By snoadmin
Current and aspiring high school teachers gathered at the Anatol Center on campus for a weeklong workshop on the Holocaust and how to integrate art into lessons.
From Aug. 8-12, guest speakers, including Holocaust survivors and faculty from Cal State Long Beach, led the workshop. A trip to the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust was also included in the lessons.
“The overall evaluations [of the workshop] were entirely and overwhelmingly positive,” said Jeffrey Blutinger, an associate professor of history who helped organize the workshop and CSULB’s inaugural Barbara and Ray Alpert
Endowed Chair for Jewish Studies. “Almost every teacher wrote down something in terms of how they would incorporate what they learned in their teaching.”
The workshop is in its second year, and this year’s focus was on art as resistance and art as perpetration.
“Using this topic of art allowed us to approach the Holocaust from different perspectives than we have from the past,” Blutinger said. “It allowed us to look at Nazi culture and how art fit into a fascist regime and fascist government, which is something a lot of people don’t understand.”
Discussions in high school history and language arts classes can be accentuated by using art to appeal to a variety of people.
“[Looking at art] allows us a different way of approaching a subject in a way that can appeal to different teachers and allows them to bring art into a history or language arts class in a way they may not have thought of before,” Blutinger said.
The most mentioned resource in participant evaluations was “Echoes and Reflections,” a multimedia curriculum on the Holocaust developed by the Anti-Defamation League, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute and Yad Vashem.
Debra Linesch, chair of the graduate program in marital and family therapy at Loyola Marymount University, shared a project that teachers may incorporate into their curriculum.
“She worked with the teachers to introduce a project they can do in the classroom that allows students to process the subject in a way many teachers found deeply moving and inspiring,” Blutinger said.
Two Holocaust survivors spoke at the workshop, and many teachers mentioned bringing a survivor to a class discussion. Gerda Seifer, Holocaust survivor and Long Beach resident, spoke about her experiences in the Lvov ghetto and as a hidden child.
Many other resources were provided to participants, including IWitness, an online database of survivor testimony prepared by the USC Shoah Foundation.
Of the nearly 30 participants, four LBUSD schools were represented, along with five LAUSD schools and three students in the credential process at CSULB.
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