IEP Students Face History to Improve the Present and Future

Do you think the most important part in teaching students history lessons are the dates the events took place? Think again. As Adam Strom, director of research and evaluation at Facing History and Ourselves, told International Education Policy Program (IEP) students last week, the important aspect of teaching history to students is making a connection to their lives.

Begun in 1976 by Margot Strom, C.A.S.’77, Facing History is an international educational nonprofit organization that engages middle and high school teachers and their students in an examination of racism, prejudice, and anti-Semitism by relating the past to the world today. Facing History provides professional development, curriculum, and workshops nationwide.

Professor Fernando Reimers, director of IEP, invited Adam Strom to kick off the IEP seminar series. The seminars are designed to help students learn about organizations that are doing cutting edge work internationally in the field of educational innovation and to provide professional networking opportunities.

“Our students are generally very interested in how to improve the quality of education in developing countries,” Reimers said. “We provide them with ample opportunities to discuss what quality is, how it relates to relevancy of education. One of the most interesting components of quality concerns developing in students the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that allow them to participate as citizens.”

Reimers saw Facing History as a perfect start to the IEP seminars because it offers an innovative approach to teacher professional development and engaging and transforming instruction that helps students develop civic competencies. “For this reason we have invited their director of research and evaluation to the IEP seminar over the last several years to talk with us about their approach and, in particular, about the expanding international work that they do,” he said.

Facing History thrives on drawing connections between history and students under the philosophy that through studying the historical development of the Holocaust and other examples of genocide or collective violence, students learn the essential connection between history and the moral choices they face in their own lives. As Strom explained, history classes often emphasize how certain figures were big “actors” rather than “ordinary people who’ve done evil or extraordinary things,” he said.

By pushing students outside of concrete thinking, they can look at the relationships between individuals and society, consider real stories of history in different contexts, and study topics in a lot more depth.

“It’s a horrible thing to teach every litany that ever happened,” Strom said. By taking fewer events and studying them with more depth, students become more engaged. For instance, Strom points out that teaching about the Holocaust shouldn’t solely focus on its end, but also lead to lessons about what was happening in the 1920s and how and why democracy in Germany broke down.

This curriculum and teaching model has resulted in favorable evaluations from students and teachers, as well as the many questions from the IEP students attending the seminar.

“I believe that Facing History was a great seminar to jump start the series because the organization links a traditional academic discipline to social service/action work; similarly, IEP links scholarship to real world practices,” said IEP student Carrie Berg. “The IEP Program seems to be designed to help students develop a skill set to take into the field of education and learn how to apply research to policymaking and program design. The seminar series allows us to talk to practitioners about what individuals and organizations are doing to bring about some powerful social changes.”