Bringing the Lessons Home

By Amy Magin Wong

In 1992, David Klevan, Ed.M.’04, joined the soon-to-open United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the role of museum educator, charged with designing programs that would impart the lessons of the Holocaust to a diverse public.

However, as the museum was at its inception, Klevan recalls, “We had no idea what our programs or the public demand would be.” As a member of the museum’s community partnerships branch in the education division, Klevan began reaching out to public middle and high school students in the surrounding D.C. area through a program called Bringing the Lessons Home: Holocaust Education for the Community. More than 80,000 students, teachers, and parents have since toured the exhibits and participated in the ensuing discussions.

“The kids respond to the fundamental nature of the history and the questions it raises about humanity,” Klevan says. “Everyone who reflects on it ends up asking, ‘What would I have done?’ Especially kids, who are obsessed with personal identity, with fairness, and often in America, with race issues.”

As the museum’s overall mission expanded, so did Klevan’s responsibilities, and he moved into the position of program manager for community partnerships. His work included a new program for the local police, Law Enforcement and Society, initiated by the museum at the request of then-Washington, D.C., police chief Charles Ramsey. The training encourages new recruits and in-service officers to reflect on their role in society and the importance of their jobs.

“They look at what had been a professional police force in Germany and try to figure out how it became corrupt, and complicit, in genocide,” Klevan explains. “They ask themselves, ‘What are the core values of our profession? What are the safeguards that enable us to maintain a balance between our need for security and liberty?’”

The program has proved so meaningful that participation has spread to police forces in several surrounding cities, counties, and states around the United States. And through the FBI, which requires all new agents to go through this training, the program now reaches law enforcement leadership nationally and internationally.

In preparation for more of a leadership role at the museum and perhaps beyond, Klevan decided to take a year off and attend the Harvard Graduate School of Education, crafting his own curriculum through the Specialized (now Special Studies) Degree Program.

“It was an incredible challenge putting something meaningful together,” he says. “A real advantage of being midcareer was that for every one of the classes I chose, I had a practical application.” His focus, leadership and nontraditional educational settings, included courses from the Harvard Kennedy School and focused on taking his museum programs to a broader, national level.

One direct result of Klevan’s coursework is the implementation of his recommendations for improving the museum’s teacher fellowship program. To more effectively teach the Holocaust, a small group of participants collaborate to develop a single lesson for a single class period, which is then presented and revised based on the actual classroom experience and tangible evidence of student learning. “My hope,” he says, “is to create an online forum of professional knowledge, where teachers download the lesson plans and then return to our website to share their own evidence and observations about student learning.”

Klevan’s role at the museum has continued to grow, and he is now the education manager for technology and distance learning — work he relishes. “It has given me a lot of freedom to work with all different branches of the museum,” he says. He is delving into the numerous possibilities the Internet offers to impart the lessons of the Holocaust to a wider audience through a variety of projects.

The common thread through all of his initiatives, Klevan says, is “to teach about the Holocaust and its relevance today,” with the hope of “creating a more ethical and more humane society.”

Photo by Julie Ann Woodford

About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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