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Yizkor- A Project Based Learning Approach to Holocaust Education and Interdisciplinary Unit Planning


Last year, I was asked to co-develop a Holocaust unit for Grade 7. I was privileged to work with Leora Schaefer from Facing History Canada, our MYP Coordinator, our Dean of Jewish Living, our librarian and my Individuals and Societies teaching partner at the South Campus to develop a unique offering that was both broad and deep. We chose 20 artifacts, created information packages to go with each, and helped the students make informed choices about their topics of interest based on gallery walking through the packages. They narrowed their choices to 5 options, and received one in their top 3. The Yizkor Project, which means remembrance and culminates on Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah), was so successful that it evolved to become the first grade 7 Interdisciplinary Unit at my school.

I had always used a multidisciplinary approach in my teaching, but an MYP ID unit (Middle Years Programs for the International Baccalaureate) is a different configuration. An ID unit requires at least 2 disciplines to develop a shared unit planner and integrate teaching to help students create meaning that could not have been achieved without the contributions of each discipline. In the revisited Yizkor Project as an ID unit, Language and Literature (English/Language Arts) joined Individuals and Societies (History/Social Studies), and we embarked on teaching from each of our disciplines to help students curate meaningful exhibits for a Grade 5-8 audience, their parents and guests.

We began the unit with a virtual trip to the Anne Frank Museum to look at what an exhibit can entail. I wanted the students to have context to begin developing the success criteria for an effective exhibit geared to a Middle School audience. I chose the Anne Frank house because the students would be reading the play The Diary of Anne Frank in Language and Literature. Plus, it’s a great site with a virtual tour of the house that was turned into a museum. "The Diary of Anne Frank" is the second most widely read nonfiction book in the world, after the Bible.

Our next step was to begin to generate a list of what an exhibit entails. Students used terms like interactive, experience, primary and secondary resources (which I had taught them about in Grade 6) and explanations, which I added to our working anchor chart titled Museum Exhibit Success Criteria. It was important for the students to also be informed that they would be curating an exhibit on the Holocaust, but that they would not see the outline until more background knowledge had been built related to curating a Holocaust exhibit. They had to contextualize the learning.

Next, we went on a field trip to the Chaim and Sarah Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre. This local Holocaust information centre was a great place to look at the different tools that museums use to help engage visitors. There was a tablet with questions, expert groups who focused on specific exhibits and a prompt sheet that could help students think about text, audience and production which comes from both an Individuals and Societies lens through information literacy and the media literacy strand in Language and Literature. We also got to experience a new innovation in Holocaust survivor testimony, called New Dimensions in Testimony, featuring Pinchas Gutter, an aging survivor, who could answer almost any question asked by the curious Grade 7 audience. It was an amazing day of learning for everyone, and I added the student's insights from their prompt sheet to the list of success criteria.

Based on the work the students did at the museum, I was able to gauge that they all had a solid understanding of what an exhibit is and what makes it engaging for each of them. Once it was clear that there was a shared understanding, I was able to hand out the assignment. We scheduled a time when we had the Grade 7’s in the same period so we could bring them together as both discipline teachers to introduce the summative. The summative required the group to curate an exhibit using their selected artifact (the one the grouping was based on) and respond to their learning on the topic individually through a creative product with an accompanying artist’s statement.

From that point on, my class time was used to build content knowledge or for me to mull about as a creative collaborator to support the students as they built their exhibits. The student’s creative responses were mostly being developed at home. One student, who truly painted a masterpiece, backwards designed the time to begin as soon as he read his first story of a hidden child because he was so moved and wanted to work on it with his extra curricular art teacher's support (I had no idea he painted). Language and Literate classes were used to teach audience imperatives, editing and revision. My classroom was a messy maker space for a while, and I had to reassure my principal and our custodian that it was creative clutter (with a promise that it would be gone on April 24th).

My class had their four weekly periods for three weeks to work on their exhibits. They used the first week to develop the information plaque that explained their subject content. The following week, they had to commit to how they would curate their artifacts. The artifacts ranged from pictures of memorials to photographs of images, to diary entries, to narratives, to picture books. The students had to plan the layout of their exhibits around their artifacts, ensure that the teacher had approved their edits and that their work was audience-ready. Last Friday, our last working period, was pretty intense, and so was I. Besides inviting their parents for the first time, I knew that there would be Holocaust survivors viewing their work, and it upped the bar in terms of content and sense of detail. We had to ensure the quality of their work with respect to their audience.

On Monday, the students arrived and began setting up their exhibits. The displays were varied, had dimension and reflected a lot of divergent thinking. Some students created interactive digital quizzes to review content from learning boards, one used virtual reality goggles to show how inundating propaganda can be, one plasticine in dioramas to retell the story of Hannah Senesh, another invited viewers to sketch their responses to seeing the artwork that children made during the Holocaust, one used fans to make the fiery tissue paper fire look like it was actually burning a synagogue to represent the brutality of Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass). One group focused on resistance and concluded that these superheroes required comic strips to tell the story of their brave exploits. Another group tried to help viewers experience the confinement of the Warsaw Ghetto by having them look into a box full of images with a mirror reflecting them inside. I could write a post about each one and am sorry to leave some out in my description. The photographs below don't capture the atmosphere in the room or the impressive variation in each exhibit. There were monuments, paintings, drawings, Lego sculptures, other experiential exhibit features. More profoundly, there was symbolism, layers of meaning and depth.

Projects like this only really come together in the final moments. When the exhibits were set up, I added a bowl full of stones and the explanation that in Judaism, a stone is placed on a gravesite as a lasting presence of the person life and memory. The museum visitors were asked to place a stone on an exhibit that spoke to them. After everything was set up and the soundtrack to Schindler’s List was playing in a loop in the background, with the candle lights form the exhibits flickering in the dimmed light of the room, the Yizkor Museum was ready to open its doors.

Every class from Grade 5-8 came to view the museum in 15 minute shifts. I spent all my spares there listening to the feedback, fixing anything out of place and taking pride in our student’s beautiful work. So many visitors were informed and engaged. The gallery was well-attended by adults, too. Many colleagues and parents came, some with their survivor parents. I felt honoured that they were moved by it.

At the end of the day, the Grade 7’s came to view and learn from each other's exhibits and work on the reflection that was a mandatory part of the ID unit. I felt so much pride sharing the feedback I had heard. I communicated why this assignment was so much bigger than whatever bands they meet in terms of criteria on the rubrics. While their Language and Literature teacher and I would moderate the marking of their work, they had all achieved something important. This is a truly rich task.

These grade 7 students will be among the last generation to meet a survivor. Last year, there were 100,000 Holocaust survivors left. It was entrusted to me as their teacher to begin their inquiry about the Holocaust, and I hope they will drive their own learning from here. While I could only scratch the surface of the complexity and depravity of this dark time in human history, I could help them investigate their information and invest in their learning. I could also help encourage them not to be indifferent to genocide or any acts of hate. It is our duty as human beings and as Jews to 'bear witness’ to what happened and help ensure that Never Again means never again for anyone.


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