As a number of the local history projects are wrapping up what they planned to do, we get to take a look at the progress that Team Denmark has made as part of the first portion of their project that took place over the summer. Our two teachers from Denmark, Mirela Redzic and Lars Amdisen Bossen, outlined the process that they took with their students for this project. They began with getting a better understanding of what their students already knew about the topic of national socialists by having them create rough mind-maps of key words that came to their mind.
They also had the amazing opportunity to have a video call with our videographer, Aaron Peterer, who discussed with the students how history can be told through monuments and local historic sites. It was lovely to see how engaged all the students were throughout this information session! Following Aaron’s discussion, there was an in-class streaming of the German version of the movie “The Wave” – a socio-political thriller centred around World War 2 and how the masses can be easily coerced into doing someone’s bidding. The purpose of showing this movie to the students was to illustrate to them how similar events could still happen and how to avoid this phenomenon.
Following the movie, the students were split into a few groups and were able to self-evaluate the events of the first day. We can see in the picture how students were able to begin their self-reflections.
Following this first day of group work and evaluation, the students visited a local museum where they were able to research, discuss and engage with Holocaust and national socialist race ideology materials using historical methods. This was followed by a visit to a local cemetery where German soldiers and refugees and children are buried close to each other. Students were able to connect this to present day events in Ukraine with the war, where they even saw some graves of Russian soldiers from the second world war – this caught the attention of many of the students. Finally, there was a guest lecture in the classroom about the Holocaust from a subject expert in order to help the students further understand the sensitivity of the topic they were researching.
Team Denmark has been making amazing progress on their local history projects so far, and continue to work on it throughout the coming weeks! We look forward to more updates as the project progresses.
