Educator Steve Cohen: Memory | Facing History & Ourselves
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Educator Steve Cohen: Memory

Steve Cohen, Senior Lecturer at Tufts University’s Department of Education, discusses the impact that learning Facing History has on students.
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Video

Language

English — US

Subject

  • History
  • Culture & Identity

Educator Steve Cohen: Memory

Students often ask after they've studied history, "so what?" Why did I have to learn about these dead people? How does this affect me today? Well, one of the things we've found as we've taught this unit on Facing History and Ourselves is that the students soon have a different idea about history.

In fact, "so what?" no longer is part of their vocabulary because they can see the ramifications and repercussions. And they begin to think about history in different ways than they had previously. They no longer think about just the immediate past. They often go back further into the past.

Our students are very interested, in fact, hungry to find out about the Armenian Genocide-- the genocide that occurred during the First World War. As we noted earlier, genocide often occurs under the cover of war.

So the legacies of the Holocaust have really forced our students to become historians themselves. They think about what happened in Germany in the 1930s, what happened in the rest of Europe during the 1940s, and how the rest of the world has had to try to confront what happened and come to conclusions about how the world will live together.

This hasn't always been successful. We don't have a happy story with a ribbon to wind around it and to say, from this, we've all learned better living conditions in the 20th century. In fact, we recognize that the world is still a perilous place. And that makes it even more important for students, who are about to take their place in the world, to recognize there is a great deal of work to be done.

One of the things, in fact, that happens as we think about the results of World War II and mass murder of millions of human beings was that a new word was coined, a word that had never existed before.

Raphael Lemkin, an international lawyer coined the phrase genocide and coined the word genocide. Genocide meant the mass murder of a people. It was a word that had never been used before in human history, and it's one that was used to describe the mass murder of the Jews.

Many people thought that genocide would never have to be used again. One of the reasons we teach this curriculum and discuss it with our students is that genocide is a word, unfortunately, that we've come to see in other circumstances as well.

Educator Steve Cohen: Memory

How to Cite This Video

Facing History & Ourselves, “Educator Steve Cohen: Memory,” video, last updated June 26, 2014.

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Using the strategies from Facing History is almost like an awakening.
— Claudia Bautista, Santa Monica, Calif