Teaching Resources for High School and Middle School Classrooms
Educational use of testimonies has been at the heart of the Fortunoff Archive’s mission since its beginning. As we move toward a world without living Holocaust survivors, this mission is more important than ever. Testimonies offer a crucial counterpart to the abstract numbers, facts, and timelines of history. They invite encounters with diverse individuals and families whose lives span the prewar years, the Holocaust, and the postwar decades.
The Fortunoff Archive’s digital teaching materials are rooted in testimony. They are designed to engage students in empathetic listening, rigorous historical analysis, and ethical reflection. They may be used to address a number of topics and themes, including:
- The Holocaust
- Oral history methods
- Historical and historiographical thinking
- Comparative history of race and citizenship
- Antisemitism
Each teaching set invites a different way of learning with testimony. The Art of Listening conveys the Fortunoff Archive’s ethos and interview methodology. It asks students to consider how testimonies are collected, how to listen to them, and what it means to bear witness. Educators are also invited to apply the Fortunoff interview method in their classes and in oral history projects. Historiography of Holocaust Testimonies was published in the #AHRSyllabus in the American Historical Review. It invites students to explore how inclusion of testimonies transformed Holocaust scholarship in the late twentieth century. Race and Citizenship in Nazi Germany and Jim Crow United States invites students to use testimony, textual sources, and historical scholarship to explore how states construct laws to elevate and oppress groups. Students investigate both the value and limits of historical comparisons. Please fill out this form if you would like to receive updates about new teaching materials and workshops.
These sets were developed by Dr. Agnieszka (Aya) Marczyk in partnership with scholars and teachers, including Leslie Blatteau, Lindsey Rossler, members of the Fortunoff Archive’s Teacher Advisory Council, and many others who have generously shared their insights and ideas.
The Art of Listening
How does one bear witness to the Holocaust? And how do we listen to testimony? This teaching set introduces the Fortunoff Archive’s interview methodology and invites students to encounter testimonies as personal narratives and complex historical sources.
Historiography of Holocaust Testimonies
What is the role of survivor testimony in the study of the Holocaust? Historiography-Based Inquiry is a new instructional model that engages students in analyzing how historians interpret sources and how historical understanding changes over time.
Race and Citizenship
A Black soldier arrived in Buchenwald with the segregated US Army in April 1945. His reflections are a starting point for a comparative historical investigation of race laws and citizenship rights in Jim Crow United States and Nazi Germany in the 1930s.