For 10 days in March, four educators from the Mountain Views School District (MVSD) immersed themselves in an extraordinary professional development opportunity: traveling throughout Germany, the Netherlands, and France to explore the legacy of international human rights issues, the Holocaust, genocide, and crimes against humanity around the world.
With funding support provided by the Cohen Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College in New Hampshire, the MVSD teachers joined with other educators to visit such diverse and harrowing settings of the World War II and Holocaust eras as the Palace of Justice and Nazi Kongresshalle in Nuremburg, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, the former Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp and the nearby Memorial Alsace Moselle in the Alsace-Lorraine region of northern France, and the Anne Frank House and the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands.
The MVSD educators who partook of this special journey through history and the present day are Woodstock Union High School and Middle School (WUHS/MS) 10th-grade English teacher Nate Clifford, literacy interventionist Marcia Davis, 9th-grade English teacher Lauren Sullivan-Justice, and Reading Elementary School pre-K and kindergarten teacher Lois Fein. For the past several years, Sullivan-Justice has collaborated with WUHS/MS history teacher Nick Wolfe to teach a Holocaust and genocide unit within the 9th-grade English curriculum at WUHS/MS.
The goal of sending the four teachers on the Cohen Institute study tour was to build additional background knowledge and place-based educational experience for the MVSD educators. Over the course of the coming summer, the teachers will collaborate with MVSD Director of Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment Jennifer Settle to prepare a coordinated curriculum for teaching about human rights, the Holocaust and genocide in grades 7-12 at WUHS/MS beginning with the 2025-26 school year that commences in late August. But before those curriculum upgrades, yet another by-product of the MVSD group’s European tour will wrap up this school year at WUHS/MS: an internationally travelling exhibition, “Anne Frank: A History for Today,” that will be on display at the WUHS/MS Library from May 26 through June 13.
Settle and the four MVSD educators all spoke emotionally at an MVSD School Board meeting on May 5 regarding the March tour of Holocaust-related sites in Germany, the Netherlands, and France, and the powerful impact it is expected to have on their classrooms in times ahead.
For the full story, please see our May 22 edition of the Vermont Standard.
