TORONTO, July 22, 2003 -- Thirteen York University students are spending their summer studying ways to teach about the Holocaust and racism. Their studies will take them to Europe for three weeks.
There they will join university students from Germany and Poland and will visit several former concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and participate in a series of workshops and conferences about the Holocaust and Jewish life in Europe before and after the Second World War.
The field study is part of the Mark and Gail Appel Program in Holocaust and Anti-racism Education --"Learning from the Past, Teaching for the Future", which brings together university students, primarily from teacher education programs, to explore how best to counter racism and anti-Semitism in the classroom. The 2003 group includes students from many ethnic and religious backgrounds (Catholic, Protestant, Greek Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim).
The program was conceived in 2001 by York professors Michael Brown, past director of York's Centre for Jewish Studies, and Mark Webber, co-director of York's Canadian Centre for German and European Studies. The students traveling to Europe are the second group to go through the highly successful program.
Webber says that visits to sites such as the memorial at Auschwitz and the museum of Romani (Gypsy) culture in Tarnów can be deeply moving and emotional experiences for many of the students. "This program offers future teachers a unique opportunity to connect the past with modern realities that can't be properly conveyed by textbooks alone," he says.
Adds Brown, "Recent world events such as 9/11 and the Iraqi war have perpetuated many racist stereotypes. This program aims to give the next generation of teachers the tools that they will need in multicultural classrooms to dispel these stereotypes based on firsthand reflections and personal experiences from their trip."
The York students will depart from Toronto on July 27 and return August 21.
A ten-day follow-up symposium which will re-unite the students – 27 in all – from Canada, Germany and Poland is scheduled for February 2004 at York University. A Web site with program details is located at: www.yorku.ca/tftf.
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For further information, please contact:
| Professor Mark Webber | Ken Turriff |
| Canadian Centre for German and European Studies | Media Relations |
| York University | York University |
| 416-736-5695 (cell phone in Europe 011 49 175 147 7073 | 416-736-2100, ext. 22086 |
| mwebber@yorku.ca | kturriff@yorku.ca |
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