World Holocaust Remembrance Centre
In January 2019, I went to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, located in Jerusalem, Israel, to study pedagogical approaches to the Holocaust. I was selected for this unique Professional Development along with 29 other History teachers, as part of an initiative run by the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand in tandem with Yad Vashem.
The Holocaust teaches us some important lessons. One of these lessons is the importance of being an upstander, not a bystander when it comes to any form of discrimination. For our students, the theme “Upstander, Not Bystander” is a great way of facilitating an anti-bullying rhetoric.
When I returned to school this year, I invited other teachers to collaborate with me using this theme. The idea was to use the Holocaust as a context for a wider discussion about racism, discrimination and bullying. In my Year 11 History classes, we discussed the roles of upstanders and bystanders in the antisemitic pogrom of 1938; Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass). This enabled students to readily define the range of responses we can have to discrimination. We then started a discussion about situations in which we can be upstanders or bystanders. There was a lot of discussion about the use of social media, and how easy it is to be bystanders on social media. We discussed practical ways we can be upstanders, like being supportive of people who are different from us or telling an adult when bullying is occurring.
The teachers collaborating with me had similar discussions with their students. Shareen Prasad, a science teacher, taught her students about being an upstander in Science. They did several case studies on scientists, who were upstanders in their chosen fields. Kathryn Stringer, an English teacher, looked at examples of upstanders from history and popular culture, and then explored a range of texts featuring upstanders. She explored the idea of bystanders and “the banality of evil” through the text “The Wave.”
As part of our collaboration, we had Chris Harris and Lizzy Eaves from the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand (HCNZ) present to our classes on this theme. They spent time chatting to our classes about upstanders in the Holocaust, and the importance of speaking out against hate.
Looking at the outcome of our collaboration, Kathryn Stringer noted, “My hope is that this will encourage them to be an upstander when they witness injustice. I think that while they are now empowered to identify bystander behaviour, it is still challenging for them to resist it. So the next step will be encouraging them to be brave and stand up against injustice.”
Next year we will continue to use “Upstanders, Not Bystanders” particularly with our junior students, who need to hear this message. The HCNZ has organised for the Children’s Holocaust Memorial to come to Christchurch next year, so we will be taking most of the junior school to this exhibition. I highly recommend this initiative to other schools. There are some great teaching resources on “Upstanders, Not Bystanders” on the HCNZ website (https://holocaustcentre.org.nz) which can be used with students before, during and after the visit to the Children’s Holocaust Memorial.
