Students Participate in Cross-Departmental Collaboration

Over the past four years, Dean of Students and History Teacher Fred Kountz and Languages Department Chair and French Teacher Josiane Mariette have joined their senior classes in an interdisciplinary partnership between Holocaust studies and French literature. Each fall, seniors in these courses learn the history and historiography of the Holocaust as they study Une jeunesse au temps de la Shoah, Simone Veil’s indelible account of her childhood and survival in the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen camps. In December, through a gift from a generous donor, and in celebration of the launch of the much anticipated I2 curriculum, the teachers were able to take their students to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC. 

 

In the USHMM’s world class library, Baldwin students worked with staff researchers to explore French-language sources and learned how to efficiently sort through the more than 300,000 sources as they build their own research topics for final papers. The students also received training in how to access specific, digitized collections off-site, so they are well-prepared to continue working back in Bryn Mawr.

 

In the afternoon, the girls explored the temporary and permanent exhibitions in the museum and concluded their visit with a conversation with a French survivor, one of the museum’s many volunteers. 

 

Back on campus, the two classes joined a final time for a closing discussion — in French and English — of lessons learned in both courses. 

 

Through this cross-curricular connection and the memoir of Simone Veil, the students expanded and complemented their knowledge of the Holocaust and demonstrated to the Baldwin community the promise of interdisciplinary education.