Living Proof - The Holocaust Happened (Chapter III of The Dark Side of the Truth: Using Oral History as a Vehicle for Studying Ourselves and Contemporary History) written and produced by the students and teachers of Ditmas Middle School.
As part of the 8th grade Social Studies course in American History, Mr. Michael Downes, Law Studies instructor, and I decided to infuse oral history techniques and literature into the teaching and learning. Toward that end, we modeled for the students how to develop three key questions on a topic and then sit back, listen, transcribe and reflect.
Next, I re-read (in light of the class’s study of World War II) Studs Terkel’s The Good War, which I had read when I first discovered oral history as a genre. The individual oral histories collected by Studs Terkel included rich, multiple-perspective interviews on D-Day and Internment Camps. I asked the students to imaginatively develop poetry or point of view, stream of consciousness responses to that material. Both Mr. Downes and I love period music, so we also introduced audio files of George M. Cohan music to give the students a lyric counterpart to their reading and text. This, involved Internet sourced music and projected lyrics accompanied by films, in tandem with the textbook they used, as well as Studs Terkel material.
The students literally smiled away. For them, history lessons were morphing into active learning experiences through which the period studied comes alive. During the course of the project they created fictionalizations of Terkel-inspired oral histories, and interviewed actual Holocaust survivors personally, becoming authentic historians in the process.
Principal, Barry Kevorkian and Assistant Principal, Michele Esposito supported the project by chatting informally with its leaders and advocating that other classes in the school sample this approach and its results.
We founded the Living Proof Oral History Center in the school, including the interviews with Holocaust survivors John Ranz, Rae Kaner, Hannah Rigler, and Yehudah Lindenblatt. In addition to the interviewing and writing the students did, they were filmed doing survivor-inspired story reenactments and rap music by Mr. David Liotta, dedicated social studies teacher, videographer and rap artist.
The sense of life mission and purpose acquired by the students through participation in this project is something of greater value to them than the improved test scores which will no doubt result, as well.
Dr. Rose Reissman,
Ditmas Literacy Consultant and Project Coordinator
Tdst June 6a (Revised)
