With the holidays approaching many of us are busy organizing family dinners, making or buying gifts for our loved ones and maybe even preparing for travel. As we anticipate this festive time of year, it can feel like the weeks are passing extra quickly with little time to slow down and savour the moment. Before you and your students break for the holidays, I wanted to leave you with a few ideas to spur reflection and personal growth in yourself and your students - ideas I hope will bring new energy into the new decade. 

Topics: Choosing to Participate, classroom lesson, Holiday lesson

Lesson #1: Reflecting on Our Consumption Patterns: How to be a more conscious consumer

(30-35 minutes)

Topics: Choosing to Participate, classroom lesson

In this blog post, British Columbia educator Lindsay Hutchison shares how she engaged her Genocide 12 course students in an inquiry project on resistance during the Holocaust.  She walks us through the design and reflection behind this project and shares her assignment outline and several of the students' creative responses. 

Topics: Genocide/Collective Violence, Holocaust Education, resistance, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanities Course, Holocaust and Human Behaviour, Inquiry, Creative

In a Facing History and Ourselves classroom, teachers are often developing creative ways to engage students in learning history. In this blog post, Elise Bigley tells us how she created a digital game- and invites students to create their own digital game- to deepen student learning from primary testimonies and source documents. She introduces us to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre's incredible archive of  the experiences of Jewish refugees who were deported from Great Britain as enemy aliens during WW2 and interned in prison camps in Canada. These stories allow us to uncover a lesser-known moment in Canadian history and raise important questions about stereotypes, racism and the choices we make towards those who arrive at our borders.

Topics: Refugees, Holocaust History in Canada, Digital Learning

 

For the past few years, my school community school community at St. Joseph’s College School in downtown Toronto has recognized October the 4th as a day to honour the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirited People.  Since 2017, our school community has worked collectively to use art and activism to spread awareness around this day in hopes of creating change. This is an important issue to us; being a school for girls and young women, gendered violence resonates particularly with our student population.

Topics: Art, Choosing to Participate, Indigenous, student activism, mmiwg

some words before the video

As your school commemorates Orange Shirt Day this year, we hope these 5 resources and teaching ideas will equip you to teach your students (and colleagues) about Canada's Residential Schools, and inspire and empower students to create a meaningful response. 

Topics: Choosing to Participate, Teaching Resources, Truth and Reconciliation, classroom lesson, Indigenous, Lesson Ideas, stolen lives, Orange Shirt Day, cross curricular teaching and learning

Welcome back to another school year! We are so excited to work with you for a fresh new year of learning, and growth.  We want to start with words of appreciation for the work that you do and the relationships that you forge with your students, so we created a found poem for you using the text from a strategy so many of you start your school the year with: contracting for courageous and reflective spaces.

Topics: Events

Facing History and Ourselves Canada will be running some amazing professional development seminars throughout Canada this summer. Below is the information for all of the upcoming seminars, as well as the link to find out even more information on each seminar.

Topics: Professional Development, Summer Seminar, Holocaust and Human Behaviour, stolen lives

This spring, Facing History and Ourselves, in partnership with the Azrieli Foundation Holocaust Survivors Memoir Program, invited 175 students from 6 schools to layer onto their learning about the history and legacies of the Holocaust, or of Canada's Residential Schools by reading Survivor memoir. Students read Theodore Fontaine’s Memoir Broken Circle: The Dark Legacy of Indian Residential Schools, or excerpts of Nate Leipciger’s Memoir The Weight of Freedom, then created pieces that reflected their understanding and responses to these testimonies, which were gifted to each Survivor.

Topics: Toronto, Holocaust, Memoir, Facing History and Ourselves, Survivor Testimony, Canada, Residential Schools, Canadian History, Student Work, project, genocide, Holocaust and Human Behaviour, reflection, Connected Learning, Grade 10 History, HSB, CHC, difficult conversations, trc, stolen lives, facing history pedagogy, Azrieli Foundation Memoirs, Decolonizing Schools, Holocaust History in Canada, Facing Canada, cross curricular teaching and learning, collaborative inquiry

On March 31st, 2019,  Facing History and Ourselves in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario partnered with Durham District School Board, Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board, Peel District School Board, Toronto District School Board, Toronto Catholic District School Board and York Region District School Board to host a day long educator conference to discuss ways educators and institutional leaders have worked, and can work to decolonize and Indigenize education.  

Topics: Indigenous, Decolonizing Schools