UK Teachers Stage Children's Opera, Study Transition from Apartheid to Democracy, with Strom Prize Support

Anthony Smith and Rebecca Warren: Winners of the 2010 Margot Stern Strom Teaching Awards

Anthony Smith, Assistant Headmaster of Notre Dame School in London, has been working with Facing History and Ourselves’ staff for the past three years. Our staff recently trained Notre Dame’s History, Music, Science, and Modern Languages teachers on the Facing History resource Choices in Little Rock, which examines efforts to desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. Teachers explored how to teach this history using creative, interactive methods. Then they created a “Facing History Day” which offered rich choices of workshops focusing on the experience of a black student on her brutal first day at Central High School. The History department’s workshop was on legacy and monuments; the Music department encouraged the students to write a blues song; and the Languages department led a workshop on a Facing History resource about the headscarf debate in France.

Anthony also developed a teaching unit on the Holocaust. Using materials and teaching approaches developed by Facing History and the Institute of Education, he provided workshops on research skills and the Holocaust, and a visit to the Jewish Museum. Students independently researched and created diverse individual responses to genocide including written, dramatic, musical, and fine arts projects on the Holocaust and genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. This project culminated in a unit offered to the rest of our Year Nine students and a show for the whole school of the students’ plays and music, as well as a performance of the children’s opera Brundibar by Hans Krasa, first performed in Terezin in 1942.

Anthony said about these two projects, “Our work with Facing History has had a tremendous impact on both teachers and students. Teachers developed new strategies and became more confident with a cross-curricular approach to teaching…Students acquired deep historical knowledge and developed their skills as independent learners.”

Rebecca Warren, a teacher at Skinners’ Company School for Girls in London, England, will travel to South Africa, where she will study with other Facing History and Ourselves teachers to learn more about the history of Apartheid and South Africa’s transition to democracy. Warren is also working to start an exchange between her British students and South African students who have taken Facing History through our South African partner organization Facing the Past. This will initially take the form of written exchange with the goal of a plan for British students to travel to South Africa to generate their own ideas of a global partnership.