"Learning About the Holocaust is More Important Than Ever"

At the beginning of May, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) held our 36th Annual Symposium on the Holocaust. Over two days, the Symposium brought nearly 1000 senior secondary students from across British Columbia to UBC to hear from historians, experts, and eyewitnesses of the Holocaust.

The event went amazingly well and I was so proud to have had a hand in helping to organize and emcee an event which, over the years, has had a proven impact on the students who attend (the VHEC's own Nina Krieger and Kazuko Kusumoto both attended the event as students).

I could write an entire blog post about the event itself, but Basya Laye of the Jewish Independent has already written a fantastic article which you can find here.

Perhaps one of the most unexpected aspects of this year's Symposium was finding out that afterwards a number of students were using Twitter to tell their social networks about what they had experienced and how the day had impacted them. It was great to see this sort of spontaneous, unsolicited feedback about the program. In many ways, it was much more candid and real than the feedback that they had given us on our carefully created evaluation forms. These tweets also had the added bonus of creating excitement among the VHEC staff (the majority of whom were largely unfamiliar with Twitter or didn't see the appeal) for using this type of social media more actively to promote our organization and the work that we do here.

Echoes & Reflections: A Multimedia Curriculum on the Holocaust (Shafran Teacher's Conference)

As part of my new job at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre I am responsible for planning, organizing and promoting many of the Centre's educational events, including the upcoming Shafran Teacher's Conference (February 11, 2011).

Although a great deal of planning and organization for the conference was already underway when I joined the team at the VHEC (thank you, Nina Krieger!), one of the ways that I have been able to contribute so far was in promoting the event online. Last week I approached Joel Ralph at Canada's History Magazine about the event and he was kind enough to post our conference flyer on his website and put it in the magazine's newsletter which is distributed to teachers and interested historians across Canada. I was also able to write a blog post for ActiveHistory.ca about the event, combining the conference's existing publicity materials with my own experiences as a teacher (in order to better fit the style of writing for that publication).

To be honest, I'm not sure that promoting the Shafran Teacher's Conference in either of these publications will have an impact on actual conference registration numbers. After all, the VHEC is promoting this event to a very select group of people: teachers in British Columbia (specifically those in Vancouver and surrounding areas) with an interest in Holocaust Education. The audiences for both Canada's History Magazine and ActiveHistory.ca, on the other hand, are nationwide and not entirely made up of educators. Thus, a large number of people who read the announcement for the conference will either a) not find it applicable to them or b) find it applicable but be unable to attend due to travel and/or time constraints.

Despite all that, I don't think that my time was wasted in choosing to publicize the event in this way. Now, two national audiences with readership in the thousands, have had some exposure to the VHEC's name and a little taste of the type of programming that we do. Even if this specific event wasn't up their alley, perhaps future ones will be. Or, maybe the next time they need something Holocaust-related, they'll think to approach the VHEC for referrals, resources or information. You just never know. :)

Advertising Standards Canada PSAs

Last week, Advertising Standards Canada launched its newest ad campaign to promote truth in advertising. The campaign is composed of a number of print and television ads that prominently feature the slogan "Dressing it up doesn't make it true." The majority of the ads are cute, colourful and clever (utilizing almost Pixar-like animation to catch the eye and engage the imagination). While all of them are entertaining in their own right, I've included my favourite below:


If you're interested, the rest of the ASC PSAs can be found here.

According to UWO, I Have Now Mastered the Arts

"I Admit You."

When the Chancellor of the University of Western Ontario held my hands and said those three little words to me this past Friday, it was like music to my ears. In fact, after completing 8 months of course work and a grueling summer internship, the only thing that would have made this moment better was if he had followed with, "...and you're hired" (a girl can dream, can't she?!).

But alas, that wasn't to be. Instead, I begin my job search in earnest today, confident in the knowledge that my time at Western has helped prepare me for a multitude of career paths in history, heritage and beyond (provided, of course, that I can choose just one!).

I don't usually include photos of myself on this blog, but this is definitely one for the record books! Allow me to present UWO's Masters of (Public) History, 2010:


Back row, from left to right: Jordan Goldstein, Dana Johnson, Tim O'Grady, myself, Braden Murray, Tasha DiLoreto, Megan Arnott

Front row, from left to right: Sara Sirianni, Shelagh Staunton, Becca Rahey

Reading the Newspaper with a Public Historian's Eye

Newspapers. I'm my house, they're everywhere. They lay on the floor in my entryway, folded neatly and encased in coloured plastic. They're piled precariously on chairs and stairs by our side door. They overflow the blue recycling bins in the garage. They litter our kitchen table, the family room table and even the living room table. Articles are clipped, highlighted and/or written on and stuck on the fridge, filed away for future reference or slipped under my bedroom door as I sleep. As a three-newspaper family (receiving The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail and the Whitby This Week on a regular basis), it's quite possible that we are single-handedly responsible for creating a very large hole somewhere in the Amazonian jungle.

So, this morning when I went downstairs for a cup of coffee and some breakfast, I was not at all surprised to see various sections of The Toronto Star covering nearly every square inch of the kitchen table. Nor was I particularly shocked to see that my father had "conveniently" left the paper open to an article announcing that the "Spadina House [had been] restored to its glory days." Yeah, my father's about as subtle as sledgehammer, but I was intrigued enough to pick it up and start reading.

At first I read the article like I have always read articles of this type: I skimmed the story, interested to learn a little more about Toronto's built heritage (e.g. Spadina House was built in 1866 by James Austin, one of the founders of the Dominion Bank and later, a president of Consumer's Gas Company) and intrigued by the more minute historical details (like the fact that different quadrants of the city used to have designated days on which the muckety-mucks could fashionably receive visitors). I was also mentally adding Spadina House to my ever-growing list of places to visit in Toronto.

But, as I finished reading the article, my inner public historian started to work...

I found myself looking critically at the photograph which had accompanied the article. The photo shows one of Spadina House's newly refurbished rooms in all its glory. With its cheerfully striped furniture, luxurious silk wallpaper and dramatic chandelier, the house looks beautiful and the care that the museum staff put into the new renovations is evident. That said, I couldn't help but cross my fingers and hope that the photographer had restricted herself from using a flash. Heaven forbid we overly expose the new furnishings to intense lighting.

Next, my eyes turned to the title of the article and I just couldn't help my knee-jerk reaction: Glory days? What glory days? Why does everyone always assume that the past was more 'glorious' or simple than the present? And what good does idealizing the past at the expense of the present do for a historical site or for the historical knowledge/consciousness of the public at large? I know, I know... I'm being nit-picky, but that sort of oversimplification drives me batty.

The final paragraph of the article briefly related the types of public programming that the newly reopened heritage site would offer. As someone interested in museum education, I was pleased to see that the site was going to offer three types of tours, "Meet the Austins" for those that are more interested in the history of the family, "It's a Kid's Life" for school-aged children, and a restoration tour for those visitors more interested in the architectural significance of the house and the process that went into repairing one of Toronto's historical gems. It really seems like the staff at Spadina House has thought about their site and their visitors and have made significant attempts to appeal to and service the widest possible audience.

Of course, all of these 'criticisms' are relatively minor and more than a little tongue-in-cheek. In fact, I've only included them in this posting to illustrate a small bit of the thought process which sent me into this metacognitive spiral of a blog post. I have to admit, it's a little disconcerting to wake up one day and suddenly realize that a single year of school has significantly changed the way that I do a task I've been doing since the fifth grade.


* Photograph is for dramatization purposes only and does not represent the actual condition of this blogger's home. :)