As one of the largest and most important museums and memorial centres on the Holocaust, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) has an extensive range of educational materials on the Holocaust, both for online teaching and for use in the classroom. In addition to targeted lesson plans for every educational level, the museum’s website has an impressive Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust and hundreds of (primary) resources and photographs on the Holocaust are freely accessible, and translated into English where necessary.

The encyclopaedia contains all kinds of information, about people, places, events and developments. In a very accessible way, this information can be used via images, sound and video for both inside and outside the classroom.

The documentary “Auschwitz, our story” is available for screening in educational institutions!

Only teachers of educational institutions (highest grade primary and middle, secondary, higher education) can request access to a private section of the site, which includes the 40-minute documentary and the document with background information and an educational lesson with questions on two levels.

Are you a teacher? Don’t hesitate and request access by sending an email to onsverhaal@smolinski.nl from the school’s email account. Then you can view the content and use it in class. Do you already have a password? Then click here..

The documentary can also be found via the “Op School” menu.

N.B. Students who want to see more interviews or write a thesis can also be referred to the “Interviews” page on the website.

The archive of Sound & Vision is invaluable for creative media makers. Archived television broadcasts, documentaries, radio broadcasts, sound recordings, photographs and amateur films: all potential content for the story you want to tell. And an excellent source for research and investigation. But how do you get hold of that material? Whose material is it? What can you use?

Archive colleges are courses and master classes that are given as part of the study programmes or are part of specific pathways. Practical and inspiring, in modules or tailor-made. 

FOR WHOM?
We focus on:

• Students of art and media programmes, including master’s degree programmes
• Students from vocational programmes and courses
• Participants in artists-in-residence programmes
• Creators affiliated with professional associations
• Participants in talent development trajectories of Sound & Vision and its partners.

Fill in the form if you want to contact us about the Archive colleges. As a student, you can also register yourself. Or mail Kristina Petrasova directly.

Module 1: Introduction

We discuss the collection of Sound & Vision and show previous projects and collaborations for inspiration. Image researchers and/or curators of Sound and Vision talk about searching the collection catalog and how the collection is built up. How is it determined what is and is not to be archived? 

And in practical terms: where do you start your research, how do you manage your results and how do you take into account the context of the material? Naturally, we show many examples of available content. 

For first year students this module is mainly an introduction to archiving. With more experienced creators we go deeper into building the research.

Module 2: Awareness

This module is a low-threshold introduction to copyright. For creative reuse, for example, public domain, citation law and portrait law are relevant. Afterwards clearing can cause problems for the story you want to tell. How can you estimate during the search whether you can obtain a license for the material? And what will that cost? Sometimes you can use material for free, what are the conditions? 

We also discuss ethics. How do you deal with sensitive historical footage in a contemporary production? How do you deal with privacy and context? 

We will give appealing examples and invite participants to come up with specific questions.

Module 3: Inspiration

A module about the love for the archive. Renowned creators from different disciplines tell how archival material can enrich your work and show examples of appealing and special film and/or art projects.

Content from the archive expands the possibilities of the creative process, gives depth to the subjects and offers great possibilities in both linear and non-linear narratives. Archival material can contribute to the formation of one’s own language and working practice.

Tailor-made

In addition to the basic modules, there is a lot more knowledge at Sound & Vision that could be relevant to students and professionals in the creative industry. Additional modules can be arranged depending on your needs and educational institution, such as archiving for makers and using data in your research.

For (Rotterdam) schools, Verhalenhuis Belvédère makes tailor-made educational programmes about citizenship, language and the encounter with the city.

Citizenship / Meeting

The Story House offers an accessible meeting place where you can get acquainted with the stories of Rotterdammers. In these encounters connections are made and prejudices are broken. You get to know new perspectives and other ways of thinking and you connect with the city.

Migration History

The Story House organises workshops and facilitates encounters in which the (migration) history of various Rotterdam communities is central: in order to connect, it is important to take note of each other’s history.

Story & Language

We invite pupils to tell about their lives and to adopt a curious and listening attitude. Stories are an accessible way to work with language and can form a bridge between the pupil and his environment.

Compared to other countries, oral history is hardly used in the classroom. The 2018 discussion file ‘Oral history en geschiedenisonderwijs,’ compiled and introduced by Susan Hogervorst, argues that oral history should also be given a more prominent place in history education in the Netherlands. Not only do oral sources give pupils access to the recent past, but they also stimulate them to think about the reliability and representativeness of sources that talk back.

In the first article Tim Huijgen presents the results of a questionnaire conducted among Dutch teachers and pupils. Both groups were generally positive about the use of oral history, but it was hardly ever used in the classroom and teachers received little support in its use.

In the second article Marloes Hüsken discusses exploratory research into the possibilities of oral history in higher education. She concludes that oral history contributes to the development of empathy and interdisciplinary skills, but that historical reasoning and critical thinking are sometimes hampered by the aura of authenticity.

The last two contributions deal with the digitisation of oral sources and its applications in education. Editor Susan Hogervorst writes about an experiment in the classroom comparing eyewitness accounts on the one hand and video interviews and transcribed interviews on the other. According to Hogervorst, video interviews are a suitable mix of orality and authenticity, but also distance, which is often lost in direct eyewitness accounts.

Finally, Norah Karrouche writes that it is valuable to teach pupils to digitise their own interviews. This is a good way for pupils to explore a place in the historical process, creating and preserving sources themselves.

Interactive workshops for history students, but also for employees of heritage organisations. About interviewing and about how to give unheard stories a place in the archives.

Recently, I worked for the Erasmus University (for the course ‘Rotterdam stories’, about the Dutch colonial past, in which students researched how Surinamese and Antillean Rotterdammers experienced that history and what it meant to their lives now), the Maritime Museum (for research into what it was like to work on a grain elevator) and Dig it Up (about the women’s movement in Rotterdam).

Oral history does not currently have a fixed place in the history curriculum of secondary education or at Dutch teacher training colleges. This is a missed opportunity in our view, because it is a method that can mean a lot to (history) education. With this site, we would like to contribute to making oral history accessible in the classroom.

We focus on students at teacher training colleges and teachers in secondary and higher education. The site offers examples of oral history interviews conducted by students, downloadable teaching materials for using oral history in the classroom, and resources for starting your own oral history project with students.

Oral history education is ideally suited for the subject history, the learning area people and society, and citizenship education.