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Members of IOE programme visit Poland to enhance their teaching about the Holocaust
15 May 2019
Teachers from schools on the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education’s Beacon Schools programme have visited Poland in order to enhance their teaching and learning about the Holocaust.
The Beacon Schools programme is a partnership between the UCL Institute of Education’s (IOE) Centre for Holocaust Education and British secondary schools. The aim is to coordinate Holocaust education within each school and embed the Centre’s pedagogical approaches, teaching and learning materials into their schools, developing a Scheme of Work to evidence how this has been achieved.
The tour to Poland involved excursions to sites in Warsaw to discover what life was like for thriving Jewish communities before the Nazi occupation.
As teachers walked through the former ghetto, stopping at points of significance and remembrance, they engaged in creative tasks that brought about powerful encounters with the past.
The four-day tour also included visits to a former Jewish village and the death camp of Treblinka. The cohort examined the resurgence of Jewish life in Poland today through a special workshop and visited the Nożyk Synagogue on the eve of the Sabbath. Throughout the trip the teachers considered site-based pedagogy and reflected upon the significance of these spaces and shared learning for their classrooms.
The teachers on this year’s programme come from a variety of schools across the country, some of which are located in particularly disadvantaged areas. Their schools join over 120 other schools of the Beacon School alumni that are committed to strengthening the quality of Holocaust education they provide through the Beacon Schools programme.
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Photo: 'Treblinka - Extermination Camp - memorial stones, 17,000 of them (11)' by Damian Entwistle via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)