(Topics discussed in this post have themes concerning the Holocaust)
I remember sitting in my 4th grade classroom, picking at the eraser on the end of my pencil while listening to my classmates chatter around me. There wasn’t any significance to this particular day, besides my teacher hinting that the 7th graders will be inviting our class to their Holocaust exhibit organized by their History class. The only understanding that I had about the Holocaust at that time was The Diary of Anne Frank, but it was impossible for me to comprehend the emotions that seeped from Anne’s words. None of us expected anything out of the ordinary that day, but all of a sudden, one of the 7th graders barged into our classroom and the chatter ceased. The student had a yellow band wrapped around their arm, and looked around the room before darting under a nearby desk. Begging us to not look their way, two more students walked into the room. “We are looking for someone who may have ran in here”, one of them stated as they both looked around the room. I remember not having any context on the situation, but I tried hard to keep my eyes on the two newcomers and not the hidden person. Unfortunately, the person was discovered and was struggling as the two 7th graders pulled them out of our classroom.
The strange thing about this memory is that I remember feeling scared for the found individual based solely on the aggressive nature of the two “guards” looking for them, but I do not remember how my teacher took what happened and turned it into a teaching moment. It wouldn’t have mattered what my teacher would have said, I considered years later, because that was only the beginning of my experience with the immersive Holocaust exhibit.
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This was back in 2007, right before the digital wave of technology methods became an integral part of education. Nowadays, with the new wave of education and increasing consideration of adding, “the development of technology and information skills within the discipline as new objectives in the curriculum” (Lippincott 2015), students would potentially benefit from contextual information delivered through technology when dissecting traumatic experiences. The reality of trauma-and lately the frequency of news stations using their platform to cover the details of trauma-is enough to inject fear into anyone’s minds. However, information professionals such as educators and librarians are beginning to regulate digital methods as a way to deliver information to their students. With endless resources at their disposal, educators would be able to not only talk about difficult subjects like the Holocaust, but also show interviews with survivors on You Tube or find the latest documentaries on the subject. I especially want to highlight the latter resource, because despite our class also having access to documentaries in 2007, most often the film was produced decades before and had outdated information delivery methods that would fail to keep a 9 year old’s interest.
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Walls covered in white sheets, one small, rectangle-shaped table covered in a white sheet, and a large box in the middle of the room. That image alone is incredibly intimidating to think back on, but again, I wasn’t comprehending what was happening fully at the time. I was in a group with a handful of my classmates, and we were halfway through the Holocaust exhibit. With the image of student-made posters and “artifacts” made out of paper and glue in our minds, we were reminded by our 7th grade tour guide about what we witnessed in the classroom the day before. “They ran to avoid being caught”, our tour guide stated, “being caught was a bad thing.” With an emphasis on that last remark, we were asked to participate in a hide-and-seek activity and were given 30 seconds to hide in that white room. I saw my classmates dart under the desk and behind the box, and my thought was to just run. I ran back the way we were led into, turning the corner to find two 7th graders at the door. Hugging the wall, I heard the tour guide finish counting and ultimately finding everyone except me. When it was over, the two 7th graders told me it was ok to go back to the group, and I remember the tour guide distinctively pointing me out as the only one who would have gotten away.
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There is a reason why I remember that day as vividly as I do 16 years later. I have learned much more about the Holocaust (and have visited some Dark Tourism locations in Germany and Austria), but I credit that day in 4th grade as changing my personal feelings about that tragedy. It was no longer just a historical event that exists only in the past, but an ongoing reminder of an event that still effects many people today. While it shouldn’t be expected for every school in the world to create immersive experiences as a way to address stressing topics from the past and present, Dark Tourism as a subject can be creatively taught to students and set up a profound experience that would potentially stay with them through their whole lives.
In the ongoing narrative on how future teaching methods will be done, “Integrating a wide variety of information concepts into a student’s academic career, focusing on such issues as the mechanisms of scholarly communication in disciplines and the economic and privacy aspects of information in society, is a much richer set of topics than an emphasis on the mechanics of searching for information (Lippincott 2015).” Considering the three aspects of learning (i.e. behavior, Cognitive, Constructivism), an immersive education plan such as an “exhibit”, a creative project, or potentially virtual reality (VR) programs will offer integral learning opportunities for current and future students.
Work Cited:
Lippencott, J. k. (2015). The future for teaching and learning. American Libraries Magazine. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2015/02/26/the-future-for-teaching-and-learning/
(This post was originally published as “blog #5” for my INfo 200 course on information communities)
The Shadow Route 