Mind the gap: Holocaust education in Germany,between pedagogical intentions and classroom interactions |
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Authors: | Meseth Wolfgang Proske Matthias |
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Institution: | 1.Institut für Allgemeine Erziehungswissenschaft, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universit?t, Postfach 11 19 32 Nr. 111, 60054, Frankfurt am Main, Germany ;2.Institut für Allgemeine Didaktik und Schulforschung, Universit?t zu K?ln, Gronewaldstr. 2, 50931, K?ln, Germany ; |
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Abstract: | The injunction to learn from history is a key feature of German debates over the politics of memory and history, which, since
the end of World War II, have been seen primarily pedagogical. Thus, state schools were asked to serve as society’s central
location for memory and learning. Research on history education has rarely addressed questions about how instruction on the
history of National Socialism (NS) plays out in practice, about how ambitious educational goals are implemented at the level
of actual instruction, or about the challenges that teachers and students face when they are asked to address such a morally
fraught topic. This paper presents findings from a qualitative study that explored these issues using analyses of concrete
classroom experience. The paper is based on four carefully selected case studies. The first looks at how a contemporary account
of the issue and its moral implications are handled in the classroom. The second examines the consequences for classroom discussion
of a discrepancy between teacher expectations and student interpretations of an excerpt from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The third also addresses a discrepancy, focusing on the institutionalized generation gap in school. Finally, the fourth
case shows how instructional communication benefits when participants assume a reciprocal, though not always articulated,
consensus opinion on NS. The interpretation of the cases illustrates how both the organizational framework of schools and
the specific conditions of classroom interaction shape the treatment of NS. Classroom interactions are strongly influenced
by the quirky, often unexpected, ways that students appropriate knowledge—ways that often conflict with the intended content
of the lesson and with public expectations for the treatment of Germany’s past. The analysis reveals a tension between the
under-moralization and the over-moralization of teaching the Holocaust, and a tension between the need to represent the crimes
of NS adequately, and to fulfill the goals of moral education. |
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