Facing History, Data, and Ourselves
One of the most rewarding parts of my teaching experience has been my ongoing relationship with Facing History and Ourselves, an organization based outside of Boston that has a track record of more than thirty years engaging teachers and students in deep scholarship around profound moral and ethical issues. The organization’s founder, Margot Stern Strom, was a teacher who realized that there had to be a better educational approach to hard history, such as the Holocaust. Through Strom’s leadership, Facing History and Ourselves developed a pedagogical approach that focused on German society between the wars, and asked some challenging questions about causes of the Holocaust: how did an educated and civilized German public become the perpetrators and bystanders in a genocide? What were their underlying concepts of themselves, as individuals and as a nation? Whom did they classify as “us” and “them” – and what were the implications of those classifications as the Nazis seized power and began laying the groundwork for the Final Solution? The teaching methods involved introducing key concepts through a personal approach, but ultimately relied on critical
