Case Study 18A
Facing History and Ourselves*
Dennis J. Barr and Betty Bardige
* The authors acknowledge, with gratitude, Marty Sleeper, Margot Strom, Doc Miller, the members of the Facing History Core Knowledge working group, Jocelyn Stanton, and Karen Murphy for their contributions to this chapter.
Facing History and Ourselves calls for you to expand your obligations and to care for the many hurting people in the world. . . . It calls for you to take action when you see something wrong with the environment we live in. . . . I faced history one day and found myself.
—Facing History and Ourselves student
Facing History dares to pose the question, how do I affect the moral and intellectual development of my students? We must ask this question about all of the students with whom we work, students from all walks of life, whether their paths have been windy or straight, paved or dirty, and even though we do not know where they will lead. If the answers come too quickly, they are probably false. If they don’t come at all, then we are all in trouble—teachers, students, and ultimately the society of which we are a part.
—Facing History and Ourselves teacher
Facing History and Ourselves is an international educational and professional development organization whose mission is to engage students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice, and anti-Semitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry. Facing History and Ourselves believes that by studying the historical development of the Holocaust and other examples of dehumanization, collective violence, and genocide, students can make essential connections between history and the moral and civic choices they confront in their own lives.
Facing History and Ourselves has nine offices in North America, an international hub in London, and a network of twenty-nine thousand educators who reach nearly 1.9 million students each year. For this purpose, the Facing History and Ourselves “program” refers to the application of Facing History principles, content, and methodology to teacher professional development and classroom implementation. Facing History’s work encompasses a broader range of activities, however, including a model for systemic reform in schools, districts, and school systems internationally. In addition, since neither schools nor school systems exist in isolation from the communities of which they are a part, Facing History reaches audiences beyond the classroom through major public events such as a traveling multimedia exhibition, speaker series, and academic conferences in partnership with major universities. Facing History’s website (www.facinghistory.org) and online resources attract more than seven hundred thousand visits from 215 countries and territories annually.
Core Tenets of Facing History and Ourselves
Facing History and Ourselves assumes that democracies are human enterprises that can only remain vital through the active, thoughtful, and socially responsible participation of their citizens. Education can be used as a critical tool for building and preserving democratic civil society. At the same time, history has shown how education can also be used to dehumanize and marginalize some groups and as a tool to subvert the values that are essential to preserving human rights and democracy. Facing History highlights the importance of creating learning environments that encourage reflection, deliberation, debate, and questioning processes that allow teachers and students to develop well-informed perspectives and judgments about complex social, moral, civic, and political issues.
Moral development is a lifelong process, beginning in early childhood and extending through adulthood. It takes on special urgency in adolescence, however, when children need to be seen as moral philosophers (Kohlberg & Gilligan, 1971) as they develop a sense of moral agency, principled self-worth, and voice. Similarly, adolescence is a critical period for the development of civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions. Adolescence is, by definition, a time of transition, when young people begin to take their places as responsible and participating members of their communities. As young people weigh their future choices, they wrestle with issues of loyalty and belief. The adolescent’s central developmental questions are “Who am I?” “Do I matter?” and “How can I make a difference?” They seek people and paths that are worthy of their loyalty and commitment, challenge hypocrisy, and bring passion and new perspectives to enterprises that capture their imaginations and engage their involvement (Bardige, 2011).
Facing History brings historical and moral dimensions to civic education. To become informed and thoughtful citizens of their communities and of the increasingly interconnected and interdependent world, adolescents need civic education that goes beyond the traditional civics class. They must develop sufficient background in history and world affairs—as well as in science and the humanities—to know what to make of new information, or at least how to find it. Students need to understand the major controversies and conflicts of today’s world; the national and international institutions and processes that protect or imperil human rights, freedoms, and well-being; and the pivotal events and processes that have shaped our world and continue to influence our common destiny.
In addition to knowledge of history and other social sciences, and moral and civic competencies and dispositions, tomorrow’s world citizens will need literacy and media skills that enable them to find, interpret, and evaluate information and to communicate their views with integrity and persuasiveness. They will need to develop “habits of mind” that encompass multiple-perspective taking, admit divergent views and discrepant information, tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity, and ultimately form integrated understandings and judgments on which they can base individual and collective action.
If as adults we want the next generation to join us in building more compassionate and inclusive communities, in standing up to injustice and preventing cruelty and violence, we will need to stretch their imaginations—and our own—as together we attempt to walk in unfamiliar shoes and communicate across cultural and ideological divides. At the same time, young people will need worthy models to emulate and challenge their thinking. We will need to engage them in discussions and take their questions and positions seriously. And we will need to give them many opportunities to develop their own opinions and voices and to practice empathy, ethical decision making, and civic participation in caring communities as well as in circumstances that call forth their moral outrage and challenge them to put their beliefs into action.
The Facing History and Ourselves Program
The Facing History and Ourselves program integrates compelling content and rigorous inquiry, not a specific lesson sequence. As a model of professional development, studying, and teaching, Facing History encompasses the teacher’s intellectual and emotional engagement, which along with the particulars of her classroom situation guides mindful selection of resources, activities, guiding or “essential” questions, and assignments. The journey that each class takes is shaped by the insights and questions these experiences spark for that particular group of teacher(s) and students. At the same time, each journey is built around a core of common elements—regardless of whether the “course” being taught is seen as primarily history, literature, art, humanities, civics, or ethics; whether it is taught to adolescent or adult learners; whether it is a unit within a longer sequence, a core or elective course, or a yearlong or multiyear program; and regardless of the particular time and place in which it is offered.
The common core elements of a Facing History course are designed in a “scope and sequence” framework that organizes the inquiry and shapes the journey that students and teachers will take together. The scope and sequence begins with what students know and care most about—themselves and the social/moral worlds they inhabit. Through evocative literature, art, and individual and group activities, students probe themes of identity, individuality, conformity, stereotyping, group loyalty, and responsibilities to those beyond one’s immediate circle. They explore how society influences individuals and how individuals can influence their society. They examine how, for individuals, communities, and nations, in-group identity and cohesion can come at the expense of exclusion, stereotyping, marginalization, and dehumanization of those in “out-groups.” They see people who fell down in terms of their moral actions, but they also see people who stood up. As they will again and again when they look at distressing history, they face their own propensities to participate in or overlook cruelty and to ignore opportunities to help (Bardige, 2011).
In the early part of their journey, students and teachers begin to build a common language, a “vocabulary of ethical decision making.” It includes words like victim, victimizer, bystander and upstander, democracy, citizen, civic participation and patriotism, stereotype, propaganda, ostracism, racism, and anti-Semitism. This core vocabulary will serve students well as they study the past and make connections to the present. It will also expand and deepen as historical examples and students’ judgments of their protagonists’ actions and/or inaction give new meanings and resonance to the words.
After an exploration of questions about identity and membership, courses examine a historical case study in depth. The foundational resource book, Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior (Strom, 1994), focuses on the failure of democracy in Germany and the events leading to the Holocaust. It provides a rich set of materials to support student and teacher inquiry. The history is examined as something that did not have to happen, the result of choices made and neglected by individuals and groups at all levels of society. Finally, it provides multiple entry points into explorations of related historical content and present-day issues, enabling individual classes and students to “go deeper” into content that holds particular interest or relevance for them. Examining the collapse of democracy in Weimar Germany, the rise of the Nazis, and the role of propaganda, conformity, and obedience in turning neighbor against neighbor provides students with new perspective on the present as well as the past.
In all Facing History and Ourselves materials, history is looked at through multiple lenses, incorporating eyewitness accounts and other primary sources along with interpretative material and reflections on root causes. Why, a course may ask, do some people willingly conform to the norms of a group even when those norms encourage wrongdoing, while others speak out and resist? Students’ answers will be stretched by their study of history; by the findings and reflections of psychologists and social scientists; by the reflections of artists, writers, scholars, and eyewitnesses; and by their own intellectual, moral, and emotional reasoning and that of their teachers and classmates. Studying resources such as an interview with a concentration camp commander, a story of a German university professor whose colleagues were expelled and whose activities became increasingly constrained, and a video about a village in France where Jews were hidden may offer students entry points for a rich discussion of issues of compassion, courage, and resistance in their own worlds. At the same time, such readings can provide needed distance and perspective on issues and events that may yet be too raw, painful, or controversial to discuss directly.
Having delved into a historical period, students who had been initially asked to suspend their prejudgments and prejudices are asked to reflect on and form judgments about the actions and inactions of the people whose lives they have studied. How has the world judged these historical actors? Do students feel that justice has been served? In addition, students consider what needs to be remembered and memorialized and the ongoing consequences or legacies of the history they studied. What paths to restitution or reconciliation have been, or might be, taken?
The final section of the scope and sequence involves connecting what students have been studying to questions about prevention, civic engagement, and their own participation in society. It usually begins with study and reflection—delving into the choices of those who have “made a difference” in large and small ways. For many individual students and sometimes for a whole class, it leads to a student-initiated action or project—as simple as writing a letter to a politician, helping with a community fund-raiser, or not laughing at an ethnic joke, or as complicated as staging a protest march or exhibition, orchestrating a discussion of class or school norms that changes policy and behavior, or starting a blog or a service club. And often, of course, the important choices are made long after the course has ended.
There is an ongoing interplay between “facing history” and “facing ourselves” throughout this scope and sequence. The meaning students make of core themes of the course, such as issues of inclusion and exclusion, are informed both by personal experience and their study of history. Students’ perspectives on in-groups and out-groups in their school or community, for example, can provide the teacher with critical information about what is relevant to them and how their moral imaginations might be stretched through the Facing History journey.
One eighth grader, Patty, wrote in her Facing History journal about the teasing of immigrant students in her school, “I know how I feel, which is that it’s wrong. But I’m not planning on standing up for those people even though I know it’s wrong, ’cause I mean, it’s not that big of a deal. Even though if it happened to me it would be.”
Though she judges the way the immigrant students are being treated as “wrong,” she also sees it as “not that big of a deal.” The vocabulary, content, and pedagogy of Facing History may provide the opportunity for Patty and her classmates to think more deeply about their involvement in relation to such issues. Patty might come to see, for example, that she does not include “those people” in her universe of responsibility (a concept Facing History courses address), and to consider how her decisions are both shaped by and influence the culture in the school.
In this particular school, a culture of fear influenced students’ responses to everyday ethical issues. Another girl, Jenny, put it this way, “Like if you see someone else getting picked on, in your mind, like a part of you thinks it’s wrong but another part is like, yes I am glad they’re being picked on so then I won’t be picked on, so then you join in so then they won’t look at you, you know?”
Jenny and Patty, like many students in similar school cultures, grapple with conflicting motivations, such as the wish to act according to their values but also to stay psychologically and physically safe. Facing History helps students to gain new perspective on these kinds of dilemmas and the consequences of their daily choices.
Pedagogical Emphases
As we have seen, the content of a Facing History and Ourselves course can be laid out on a scope and sequence map, but its power to build the knowledge, skills, and dispositions of civic learning grounded in historical and moral considerations comes from the fusion of content and pedagogy. To Facing History, pedagogy is an active, always challenging process of engaging young people in an intellectual, emotional, and ethical enterprise worthy of their commitment. This enterprise requires personal reflection and active interaction with others.
The first pedagogical emphasis is intellectual rigor. Adolescents, by and large, are keenly interested in questions of historical veracity and moral integrity, but a lack of historical knowledge and memory can skew their perspectives. At the same time, most are just developing the cognitive capacity to grasp the ways in which an outcome can be influenced by multiple interacting factors. They may believe that there are “two sides to the story” and seek out alternative views, yet they may have difficulty holding in mind more than one explanation or recognizing that the “two sides” they see do not carry equal moral or explanatory weight (Bardige, 1983). Intellectual honesty in teaching adolescents, therefore, requires that historical narratives not only be factually accurate but also authentic in their use and portrayal of eyewitness accounts and other primary sources; unbiased in their inclusion of multiple relevant perspectives; and truthful in their representations of scope and scale, competing causal explanations, the weight of evidence favoring one explanation, conclusion, perspective, or judgment over another, and the limitations of current knowledge.
Historical content must also be explored in sufficient depth to allow students to follow the historical narrative and reflect upon its implications. Teachers help students to resist the urge to frame a neat story of the triumph of good or evil so that students can engage with the complexities of what actually happened and understand the relationships among historical events. When history is read as a human story—full of complexity and challenge, propelled by the decisions of individuals who could not always anticipate their consequences—it comes alive. History becomes a body of knowledge that adolescents can think and debate about and can mine for lessons with present-day relevance.
The second pedagogical emphasis involves allowing for and attending to students’ emotional engagement with the historical content and with the views and feelings shared in class discussions. When the arc of a historical narrative resonates with adolescents’ own emerging stories, they can “take in” the emotions of others, grapple with the complexities of their life situations, empathize with them, and learn from their experiences.
The active and ongoing participation of the teacher is critical in assessing what her students know and can do, what they feel strongly about, what they want to know more about, and what will engage and stretch their hearts, minds, and values. Curricular materials and approaches must be integrated with tools that provide teachers with insight into students’ thoughts and feelings, including thought-provoking assignments, curriculum-embedded assessments, and engaging group discussion activities. And any program of study must be backed up by a set of well-chosen, well-organized resources that enable teachers and students to extend their investigations and enlarge their understanding. When history is taught and learned in this way, intellectual rigor is not opposed to emotional engagement, but rather stimulates it. Stories chosen for their emotional resonance are especially compelling when they are both true and authentically told.
The third component at the heart of Facing History’s pedagogy is ethical reflection. The complexities of history and life can stimulate ethical reflection that, in turn, promotes more sophisticated moral reasoning (Lieberman, 1981). Complicating one’s thinking is especially critical in the realms of social perspective taking (Selman, 2003) and moral reasoning (Power, Higgins, & Kohlberg, 1989). When teachers seek to highlight the ethical dimensions of history, they ask different kinds of questions than when they only seek to promote dispassionate understanding (Reimer, Paolitto, & Hersh, 1979).* They focus on moments of choice and call students’ attention to the moral dilemmas they pose. They help students articulate their own perspectives as to the right or best choice, explain their reasoning, and then step into others’ shoes and take their perspectives into account. Such discussions help students to learn from the failures of history and steer a path between the dangers of dogma and the “anything goes” abyss of moral relativism. Both extremes have often proved dangerously seductive to adolescents and young adults, who are looking for something to believe in and at the same time testing their ability to choose their own paths. Nowhere is this clearer than in the history of the Holocaust and the events that led up to it.
Facing History teachers deepen students’ historical understanding by sparking rigorous analysis, emotional engagement, and ethical reflection that feed and are fed by each other. Students actively engage with what they are reading, hearing, and seeing. They respond with empathy, concern, or outrage; they examine their initial reactions in light of new or discrepant information or a teacher or classmate’s question; they rethink their beliefs and commitments and deepen their understanding in light of what they have learned. In sum, within the context of an emotionally supportive, intellectually stimulating, and ethically focused classroom, students are challenged to face history, face themselves, and practice the skills and habits of informed, reflective, and ethically grounded democratic citizenship.
The fourth pedagogical emphasis makes historical analysis, emotional engagement, and ethical reflection possible and fruitful: creating a safe, reflective, and engaging classroom. Reflection, conversation, and debate are known to be essential to fostering social and moral growth. The distinctive teaching philosophy of Facing History and Ourselves relies on the moral discourse of history to deepen adolescents’ understanding of humanity. It takes a special kind of learning environment, what Facing History calls a “reflective classroom community,” to achieve such a goal (Miller, 2009).
To create the reflective classroom that is essential to teaching Facing History and Ourselves, teachers must (1) promote a climate of respect, (2) model a culture of questioning, (3) nurture student voice, (4) create space for diverse viewpoints, (5) deepen reflection through thoughtful silence, and (6) honor different learning styles.
In reflective classrooms, students’ knowledge is constructed rather than passively absorbed. Students are prompted to join with teachers in posing problems to foster “critical consciousness” (Freire, 1994). In reflective classrooms, teaching and learning are conceived as social endeavors in which a healthy exchange of ideas is welcome. Students are encouraged to engage in dialogue within a community of learners, to look deeply, to question underlying assumptions, and to discern underlying values being presented. Students are encouraged to voice their own opinions and to actively listen to others, to treat different students and different perspectives with patience and respect, and to recognize that there are always more perspectives and more to learn. Learning in these contexts nurtures students’ humility as well as confidence—humility because they come to see that they have no “corner” on the truth, and confidence because they know their opinion will still be taken seriously. Perhaps this is why the educator Diane Moore has argued that “encouraging students to take themselves seriously and inspiring in them the confidence to do so are two of the most important roles of an educator in a multicultural democracy” (Moore, 2006, p. 11). As John Dewey has argued, classrooms like these are not training grounds for future democratic action but rather places where democracy is already enacted (Dewey, 1916).
The following example illustrates what can happen when a teacher skillfully fosters a reflective classroom that is intellectually rigorous, emotionally engaging, and ethically rich. The context is a yearlong humanities course in a public high school in an urban community. The class, composed of sixteen students, all of whom are recent immigrants to the United States, had been using Facing History resources to study the Rwandan genocide. The teacher describes the background for a lively class discussion that incorporates key themes and resources of the course and engages diverse perspectives:
My students have been working on their digital stories, which are stories of moral dilemmas and universes of obligation. The students had a choice: they could write a story pertaining to their community project or they could write a story about Rwanda. We have been working on community projects for the last two months, and students have been observing, researching, and questioning their communities around a key issue. We also just finished a unit on the Rwandan genocide, where students wrote and debated issues of obligation and accountability. Together, we decided to create a collection of community dilemmas of people trying to understand their moral obligations during complex times. Each student wrote a script for their story. They recorded someone reading it, and then they found or created images to illustrate it. The final step is combining both the audio and visual into a three minute movie called a “digital story.” After a class period of editing and searching for images, a student asked me if we could have a “sophisticated conversation” about the story-making process. The rest of the class agreed that a discussion would be helpful to their projects.
We began. The students admitted that they were struggling with finding images to best represent their stories. One student, Elizabeth, said to the group, “You know, many of our stories are about violence, and I don’t know how to represent violence. I don’t know what would be an appropriate image. I don’t want to do something inappropriate.”
Immediately, Omar answered her, “Who says what is appropriate? Who says what is inappropriate? If it’s truth, if you think it represents your story, it’s appropriate. It has to be your story, not someone else’s story.”
From there, with no help from me, students starting drawing connections to Fahrenheit 451, which we read together in September. One student said, “I connect this to Fahrenheit 451, and how the people burned books. They said that some ideas shouldn’t be in society, and so they burned them. It’s like saying what images are appropriate or not. Who says what should be in society? It’s like limiting our freedom of speech.”
From there, Abdoul chimed in. “I see your point, but I think there are some books that should be burned. Hitler’s book is one of those books.”
The students all jumped in. “But if Hitler’s book is burned, how will we learn about him? How will we learn about history? What examples will we have of how genocide happens? If we burn his book, aren’t we being just like him? If we start burning books we disagree with, then someone might burn our books one day.”
Abdoul argued, “We can learn about the Holocaust in other ways. I take Elie Wiesel as an example. His book is a better book to use to learn about the Holocaust.”
“But how can you decide what books people should learn from?” another began. “We need different ideas to understand different societies. Different people have different ideas. We have to accept that.”
A student named Fatoumata interjected, “I am from Africa. You are from Africa. Where is our history? Do you carry it with you? How would you feel if they burned our history? Don’t you want people to know our history?”
The conversation continued. From there, the class connected the discussion to the essential question I used to frame the first unit in September: “What is the nature of humans? Are humans born good or evil?”
“I think humans are neutral!” Ankita firmly said. “It’s not like you’re evil and you’re good and I’m this and you’re that. It’s that you do evil things or good things sometimes. You make choices.”
“Right,” one said, “but can humans be trusted to live with all the different ideas in society? Can we trust humanity enough to not burn books?”
“It’s all about trust,” another agreed. “You have to trust humanity with all types of speech.”
“But how do you know you can trust someone?” Sunny asked the group.
The answers varied:
“You can see it in their face.”
“You can’t.”
“I don’t trust people until they really know me.”
“You can trust someone by being trustworthy yourself.”
“You can trust someone by being the change.”
“You have to be the person you hope others will be to you.”
“However, maybe we trust people who look like us and sound like us,” Ankita admitted. “Maybe we need to start trusting people who don’t look like us.”
“I think it depends on your experience with trust and your experiences with different people,” Abdoul suggested.
“I think it’s all about fear, and fear of people who aren’t like you. We have to trust people when they say they are trustworthy.” Omar offered.
“We keep saying that if we trust people, the world will be better. But look at our community projects. All of us are now talking about violence. How can we trust in a world where all we see is violence?”
At the end of the conversation, our class only had more questions. But for me, as their teacher, I was left with something more. These conversations showed me that my students were engaged; engaged with the curriculum, with choice-making, and with creating a society where all can participate. I often ask how educators can help create a more informed and active citizenry. After a discussion like this, I felt one step closer to the answer. (Stanton & Sleeper, 2009)
The students are talking about many different things—their histories; book burning in Nazi Germany; the Holocaust; violence in their worlds; and trust in the people they see, read about, and interact with. They have explored all of these topics in more focused discussions during their course, and now they are doing the hard work of thinking about what such issues mean in their own lives. But most of all they are talking about humanity. The essential lesson with which they are grappling is how to cope with and understand differences in the world in which they live. In doing so, they are coming to grips with the question, how do I make a difference?—a question constantly on the minds of young people and one fundamental to any construction of civic education.
Preparing and Supporting Teachers and Schools
Since its founding in 1976, Facing History and Ourselves has recognized that teacher effectiveness is at the heart of educational success for students. Facing History provides professional development seminars, workshops, coaching, and print and online resources for teachers, helping them to create reflective classrooms and to use the content and pedagogy to promote their students’ growth as thoughtful participants in society, as well as their academic achievement.
Teachers come to Facing History and Ourselves by many paths. Some are sent or mandated by administrators; others come at their own initiative, either alone or with like-minded colleagues. Some come having already made a commitment; others are merely curious. Most find that what the program has to offer is meaningful to them as adults as well as teachers, and the task of sharing it with students is one that requires not only their own courage, thoughtfulness, and willingness to be a student again, but also the support of mentors and colleagues.
To become effective Facing History and Ourselves educators, teachers first need time to step back and reflect together with colleagues. During professional development seminars and workshops, they get time as learners to explore the concepts at the core of the scope and sequence and to deepen their understanding of the history they intend to teach. They look at and experience a variety of ways they can constructively engage their students in the study of this history and its implications for how we live today. All of this is done in community with the support of Facing History staff, colleagues, scholars, and ideally also school administrators and parents. At the same time, teachers build relationships with colleagues who will share their challenges and with a staff member who will provide ongoing support.
In its teacher preparation efforts, Facing History and Ourselves is explicit both about the need for support and effective methods of obtaining it. Administrators and supervisors need to understand the program and value its aims and content so that they can adjust schedules and respond to parent and community concerns when needed and can foster a schoolwide culture that builds upon the lessons of Facing History and supports civic learning beyond the classroom. Facing History urges teachers to make their efforts visible to parents, other teachers, administrators, and community members, inviting them to sit in on classes and professional discussions, offering curriculum night presentations or extended study group opportunities, or linking them with adult education offerings in the community. Facing History staff continually follow up with teachers who have attended their seminars, listening to teachers’ observations and concerns, suggesting additional resources, arranging for speakers, and sharing the joys of uncovering students’ moral insights and growing sense of the importance of their education and their “choices to participate.”
Applying Facing History and Ourselves in New Contexts
From its beginnings, Facing History and Ourselves has been international, with outreach to educators and scholars from around the world. Facing History has staff in Toronto and London supporting extensive work in Canada and the UK, and it provides professional development and follow-up coaching to educators in dozens of other countries. Partnerships with educational organizations in South Africa, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, and Israel have allowed the work to expand broadly in those locations.
Since 2003, the global work of Facing History and Ourselves has included the facilitation of teacher professional development seminars in South Africa, Rwanda, and Northern Ireland and the development of appropriate follow-up strategies tailored to each country’s needs and educational context. Importantly, each of these countries is emerging from a history of violence, division, and trauma, and each is at a significant point in the process of transition. These countries are places where the legacies of recent conflict remain painfully present and where teachers, charged with the responsibility of teaching historical narratives that themselves remain the subject of intense controversy, are struggling with the burden of their own memories. Facing History’s experience in each of these countries demonstrates the enormous challenges that confront educators who too often are left to address conflicts and promote reconciliation without the necessary tools and support (Murphy, Sleeper, & Strom, 2011).
In these postviolence societies where the program has been introduced, Facing History, working as an outsider, has acted as a medium for bringing together individuals and groups who have been on opposite sides of the conflict. Its approach to history education meets the need to look at history from multiple perspectives, to explore issues of ethics and decision making, to not treat historical events as inevitable, to locate individual moral agency, and to understand the process of history making itself. By introducing a discussion of historiography, teachers are brought into the process of transition within the context of history education, providing them with tools to understand and deconstruct the official narrative as well as to better understand the basis and background for the curriculum they have been given to teach. The Facing History model of continual interchange between facing the present and confronting history has allowed participants in professional development seminars to reflect upon their own identities, to think about the impact of identity on behavior, to contemplate how such thinking and actions can produce a sense of “we and they,” and to use those reflections as entry points to their own history. Further, using a case study of another time and place in which universal themes of human behavior, choice, and decision making are embedded has been critical to eliciting significant discussion and reflection upon the particulars of that history and its legacy for the present and future.
The salient challenge for teachers in these countries is for them to confront their own past and then help their students find meaning and connection to the present. In order to do so and to help students develop the skills necessary for democratic participation, teachers need to practice these things themselves. In the three postconflict societies where Facing History has been introduced, traditional pedagogies, with an emphasis on lecturing and exams, have been the dominant mode of instruction. Increasingly, education departments are recognizing that the interactive strategies and participatory methods that characterize Facing History represent a needed opportunity for modeling and practicing democracy. Facing History professional development seminars have allowed teachers to develop new skills that can then be integrated and modeled for their students. Evaluations of Facing History’s efforts in South Africa and in other countries in transition have demonstrated positive effects on teachers and students and have been used to adapt the approach for each country (Tibbetts, 2006).
How Do We Know Facing History and Ourselves Works?
Throughout the organization’s history, Facing History and Ourselves’ evaluation staff and independent researchers have carried out more than one hundred studies that have yielded a large body of knowledge about the model’s effectiveness, as well as knowledge about teacher and adolescent development more generally (Barr, 2010; Brabeck, Kenny, Stryker, Tollefson, & Strom, 1994; Schultz, Barr, & Selman, 2001; Tibbetts, 2006). Independent experts and review panels have repeatedly validated the program’s effectiveness based on the findings of evaluation studies. Facing History was selected for membership in the U.S. Department of Education’s National Diffusion Network (NDN) from 1980 to 1996 as an exemplary program (Lieberman, 1993). Since that time, research on Facing History’s model has been reviewed and provided the basis for external validation as a promising approach under the U.S. Department of Education’s Safe, Disciplined, and Drug-Free Schools initiative (U.S. Department of Education, 2001) and as a best practice in the fields of civic education (Fine, 2004); character education (Berkowitz & Bier, 2005); and Holocaust education (Isaacs et al., 2006).
Evaluation and basic research studies have examined different aspects of the following proposition: when teachers develop the knowledge, skills, confidence, and commitment needed to create safe and reflective learning environments and to use Facing History content and pedagogy to engage students’ hearts and minds, treating them as moral philosophers, capable of deeply examining the moral dimensions of history, students develop greater social, moral, intellectual, and civic maturity.
In 2009, independent researchers completed an ambitious randomized experiment studying the impact of Facing History and Ourselves on teachers and students (the National Professional Development and Evaluation Project: Barr, 2010; Boulay et al., 2011).† The study investigated the causal impacts of a Facing History professional development on high school teachers’ sense of professional efficacy and satisfaction, and on their students’ historical understanding and social and civic growth. Schools and teachers near Facing History’s U.S. offices that had not been exposed to Facing History were eligible to participate in the study. The study involved 134 teachers and 1,371 of their students in seventy-six schools in eight regions of the United States. Half were randomly assigned to receive Facing History training and implement the program in the first year, and half served as a control group and received these services a year later.
The results demonstrate that Facing History’s educational model is scalable beyond those teachers and schools who actively seek to use Facing History. The professional development provided by Facing History had a statistically significant and educationally meaningful impact on all aspects of teacher self-efficacy that were measured, as well as on teacher satisfaction and professional growth‡ (Boulay et al., 2011). Specifically, Facing History teachers felt more capable than the control group teachers, on average, of creating community and learner-centered classroom environments and implementing teaching practices to promote students’ historical understanding, civic learning, ethical awareness, and character development.
In addition, Facing History teachers were more energized and motivated by their professional development experiences than were teachers in the control group and felt a greater sense of accomplishment, engagement, and growth as teachers. No differences were found between Facing History and control teachers in the degree of their emotional exhaustion or depersonalization (disengagement from their work). These findings were sustained longitudinally over two years and were replicated with a second cohort of teachers.
Facing History students outperformed control students, on average, in their historical understanding and in certain civic learning outcomes. Historical understanding involves skills for interpreting evidence, for analyzing what leads people to make ethical choices, and for thinking critically about cause and effect. In the area of civic learning, Facing History had a statistically significant impact on five civic learning outcomes: civic efficacy; valuing the protection of the civil liberties of people with different views on social and political issues; awareness of the dangers of prejudice and discrimination; students’ perceptions of their class climate as safe, inclusive, and respectful of differences; and students’ perceptions of their class as offering them the opportunity to learn about meaningful civic matters. These academic and civic findings were replicated with a new group of students in an exploratory study that did not use an experimental design, suggesting that program effects are sustained in schools over time if the program is implemented fully.
Taken together, the teacher and student findings suggest that Facing History teachers not only felt a greater sense of efficacy in promoting student academic and civic learning than control teachers, but they were also, in fact, effective in practice because student outcomes were found in the same areas. Although the relationship between specific teacher and student changes was not the focus of this study, the alignment of these outcomes suggests that Facing History prepares teachers to address the following critical needs in education:
In sum, this rigorous study and the many other studies carried out over nearly four decades provide a robust picture of Facing History’s effectiveness in enhancing teachers’ sense of efficacy for promoting students’ abilities to participate in society as thoughtful, informed, caring, and active citizens.
Conclusion
Martin Niemoeller, a leader of the Confessing Church in Germany, voted for the Nazi party in 1933. By 1938, he was in a concentration camp. He survived the war, later reflecting,
In Germany, the Nazis came for the Communists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me. (Strom, 1994, p. 206)
Niemoeller considers the tragic consequences of indifference for those he did not see as belonging within his universe of responsibility. If we study history in depth and with rigor, using narratives such as this, we complicate and deepen our understanding of who we are as individuals. Looking at ourselves through lenses of group and national membership, we see how our identities and actions have been shaped by larger historical events and the actions and perceptions of those within and outside our groups. At the same time, of course, our growing self-understanding deepens our understanding of history—and may cause us to question interpretations or constructions of historical narratives. This is the interplay at the heart of the Facing History approach.
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*In a discussion of a videotape of her teaching, Margot Strom explained how focusing on the ethical questions raised by a hypothetical dilemma influenced the questions she asked her students, how their thinking was stretched through the discussion, and how she adapted the technique to deal with the greater complexities of real events in history.
†The study was funded by the Richard and Susan Smith Family Foundation. Data collection and analysis were carried out by Abt Associates Inc. Dennis J. Barr, Melinda Fine, Ethan Lowenstein, and Robert L. Selman served as coinvestigators.
‡P values for group differences on all efficacy outcomes range from .0004 to .0047. The effect sizes range from .49 to .85. The p value for the satisfaction with professional development, expertise, and engagement variable is .0001, and the effect size is 1.00. The p value for the personal accomplishment variable (one aspect of teacher satisfaction) is .0011, and the effect size is .49.