Educator Steve Cohen: Welcome to a Facing History Class | Facing History & Ourselves
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Educator Steve Cohen: Welcome to a Facing History Class

Steve Cohen, Senior Lecturer at Tufts University’s Department of Education, gives an overview of the Facing History curriculum.
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At a Glance

Video

Language

English — US

Subject

  • History
  • Culture & Identity

Educator Steve Cohen: Welcome to a Facing History Class

Hi. My name is Steve Cohen. I'm a Senior Lecturer in Education at Tufts University. And I wanted to talk to you a little bit today about the Facing History and Ourselves curriculum. It's a curriculum often used in schools to help students think about the importance of history and the importance of their role in history. It's a curriculum that starts with issues in the individual and society, and takes students through the decisions that real people made in real time.

The history itself, one of World War II, and The Holocaust, and human behavior during that period of time is material that's hard. It's material that students have to think deeply about. And those are exactly the reasons why we know it's so important to teach it.

It's important for students to have a chance to grapple with issues in history that aren't black and white, issues in history that force them to recognize the views of all sorts of people and to recognize that we all have roles to play in history.

Sometimes it's said when teaching about history that the facts speak for themselves. They don't. The facts never speak for themselves. The facts have to be reconsidered, debated, discussed, analyzed. And they really force all of us to think about what we know and how we know it.

So instead of saying that the facts speak for themselves, we really want our students to be able to recognize that they are interpreting things that happened in the past in the same way that they're interpreting the world that they face today.

And for our students, we know that the past is not necessarily a guide to the future. But understanding what happened in the past will be very helpful in trying to stake out the path that we'll take going forward.

History is often not our students' favorite subject. History, for a lot of students, gets reduced to memorization, names, dates, and places. Facing History doesn't teach that way.

And one of the things we really try to do with the Facing History curriculum is to have our students think about who they are and where they are in society. History is a study of the past. But at the same time, we're looking at the past to try to understand the present.

What we're trying to do with our history instruction is to have our students understand that history is about real people making real decisions. And those things are where we focus in the Facing History curriculum.

Educator Steve Cohen: Welcome to a Facing History Class

How to Cite This Video

Facing History & Ourselves, “Educator Steve Cohen: Welcome to a Facing History Class,” video, last updated September 30, 2014.

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The resources I’m getting from my colleagues through Facing History have been just invaluable.
— Claudia Bautista, Santa Monica, Calif