This article explores the pedagogical challenges and ethical dilemmas related to the use of Virtual Interactive Holocaust Survivor Testimony (VIHST) in place of live survivor testimony. The National Holocaust Centre and Museum (UK) uses 3D interactive digital as an attempt to replicate the meaningful learning experiences of listening to a live survivor. Data was collected through interviews with survivors and museum staff. Key findings include how survivors are chosen to participate, whether testimonies can or should be edited for pedagogical purposes, and challenges associated with virtual testimony that do not exist with live survivor testimony.

Schweber and Resenly’s chapter, “Curricular imprints or the presence of curricular pasts: A study of one third grader’s Holocaust education 12 years later,” examines the long-term effects of a student’s encounter with the Holocaust. Based largely on interview data, the authors look at how individual and collective identity mediates Holocaust memory and how early curricular experiences matter over time. They conclude that in this case, experiences with Holocaust education in later years and avoidance of so-called casual learning about the topic followed an emotional pattern set by that early experience in formal education. The research highlights the challenges of learning about the Holocaust in depth at a young age, perhaps especially for Jewish children who identify with Jewish victimization.

Act 10, the 2011 legislative ruling in Wisconsin that reduced public-sector unions' collective bargaining power, provides a descriptive case study to examine what happens to teachers when collective bargaining disappears. Analysis of interviews with social studies teachers (n = 26) from a stratified random sample of 13 districts shows that the most salient changes for teachers post-Act 10 include increased workloads, reduced pay and benefits, decreased job stability, and unchecked school board and administrative power. These findings are consistent across communities of different sizes and political leanings. In concert with a slew of other reforms initiated within a context of decreased union power, these changes have led to teachers feeling uncertain and vulnerable as well as experiencing a loss of “meaningful teaching.” Interviewees expressed doubts about whether they should continue teaching and concerns for the future of the profession.

The protests against the Budget Repair Bill in Wisconsin during the spring of 2011 provide a powerful moment in which to examine social studies teachers' curricular, pedagogic, and personal political decisions in the context of a local, controversial current event. We engaged 7 middle and high school social studies teachers from small and large, liberal and conservative communities who participated in the protests in in-depth, semi-structured interviews using direct prompts rooted in critical incident scaffolding and open questions in keeping with oral history traditions. The teachers' stories reveal the profound significance of that moment in their lives, the ways in which teaching through turmoil deepened their political awareness and activism, a range of factors influencing their decisions of whether or not to disclose their opinions to their students, the importance of the need for "balanced" teaching of controversial issues, and the ways in which they feel their voices have been silenced in the aftermath of the legislation.

Considered as a field of inquiry, research on Holocaust education remains highly underdeveloped. Most research has focused on the production of Holocaust meaning rather than its reception. Thus, while the Holocaust is taught about in different countries and at various grade-levels, the effects of such efforts remain elusive, especially within Jewish educational settings. Much Holocaust education continues to focus on victims’ experiences rather than to broaden understanding of perpetrators’ choices, though this varies considerably by region. In this era of continued genocidal violence, it seems worth asking what Holocaust education looks like in practice, investing much more research on what it enacts, and building new endeavors on its results. What might Holocaust education do if conceptualized not from the standpoint of building nations or concretizing collective memory but as a project of global citizenship and human understanding? More research holds out the hope of finding a shorter path to a more humane world.

Based on research conducted within a Lubavitch girls' yeshivah in the United States, this article describes in detail how the Holocaust was taught and learned about eighth grade, secular studies classroom. The article describes the yeshivah, its students, and the teacher and the unit she taught. Special attention is given to meaning the students made of their learning. The article concludes by arguing the Shoah was rendered mysterious in this classroom, that the teaching of history compromised, and that both the students' historical understandings and religious growth opportunities were shortchanged in the process.

Background/Context: Though widely believed to contain moral lessons of import for audiences of all ages, the Holocaust is often considered too complex, too appalling, too impenetrable, or too emotionally disturbing a subject to be taught to young children, even if taught only in its most "preparatory version," to use Jerome Bruner's famous phrasing. The subject matter, after all, deals at its core with human brutality, barbarous indifference, and industrialized mass murder. Nonetheless, a burgeoning market in materials designed to expose young children to the Holocaust implies that students are learning about the topic in earlier and earlier grades, a phenomenon that may be referred to as " curricular creep." Such a trend raises the question of whether students should be exposed, purposefully and formally, to the horrors of the Holocaust, or, conversely, whether curricular creep should be somehow corralled. Although authors have weighed in on the ethics of Holocaust education, its history, practices, and materials, few have discussed its rightful place in the elementary school curriculum. Fewer still have empirically examined what the Holocaust looks like when taught to a young audience.Focus of Study: To propose a policy answer to the question of how old is old enough to teach students about the Holocaust, this study attempted to determine what aspects of Holocaust history were taught in the third-grade classroom of a very experienced and well-respected teacher. Importantly, the study also proposed to examine how such teaching affected students, emotionally and intellectually.Research Design/Data Generation: Data for the qualitative case study were generated through observations of this teacher's class sessions on the Holocaust, interviews with the teacher and a select group of students and their parents, and the collection of all class materials and student work. The interviews were transcribed, the field notes were doctored, and all the documents were coded iteratively and written up as a portrait of the unit.Conclusions/Recommendations: The article concludes by considering third graders to be too young, as a group, to be taught about the Holocaust, thus recommending that curricular creep be reigned in for this topic. That said, the competing interpretations of the teacher, parents, and some of the students are included for consideration as well.

This essay compares two curricular treatments of the Holocaust, one that resulted from a full-semester, 10th grade elective course taught at a public high school, the second constructed through a quarter-long, 8th grade unit taught at a charismatic, evangelical, fundamentalist Christian private school. In brief, the study examines the Holocaust's radically different uses, the narrowing of Holocaust memory and its confinement to Christological terms at the Christian school vs. its 'democratic' widening to serve anti-racist aims at the public school. Despite differences between the contents and pedagogies at the two schools, however, profound similarities emerged in their Holocaust treatments.

This study examines the production of religious collective memory at a fundamentalist Christian school. By depicting in rich detail what happened on September 11, 2001, in one eighth‐grade classroom and how the events of that day were discussed in the weeks that followed, the article reveals the processes wherein the attacks were subsumed into an overarching narrative attesting to God’s control over history. After analyzing the implications of the resultant narrative, the article speculates that the categories of theological certainty and humanistic questioning currently define a breach within the American populace that is playing out not only in politics but in education, bearing important consequences for the purposes of schooling writ large and for religious and public schools as institutions.