Teacher uses Holocaust to discuss social justice tolerance and empathy
By Julie Mack
Kalamazoo Gazette
GOBLES, Mich. (AP) — Corey Harbaugh seems an unlikely expert on the Holocaust.
He isn’t Jewish. He teaches English, not social studies. He works at Gobles High School, a small, rural district in Van Buren County. Until about five years ago, Harbaugh knew very little about the genocide of the Jewish people during World War II, according to the Kalamazoo Gazette.
But when the state included the Holocaust in the Michigan Merit Curriculum, Harbaugh began doing his own research into the topic.
That was in 2009. Today, Harbaugh has made a name for himself statewide and nationally as a teacher who incorporates the Holocaust into the curriculum.
One sign of his stature: Harbaugh got a shout out recently from President Barack Obama at a Shoah Foundation dinner in Los Angeles.
The dinner featured a short video that included Harbaugh, and in his speech following the video, Obama made reference to the Gobles instructor: “I love what that teacher said, how the Holocaust has entered into our DNA,” Obama told the crowd.
Harbaugh was thrilled he was mentioned at a star-studded presidential event.
“Steven Spielberg, Conan O’Brien, Bruce Springsteen and Kim Kardashian were at the gala, among others,” Harbaugh said. “I, sadly, was not. I was at a Little League baseball game in Gobles, where I belong.”
Harbaugh, who is 45, has been at Gobles High School for 19 years, including six as principal. He stepped down as principal in 2008 because the administrative job made him “miserable,” and he returned to the classroom.
Harbaugh quickly found a new outlet for his energies, in researching the Holocaust.
“It was a snowball rolling downhill,” he said. “I’ve found it really interesting and compelling.”
Harbaugh said the importance of the Holocaust goes beyond teaching World War II history. It’s also a way to get students thinking about social justice, tolerance and empathy.
“The Holocaust holds so many lessons,” he said.
To that end, for the past four years, Harbaugh has headed a weeklong summer seminar for Michigan teachers at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills. Participants learn about the Holocaust and brainstorm about ways to use that information in the classroom and how to make it relevant in their own communities.
A teacher from northern Michigan, for instance, may use the Holocaust as a jumping-off point for discussion about treatment of Native Americans, while in other communities it may spark discussion about Hispanics or Muslims in the community, Harbaugh said.
Harbaugh also has been working with the Shoah Foundation at University of Southern California. His work has been featured in two doctoral dissertations and he’s made presentations around the country on the subject.
This year, Harbaugh became a fellow of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and undertook a research project to survey more than 1,200 teachers across the country who teach about the Holocaust or social justice.
“My research is providing the first detailed look at the pedagogy of the Holocaust in the United States,” he said, adding he’ll be presenting the survey results this summer in Washington, D.C.
At Gobles High School, Harbaugh spends about 12 weeks on the Holocaust in his senior seminar English class, which focuses on critical reading and writing skills.
The Holocaust is so unfamiliar to Gobles students, Harbaugh said, that “we start with the very basics. Who are Jewish people? What does it mean to be Jewish?”
But by the end of the 12 weeks, he said, “they’re asking such tough questions that it pushes me to think.”
Taylor Cairns is one of Harbaugh’s students this year, and said their work included reading the book “Night,” by Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, and watching hours of video interviews of Holocaust survivors. They also read articles on anti-Semitism and saw an anti-Semitic cartoon produced in the early 2000s.
“We didn’t learn just what happened, but also why, and why Hitler was so effective,” Cairns said. Students were so taken by the topic, she said, “we’d even talk about at lunch.”
Tyler Pasek took Harbaugh’s class last year. “It really made you think critically about the Holocaust — from the standpoint of a survivor, from the standpoint of the Nazis, from the standpoint of the bystanders,” he said.
“It wasn’t a class where you memorized facts,” said Pasek, who just finished his freshman year at Michigan State University. “It was a lot of thought-provoking discussion.”
One aspect that makes the Holocaust such a powerful classroom tool are the video interviews from Holocaust survivors that bring history to life for today’s students, Harbaugh said.
“We are trying to answer the question about how we responsibly and effectively tell the human story of the Holocaust when the last survivors are gone; this is a reality that gets closer every day,” he said.
At the same time, the Holocaust involves topics that “can be very difficult to teach, even traumatic, and so it creates a challenge for teachers about how to teach it well, and responsibly,” Harbaugh said.
He referenced a controversy in California last week, where eighth-graders in the Rialto school district were asked to write an essay about whether the Holocaust really happened.
“For me it underscores the work I find so important, which is trying to get teachers to understand and recognize responsible Holocaust and social justice education, and education which crosses the line into ‘sensational,’ even ‘harmful’ education,” Harbaugh said.
“We have a responsibility to teach our students about justice and injustice in this world, but we also have a responsibility to teach it well.”
