Teaching, Learning, and the Holocaust: An Integrative Approach

Introduction

Introduction teaching as a scholarly activity: Posing Pedagogical Questions In this book we take up the call, articulated by teacher-scholars Deborah Vess and Sherry Linkon, to study the effects of interdisciplinary teaching “on student learning in the context of specific courses” (94). Our goal in part is to reconstruct the Spring 2011 session of a team-taught interdisciplinary course called “Remembering the Holocaust in Literature and History,” which we have taught for nearly a decade. In doing so, we hope to make our teaching visible and available for study—by ourselves as well as by those committed to the scholarship of teaching and learning. We harbor no illusions about the challenges ahead. Recreating a course that has since passed into memory poses its own special challenges: How do we capture the ebbs and flows and the spontaneity of the classroom? What artifacts do we provide as representative of the experience? What material do we foreground? What do we leave out? Why? If there is one lesson (among so many) to be learned from teaching the Holocaust it is that memory work (the recollection of a dramatic event) can be exceedingly challenging. Recollecting a course about the Shoah specifically (we will use the word Shoah, a Hebrew term meaning “catastrophe,” in reference to the Holocaust from this point forward) places a special burden on us, since so much learning occurs in silent reflection. We learned long ago that teaching the Shoah calls upon what Lee Shulman has termed 2 n teaching, Learning, and the hoLocaust “pedagogies of interruption” (Teaching 57). Whereas Shulman refers to faculty-generated disruption, we hope to amply demonstrate in this book that the subject of the Shoah itself compels interruption, whether faculty desire it or not. A student may be called up short when, reading Abraham Lewin’s harrowing “Diary of the Great Deportation,” she comes upon this passage: The 14th day of the “action” . . . is being continued at full speed. . . . The Germans work together with the Jewish police. . . . There are stories of terrible lootings and violence during the expulsions. . . . Shops are broken open and the goods carried out. In this participate Jewish police, ordinary Jewish neighbors and Germans. (170) How can that be? Why would Jews willingly collaborate with their persecutors? Such difficult questions often arise in response to reading Shoah material, prompting a pause for hard but important reflection. For our part, writing this book allows us the reflective space to pose a series of pedagogically based questions that go to the heart of teaching and learning. A course on the Shoah engages students in a visceral way, evoking intensely strong emotions. A challenge for all is to be able to balance the affective response with a critical awareness: How do we encourage or promote a way of understanding the Shoah that integrates the affective and cognitive domains? How do we know that such a balance occurs when we see it? Moreover, given that our course is interdisciplinary in nature—drawing as it does upon the fields of history, literary criticism, and rhetoric—how do we render explicit the discrete ways of knowing associated with each of these fields? How do we inculcate in our students a way of responding to Shoah material that is integrative of all three approaches? How do we assess success in its achievement? In raising questions that are pedagogically based, we steer clear of tracing course outcomes that extend well beyond the semester’s end and cannot be documented with evidence. One Shoah scholar, for example, wonders aloud, Do we make better human beings? Do our students develop a sense of human rights? Can a study of the plight of the Jews and others during the Holocaust create empathy for the “other”? (Feinstein 62) introduction n 3 Although we have observed when teaching the Shoah that students are often intensely engaged with the subject, and hear from many that the course was truly memorable for them, we can make no judgment as to a student’s “sense of human rights” when they are in our class, nor do we have access to data suggesting whether such a sense occurred well after the fact. Instead, as scholars for whom the classroom provides ready evidence of student transformation and development, we choose to pose questions that are pedagogically based and to derive evidence accessible in the classroom. Moreover, as teacher-scholars trained in the disciplines of English studies (literary...