The Holocaust Collaborative Project:
Corporate, Artistic, Academic, and Civic Partners Combine to Create a New Educational Initiative
In the spring of 2001, Olney Theatre for the Arts joined with partners from Comcast Cable Communications Inc., video producer Jeffrey Kramer, the Montgomery County Northeast Consortium of High Schools, and the Jewish Community Council of Washington to create a unique cross-curriculum arts-in-education program.
The Holocaust Project, funded by a generous grant from Comcast, provided three hundred eleventh grade modern history students with an opportunity to explore one of the darkest periods of world history through artistic expression – their own, and that of others. The students were from the three high schools: Paint Branch, James Hubert Blake, and Springbrook – that comprise the Northeast Consortium.
The project began on March 6 with a day-long orientation and training workshop for participating teachers: Amy Greene of Springbrook; Steven Cain of James Hubert Blake; and Jamie Paoloni and Judy Buchner of Paint Branch.
On Monday, March 26, more than three hundred students from ten classes came to the Olney Theatre Center to view the film Survivors of the Holocaust, produced by Steven Spielberg in association with the Shoah Visual History Foundation. Following the film, Holocaust survivor Nessie Godin spoke to the students and shared with them the harrowing and deeply moving story of her own experiences and those of her family. After a break for lunch, the students were divided into smaller groups for a discussion with other Holocaust survivors who shared their own first-hand accounts and answered questions.
For several days following the field trip, Olney Theatre Center teaching artists visited the students classrooms and led them through a series of creative writing exercises designed to help them explore the relevance to their own lives of the bigotry and hatred that led to the Holocaust. The teaching artists, in partnership with the classroom teachers, then encouraged the students to respond to what they had learned in artistic form—in writing or in any other medium they felt best expressed their individual ideas.
On the evening of April 30, excited students from all three schools stood in front of a packed house in the Olney Theatre Center’s Theatre Lab to showcase their work for an audience of parents, friends, teachers, school administrators—including superintendent Jerry Weast—and civic leaders. Most meaningful to the students was the presence of several of the Holocaust survivors who had shared their stories just weeks before.
The presentation included the reading of poems, stories, monologues, journals and the performance of a short play. It also included a documentary film created by video production students under the supervision of Jeffrey Kramer of Kramer Communications. It was followed by a Comcast-hosted reception where dozens of student-created drawings, paintings, illustrated books and other artistic works were displayed.
One student, Catherine Eicke of Blake, was quoted in her school’s newsletter as saying, "This experience allowed me to make connections beyond what happens from what I study in class. The point that hit home the most was how this continues today."
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