Today we are launching a truly fantastic new CPD, Understanding the Holocaust at Key Stage 3: Teaching with a research-informed Textbook. The course will explore an innovation in textbook development that the team here at the Centre has created. For the first time it brings together the very latest in research about young people’s understanding of the Holocaust with best pedagogic practice.
By taking the course you will engage in activities that help you identify alarmingly common problems that lurk in many existing textbooks and will increase your skill to recognise these. We will also present to you UCL’s new textbook and we will guide you through its rationale, and its key features. It will give you a close look at some of the student activities we have created that draw out and consolidate essential learning. Notice how the front cover looks….
Rather than an image of Hitler or the entrance to Auschwitz, common to other textbooks on the market, UCL’s textbook focuses attention on the victims. This deliberate choice is one of the textbook’s central distinguishing features: the importance of helping students grasp a sense of the lives of Jewish people before the Holocaust – their diversity, culture, families, hopes and dreams, contribution to societies across Europe, their suffering, actions and loss during the Holocaust and in some cases their remarkable survival. Only then, can the significance of the Holocaust and what was truly lost be fully comprehended.
Thanks to the generous support of the Pears Foundation and Tony Schiff Memorial Fund we are presenting those who take the course with a unique offer – a class set of 30 hard copies of the textbook for your school absolutely free. Yes, that is right – free of charge!
So do follow this link and sign up quickly for the course and the offer.
Next week we are holding a very exciting event: On Wednesday 15th July 5-6:15pm Professor Yehuda Bauer, one of the greatest historians of the Holocaust will be giving a live webinar talk on Holocaust Distortion followed by a Q&A. Many of our teachers, some of their students, politician, survivors and members of the public are joining us. To grab the chance to hear Yehuda follow this link to reserve your place.
Our centre has also launched this week a freely available edited book: Holocaust Education: Contemporary challenges and controversies
Here Centre staff confront head on some of the major challenges and controversies that currently surround teaching and learning about the Holocaust. See here for details.
With nail bars, gyms and pubs now open we might be tempted to think we are ‘getting back to normal’. However, we all know that the dangers of this pandemic still remain ever present. In schools throughout the country considerable effort is being made to provide safe school environments for students to return to in September and to begin the challenge of recapturing those important aspects of schooling – both academic and pastoral that students have critically needed and missed
Have a good weekend.
Ruth-Anne Lenga
Programme Director
