The power of place: Transforming human rights education through study abroad

• In Event: Emerging Issues in Student Mobility

Proposal

A 2018 survey of American adults commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany revealed shocking insights about the current understanding and regard for the Holocaust. Alarmingly, 22% of Millennials haven’t heard of or were not sure they had heard of the Holocaust and 49% of Millennials could not name one concentration camp or ghetto, despite there being over 40,000 of them located across Europe during the Holocaust. Perhaps most alarmingly, 58% of respondents believed that something like the Holocaust could happen again. Considering the rise of nationalist rhetoric, clashes over racial justice, and the violence facing Black Americans today, it is more important than ever that teachers address these complex topics in their classroom and equip their students with a sense of empathy and compassion for others.

Yet many teachers feel unprepared to discuss complex issues in their classrooms, sharing fears of parent and administrator pushback, discomfort with responding to student questions and comments, and lack of knowledge. Schools and colleges of education have a responsibility to prepare teachers who can teach in culturally responsive and relevant ways, leading many teacher education programs to include a diverse range of clinic experiences and multicultural courses. Teacher education study abroad is another avenue that schools and colleges of education have explored to help pre-service teachers develop a more ethnorelative world view and develop intercultural teaching and learning skills necessary for today’s global society (Cushner, 2007).

Many study abroad participants describe the experience as life changing, yet significant questions remain about the process of meaning-making and transformation. Considering transformation as a process rather than an end state, Mezirow (1999) outlined 10 steps of transformation, while Kottler (2002) framed transformation as less linear and sequential. In a 2008 review of transformation literature, Snyder (2008) outlined four specific elements of transformation. Coghlan and Weiler summarize Mezirow, Kottler, and Snyder, to note that “one can think of personal transformation as brought about by a novel event that is sufficiently challenging that it requires radical self-examination. As a result, the individual begins to reflect on and change what they know, how they know it, the way they think and the way they relate to others” (2018, p. 571). In this way, transformation is an individual process, with the novel event being different for each person involved. Further, self-examination can only be done by one person looking at themselves so the process must be individual. In order to understand transformation, we cannot simply claim that participants transformed, but rather we must seek to understand how they transformed.

This study examines the experiences of a cohort of preservice teachers from a large university in New England who studied abroad in London, engaging in coursework, research, and school based internships during the fall of 2011. Of particular interest in their experience is an experience named by them as transformative, a visit to the Auschwitz concentration camp. This paper examines their motivations for planning this trip to Auschwitz and how this experience transformed their thinking about human rights and human rights education. Using Snyder's (2008) elements of transformation, I analyze participant interviews through the lens of content, process, premise, and relational reflection to identify the elements of transformation and understand how this powerful experience shaped not only their commitments to human rights education, but also their pedagogy. Offering insights into the transformative power of place and human rights education, this paper examines how the international experience and accompanying visit to Auschwitz positioned these teachers to enact intercultural and antiracist educational practices in their professional and personal life.

Author

• Jonathan Simmons, University of Connecticut