In today’s episode, we continue our series on graduate student research with an interview with Daniel Adamson. We discuss Daniel’s research on how the British response to the Holocaust is represented in schools and museums, as well as how Daniel uses approaches from memory studies to information his research.
Daniel Adamson is a PhD student at Durham University whose research focuses on representations of the British response to the Holocaust in schools, museums and other educational settings. Daniel writes for The Conversation, as well as the British Association for Holocaust Studies’ blog and the University of Cambridge ‘Doing History in Public’ project.
Episode Transcript
Michael Donnay
In our last episode, I spoke with Adam Crymble about – among other things – the way his research broke the activity of historians into discrete spheres. In today’s episode, we’re going to continue that conversation with a focus on two of those spheres: teaching and public history.
This episode is also part of our series discussing the research of graduate students and so I will be speaking today with Daniel Adamson, a PhD student at Durham University. His research focuses on the history of Holocaust education in the United Kingdom, specifically examining how the British response to the Holocaust is represented in schools, museums, and other educational settings. I think his research is an excellent, concrete example of what can be gained from focusing on specific spheres of educational activity. In our conversation today will focus on two of those areas in Daniel’s research: Holocaust education in the national curriculum in England, and in the museum sector.
If you enjoy our conversation today, you can read more of Daniel’s writing at The Conversation, the British Association for Holocaust Studies, and the University of Cambridge’s ‘Doing History in Public’ project. I’ll link to those in the show notes. Now, here’s my conversation with Daniel.
Daniel, thank you so much for joining us. I’m really excited to have you on the podcast today.
Daniel Adamson
Hi, good to meet you. And thanks very much for having me.
Michael Donnay
I think a good place to start might be setting the scene for people. Could you talk about when the Holocaust entered the national curriculum in England and why you think it came in at that particular point in time?
Daniel Adamson
There was a government report in the late 1980s, which again, was really sort of galvanized by an early form of the Holocaust Educational Trust. And this found that teaching the Holocaust would have several benefits, both social and educational. In the early 1990s, as well, you do have quite a strong – on the mainland European continent – you do start to have quite a strong Holocaust educational movement emerging in countries such as France and Italy, where there was almost a kind of heat really, that this was the time really to seize the opportunity to teach about such an atrocity.
But I think we also do have to point towards the role of popular culture again. So in 1993, I believe, there was the massive success of Schindler’s List directed by Steven Spielberg. And alongside the commercial success of this film, Spielberg also produced a number of educational resources that were circulated to schools. So this really helped develop the complexity with which Holocaust education found its place within schools. 2001 was also a key landmark in that it marked the first Holocaust Memorial Day, which was part of a pan-European movement to commemorate the Holocaust and learn lessons from its past. And I would suggest that it’s at this point as well, that you do see a shift from teaching the history the Holocaust as a historical issue towards almost teaching it more of as a citizenship issue. So in other words, using the Holocaust as an example to promote discussion amongst students about how they might be better citizens, or how they might benefit society, or indeed prevent similar genocides from happening again.
Moving forward into the the 2010s, there has, I think, been another shift towards slightly more self-critical British history in general. So if we think about recent movements, such as Black Lives Matter or decolonize the curriculum, they are really centered again around revising commonly held views about British involvement in the past. So again, since the 2010s, I think there has been more of an appetite to be more reflective and more self critical on the more complex and ambiguous aspects of British history. Which the British response to the Holocaust certainly is one given that it was marked by varying different degrees of apathy and action.
Michael Donnay
I’m interested in one of the other points that you make in your research is that the place where it is inserted into the curriculum, in that Key Stage Three period, has a big influence on how it’s taught. And I was wondering if you could explain the connection between those two ideas.
Daniel Adamson
I think it’s worth pointing out that the Key Stage Three history curriculum is really quite packed, especially for a subject where teachers are afforded perhaps only a few hours a week with which to cover topics with students. So there is a real emphasis on speed over depth, I think, in the teaching of the national curriculum in its current iteration. So, teaching the Holocaust necessarily, when it fits into these broader courses of study such as the era of the Second World War are forced to prioritize certain events. And I suppose it is understandable that the events of the Holocaust that occurred in mainland Europe during the Second World War are the ones which probably most commonly received most coverage in the classroom settings.
The age group is also a key concern. The British response to the Holocaust is a really complex and thorny issue that requires quite a lot of theoretical and historical unpacking. It’s certainly not a black and white issue. And my research suggests that the lack of depth with which the topic is covered in Key Stage Three materials in particular, is perhaps reflective of educational resources. Author’s beliefs that younger students are maybe not as well equipped to grapple with such topics as older students. The problem being of course, that after Key Stage Three level history becomes an optional subject for English schoolchildren. After that point, when perhaps students are better placed to reflect on this problematic topic of Britain and the Holocaust, quite a few students have dropped off or aren’t taking history as an option anymore. So again, it’s probably not receiving as widespread coverage as it could do that was taught as part of the national curriculum.
Michael Donnay
Pivoting a bit to the other area that you mentioned, which is the place in textbooks sorting, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about your use of textbooks as sources and what sort of analysis you’ve been doing with them?
Daniel Adamson
Well, I found looking at history textbooks quite a useful way of rooting my research in some empirical evidence. The UCL Institute of Education textbook archive was a really key resource for me. I decided to use mixed methods to analyze textbooks published since 1991, when the Holocaust entered the national curriculum, and I tried to establish as wide a sample set as possible. So sampling different publishers, different publication dates, and different age group textbooks. And within them, I scoured through the various pages, looking for ways in which the British response to the Holocaust has been portrayed.
Overall, as I’ve hinted, I found that the issue wasn’t ignored altogether, but commonly lacked depth, so it would commonly be relegated to perhaps a few sentences on a page or even sort of one passing comment. But interestingly, it wasn’t necessarily superseded by glorified impressions of Britain’s involvement in World War Two. So in other words, these textbooks weren’t saying that you know, Britain’s record in the Second World War was spotless. There were quite a few references to the lack of action taken by the Allied government, particularly during the Auschwitz bombing debate, and during the immigration debates of the late 1930s. But at the same time, students weren’t ever really led to debate these issues in any great depth or consider the implications of them.
And again, I did wonder whether this is reflective of the authorial backgrounds of these textbooks. The Key Stage Three curriculum is so broad that any single publication or any single textbook is essentially tasked with covering a vast range of different historical topics. So as such, the authors of these textbooks have to become almost mini-experts in a number of different historical fields. And it was for this reason, I think that it was very rare to find textbooks authored by academics for example, who’d studied the Holocaust in depth and therefore could talk about the issues such as the British response with real detail and real authority.
But that said, I think there is encouraging change on the horizon. So the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education in late 2020 has published a new Key Stage Three textbook, which is really rooted in historical expertise and the results of their own surveys with teachers to find out which areas of the subject are perhaps most commonly lacking in British schools. And I think this new textbook has demonstrated beyond doubt the merits of consulting academic experts on the Holocaust before presenting resources to schoolchildren.
Michael Donnay
And I’d be interested in taking that idea and pivoting to the other part of your analysis, which is looking at museums. Which use a different set of technologies than textbooks when it comes to teaching these subjects. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about how the Holocaust is taught in British museums and maybe with a bit of a reference to what kind of technologies they’re trying to use in order to convey that information?
Daniel Adamson
Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting contrasts to tease out because both classrooms and museums are, of course, extremely influential educational settings, but the learning experiences differ quite greatly. I should point out that my research has really focused on two key museum case studies, which are the relatively young institutions – Holocaust museums based in Nottinghamshire and also in Huddersfield, in West Yorkshire. So in school classrooms, of course, you have quite a targeted audience that you’re pitching at in terms of age group, whereas museums have to cater for a potentially quite a large demographic of visitors that could range from young children to older adults.
Both of the museums I visited are quite keen to present quite an immersive experience for the learning about the Holocaust. So the Holocaust Centre in Nottinghamshire, for example, has a small recreation of a ghetto-type area in order to give an impression of some of the experiences of Holocaust victims. Whereas the new Imperial War Museum Holocaust exhibition, which opened in 2021, makes quite extensive use of surround sound audio in order to emphasize certain experiences and certain patterns in the Holocaust history they seek to present. An issue with museum education, though, is that visits are self contained. So rather than studying the history of the Holocaust as a course of study over potentially weeks as in a classroom setting, a museum has to try and cram in an entire history of such a broad topic into just a few hours. Even if the museum is solely devoted to the Holocaust itself, as is the case in Nottinghamshire and Huddersfield.
Both museums, to their credit, do supply educational officers and learning programs so that visiting school children can make the most of their visit. But again, a lot is dependent on individual agents of memory. For example, in an interview with one museum staff member, they told me that there’s quite a marked difference in the learning outcomes of schoolchildren who arrive at the museum with a prior knowledge of the Holocaust and with prior context, as opposed to those who might arrive having no idea what the Holocaust is at all. So in that latter example, this museum staff member told me that they almost have to work from ground zero. In that in the space of a few hours, they have to try and introduce students to the Holocaust, but then also guide them through these – quite overwhelming at times – immersive experiences.
In terms of presentation, I would say that the museums I encountered have a much greater emphasis on the individual human stories of the Holocaust. And of course, they do have some limited space to explore the history of the Holocaust in more artifactual terms using historical objects and remnants of the past. So the Huddersfield Museum, for example, has a very striking cabinet in its opening foyer which contains the pajamas of a victim of a concentration camp. In terms of technology as well, I think it has to be noted that museums are much more flexible than textbooks which can only really be printed in one form and once they are printed are fed rarely revised. The museums I visited make good use of digital technology such as video screens and touch screens, as well as audio materials in order to engage visitors and also diversify that learning experience. And it just provides more ways of exploring the past as opposed to purely written text.
Michael Donnay
Now, in addition to education and museum studies, your work also draws on a number of other analytical perspectives. Can you talk about how those help you frame your work?
Daniel Adamson
I think it’s been really useful for me to interact with the broader field of memory studies. Which is quite a speculative field at times, because historians of memory often deal with these quite intangible ideas of how societies think or how societies feel at any certain point. But it’s been really useful for me to consider these broader theoretical ideas about what exactly we mean when we talk about public memory or consciousness. Debates around concepts such as collective memory are very interesting, particularly debates around the role of popular culture in shaping educational memory. And that’s certainly been something that’s been somewhat of a concern of mine trying to work out how cultural or political contexts have influenced different trends in the educational materials I’ve come across.
So for one example, looking at the idea of how politics has shaped British memory or British conception of its own place in the world in the early 2000s, was really interesting in linking it back to this pan-European idea of Holocaust Memorial Day. Certain historians, for example, have suggested that the British adoption of the Holocaust Memorial Day in 2001 was partly a culmination of Tony Blair’s government’s keenness to integrate itself into the European Union. And also to justify military intervention in the late 1990s in contexts such as the Balkans. So I would say that although the the focus of my research is quite tight on Holocaust education, I think considering these broader memory debates which continue to rage to the present day has been really important in framing the findings of my research.
Michael Donnay
Daniel, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. It’s been fascinating to hear more about your research and the connections that you’re making between history of education and memory studies. So thank you so much.
Daniel Adamson
Thank you very much for having me.
Michael Donnay
Passing Notes is a production of the History of Education Society UK. Our social media manager is Elena Rossi, and our executive producer is Heather Ellis. This episode was written and produced by me Michael Donnay. You can find a transcript of this episode, as well as more information about our events, publications and conferences at our website, historyofeducation.org.uk.
Sources
Plans for a UK Holocaust Memorial looked promising, but now debate has stalled by Daniel Adamson
Textbook Portrayals of Britain and the Holocaust by Daniel Adamson
Resilience or reticence? Holocaust memory in the United Kingdom with Daniel Adamson