Executive Summary
General aim of the research
As the education for citizenship agenda continues to impact on schools, this research sets out to examine whether teaching the Holocaust, in the upper primary, either as part of a study on World War 2 or as a topic on its own, has an impact, both immediate and longer term, on pupils' citizenship values and attitudes, and particularly those values and attitudes relating to various minority or disadvantaged groups in Scotland.
Methodology
The methodology employed a longitudinal approach and involved three schools (a secondary and two of its feeder primaries). In consultation with the schools and local authority, a survey was devised ( Appendices 2 and 3) which attempted to ascertain changes in some of the values and attitudes outlined as central to good citizenship in documents such as Education for citizenship in Scotland (Learning and Teaching Scotland ( LTS), 2002); values and attitudes such as:
- Understand and value cultural and community diversity and be respectful of other people;
- Understand and value social justice;
- Confront views and actions that are harmful to the wellbeing of individuals and communities ( LTS, 2002, p10)
Furthermore, A Curriculum for Excellence (Scottish Executive/ LTS, 2004), which sets out values, purposes and principles for the curriculum 3-18, identifies responsible citizenship as one of its four capacities.
We issued the survey both before and immediately after the lessons on the Holocaust (primary 7 classes in the two primary schools) to investigate the immediate effect of Holocaust education on pupils' values and attitudes (surveys 1 and 2). The findings provide a comparison of pupils' values and attitudes (Phase 1).
Interviews were carried out with one class teacher from each of the primary schools to obtain information on the different teaching methodologies and resources that were adopted in their teaching of the Holocaust ( Appendix 4).
We followed this cohort ten months later into the secondary school and issued survey 3 to compare pupils' attitudes with earlier findings. We also issued this survey to secondary pupils who had not previously studied the Holocaust to compare their attitudes with that of the core group (Phase 2).
Key findings
It must be pointed out that this was a small study. It involved some 100 pupils in P7 and a total of 238 in S1 from one local authority in Scotland and therefore it can be dangerous to over-generalise from it. Further, there is the issue of external factors having a major influence and thus skewing the results. Finally, none of the data has been subject to statistical significance testing. However, tentatively, we found that:
- there was some notable improvement in values and attitudes immediately after the lessons on the Holocaust in primary 7, although it was not universal;
- this improvement, although not as strong in S1 (ten months later), was still generally maintained and evident, although again not universal;
- the pupils who had studied the Holocaust in primary 7 tended to have more positive values and attitudes than those who did not;
- there is evidence that learning about the Holocaust was a contributing factor to the differential in attitudes, both in the primary and secondary results;
- the pupils' attitudes towards voting for English people to the Scottish Parliament were less favourable than towards any other group they were asked about. The reasons for this are undoubtedly complex and require more research to ascertain both the reasons and consequently the kinds of initiatives that could begin to tackle this.