What is the place of teaching about other world religions in a Jewish educational curriculum for adolescents? This article explores a course in world religions that has been taught at the Genesis Program at Brandeis University since 2001. Based on a participant observational study during 2002 and 2012, the author traces how the teachers construct…

The experience of 9/11 prompted a transformation in one secondary teacher's approach to teaching controversial subjects based on the relevance to today's students. Soon after that fateful day, this teacher found a purpose and rationale for developing a very demanding curriculum on 9/11, and relates how his teaching unit has evolved by expanding…

Holocaust education has been most successful in creating empathy, historical understanding and present responsibility against racism/antisemitism and towards human rights by telling true stories of children, women and men who were victims of these crimes during the Nazi period, while also raising awareness of the consequences for the present. The…

Background/Context: Emotions often accompany discussions of ethnic matters, yet there have been few sustained investigations in education of how, and with what implications, emotional responses are (de)legitimized in the classroom, especially when conflicting historical narratives are involved. Emotions have remained in the margins of educational…

This research examines the problems that religious Jewish science teachers in Israeli high schools have in coping with science subjects (such as geological time) which conflict with their religious beliefs. We do this by characterizing the philosophical approaches within Judaism that such teachers have adopted for dealing with such controversy.…