Dr. Brian Crim, a University of Lynchburg history professor, has been accepted into a competitive faculty seminar sponsored by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum this summer.
The 2016 Curt C. and Else Silberman Seminar for Faculty will examine “Jewish Responses to the Holocaust: Teaching the Holocaust through Primary Sources.” The program will feature 20 in-residence scholars from the U.S., Israel, Germany, Poland, Italy and other countries. “Until recently, the study of perpetrators dominated the historical narrative of the Holocaust,” says the Holocaust Museum’s Web page about the seminar. “As the extraordinary wealth of diaries, memoirs, and other textual and audiovisual sources that represent Jewish perspectives becomes available, the question of how to teach such source materials in a variety of disciplinary contexts — from history, to literature, to sociology and anthropology studies, and beyond — emerges as a pressing pedagogical question. … Participants will assemble a variety of sources (in English) for classroom use, and develop strategies to incorporate these materials in different types of undergraduate courses.”
Dr Crim plans to use the experience for his ongoing research and to enhance his teaching of a Holocaust course in the LC history department. It also will inform his service as a board member of the Holocaust Education Foundation of Central Virginia, a local organization that is adding teacher education opportunities to its seminars.