Source: Echoes and Reflections Website
Echoes and Reflections is a comprehensive 10-part curriculum on the Holocaust that uses visual history testimony from survivors and other witnesses and additional primary source documents, including maps, photographs, timelines, literature excerpts and other materials. Since its launch in July 2005, the program has reached more than 1.5 million students in 4,000 public, private and parochial schools in 43 states around the United States, and in Canada and Israel.
Echoes and Reflections is the result of an unprecedented partnership among three leaders in education: the Anti-Defamation League, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education and Yad Vashem.
Ten multi-part lessons are provided with a companion DVD of over two-and-a-half hours of visual history testimony from survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. The program is accompanied by a comprehensive website with additional materials, curriculum updates and in-service workshop information. Each of the interdisciplinary lessons is supported with numerous primary source documents, including poems, literature excerpts, maps, photographs, timelines, a glossary, and student handouts.
Close to forty journal assignments are included in Echoes and Reflections. These journal assignments encourage students to reflect on what they are learning, to record their feelings and reactions to the information, and to think about how the material has meaning in their own lives and in society. Journals also serve as a mechanism by which students create their own primary source material.
Whether teaching a full semester Holocaust Studies course or including information about the Holocaust in a unit of study on World War II, this curriculum allows teachers to choose as little or as much material as they can cover in a specific time period and still cover the subject matter effectively. Developed primarily for use with high school students, the Echoes and Reflections curriculum has also been adapted successfully to accommodate both younger and older students.
Since the launch of Echoes and Reflections in July 2005, over 10,000 pre- and in-service educators and community leaders have participated in Echoes and Reflections training programs, with additional programs taking place across the US every week.
The curriculum was honored in 2007 for its use of visual history testimony and its educational website by the National Association for Multicultural Education.