Date of Award

8-2024

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

English

First Advisor

Jonathan Bush, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Meghann Meeusen, Ph.D.

Third Advisor

Gretchen Rumohr, Ph.D.

Fourth Advisor

Jennifer Lemberg, Ph.D.

Keywords

Holocaust, literacy, metacognition, reading, writing

Abstract

While at least forty-seven states have legislation around teaching the Holocaust and/or genocide to secondary students (grades 6-12), this curriculum is typically housed in the social studies departments of most districts; however, there are many English language arts teachers who either choose to teach Holocaust literature alongside their social studies counterparts, or create stand-alone Holocaust units around both informational texts and literature.

This study centers around the author’s own Holocaust unit taught to eighth-grade honors ELA students in an urban, Title I school district. The unit is used as an artifact to examine two aspects of a successful unit on a difficult topic. First, the unit is explored as a teacher artifact—a metacognitive examination based on Pamela Grossman’s “Model of Teacher Knowledge (1990) as well as scholarship about teacher identity (Shulman, 1986; Alsup, 2006; Beauchamp and Thomas, 2009; Akkerman and Meijer, 2011). This portion of the study creates an inquiry into the how and why the unit came to be using a reflective process while also including feedback from students on their experience with the unit. The intent of this section is to model a process for the metacognition and reflection that other teachers can apply to their own curricula in order to identify their strengths and challenges teaching specific units.

Additionally, the unit is investigated as a teaching artifact that inspects the Holocaust unit through a pedagogical lens. The unit was created and taught building from the five pursuits according to Gholdy Muhammed’s framework for historically and culturally responsive literacy (2021,2023). Again, autoethnography is used to analyze the professional experiences of this study’s author during the creation and execution of the unit, but calls on students for input from their perspective as the learners. This section of the study highlights the alignment in theory and pedagogy of best practice Holocaust education with historically and culturally responsive teaching.

Both sections of this study reveal the amount of mental and emotional labor involved in the creation and execution of a unit that attempts to accurately portray the atrocities of the Holocaust. Balancing the seriousness of the topic with the hope and resilience of those targeted proves an essential component of teaching to effect social justice and action from students. Additionally, the two analyses of the unit from different perspectives—the teacher artifact and the teaching artifact—reveal the critical issues with reveal the critical issues with scripted, one-size-fits-all curricula that are not created by teachers for the student populations they work in community with.

This study serves as a model for practicing English language arts teachers who are creating their own units around the Holocaust, a different genocide, or any number of historically difficult or controversial topics and seek to frame them with social justice and human rights. The research in this study is also relevant to teacher educators who are designing methods courses for pre-service teachers to explore creating literature units around such topics.

Access Setting

Dissertation-Open Access

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