الموارد

Teaching the Holocaust involves confronting many challenges regardless of the setting involved. The complex nature of Holocaust history demands that students and teachers function at high intellectual levels as they study that history, and the need to determine how sensitive topics should be approached challenges educators in ways that are not present when teaching most other topics. Thus, any teaching of the Shoah places significant demands on teachers‘ content knowledge and pedagogical expertise. These demands increase when educators teach students whose backgrounds differ from those of the general population. Specifically, students whose language skills limit their understanding of texts and classroom dialogue face multiple challenges as they seek to learn within new school environments. Moreover, the distinctive cultural milieu and life experiences that form the frames of references from which these students approach the study of all social studies topics make it imperative that teachers build curricula that include culturally relevant perspectives in order to ensure that students are provided an opportunity to learn material at sophisticated levels. This paper considers how these factors influence the teaching of the Shoah in a Roman Catholic high school located in a major city in the western United States. More than 80% of the school’s students are either immigrants to the United States or members of the first generation of their families to be born in this country; thus, most students have been identified as English Language Learners (ELLs), a category used to determine if special language services should be provided to them. This paper overviews English language learning in the United States and teaching social studies to ELL students before discussing teaching the Holocaust in a parochial school whose primary focus is on teaching ELL students. (By the author - Introduction)