In October 2023, the BC Ministry of Education and Child Care announced that Holocaust education would be specifically included in the Grade 10 social studies curriculum. This change is to come into effect starting with the 2025–26 school year.
The Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) has several resources, workshops, and lesson plans to support teachers in guiding students through learning about the Holocaust. The VHEC has also uploaded some of their teaching resources onto the BCTF’s TeachBC site.
Their latest exhibit has a focus on Nazi propaganda, and its uses to influence youth leading up to and during the Holocaust.
The exhibit walks students through examples of Nazi propaganda, some of which may not be obvious propaganda at first glance. Through questions, guided discussions, and worksheets, students learn how propaganda was used to exert influence and power. The exhibit culminates in connections to today’s world where students are asked to reflect on their practice of critically evaluating the information and media they come across.
“We want students to see that today we have different forms of censorship, for example, algorithms in social media that make it harder to get other viewpoints because they show you more of what you like,” shared Lise Kirchner, Director of Education at VHEC.
The exhibit also has a focus on acts of resistance, highlighting the Edelweiss pirates as one example. The Edelweiss pirates were a network of working-class teenagers who offered shelter to German army deserters, escapees from concentration camps, and Allied soldiers.
School groups can book free guided tours through the exhibits at VHEC to learn more about collective resistance during the Holocaust. For classes that cannot travel to VHEC, there are several other options to bring the learning to your school.
Schools can book workshops where a museum educator will visit the school (in-person if the school is in the Lower Mainland, or via Zoom if the school is outside the Lower Mainland) to work with students on a range of topics including art during the Holocaust, an introduction to propaganda, and moral courage.
VHEC also organizes Survivor Speakers, where a Holocaust survivor will visit a school. However, with fewer and fewer survivors remaining, the organization has also compiled 230 testimonies from local Holocaust survivors in their collection.
“One of the principles of Holocaust education is to use individual stories, not just statistics,” said Kirchner.
The Primary Voices section of their teaching resources is a curated collection of excerpts from survivor testimonies organized into key themes. Each theme includes lesson plans and classroom activities that build on survivor testimony videos.
The VHEC website (www.vhec.org) also includes several other short films, class book sets available for borrowing, resources, and lesson plans that teach historical thinking and analyzing of primary sources while also educating about the Holocaust.
This spring, VHEC will be launching an additional teaching resource called Fragments in Focus where students can virtually analyze artefacts from the VHEC collection, make inferences, and use their contextual knowledge of history to deepen their understanding of the Holocaust.
Kirchner shared that many of the lessons created by VHEC focus on practicing critical thinking skills and learning to be a historian.
Many social studies teachers are already covering the Holocaust as part of their curriculum, but with the new mandate, as teachers look to expand their units or create new learning opportunities for students, the VHEC collection of teaching resources provides plenty of ideas, plans, and activities. Visit www.vhec.org to learn more.