Representations of shoah and holocaust terms in selected curriculum documents: A teacher's perspective

Abstract

The paper focuses on representations of Shoah and Holocaust terms in selected curriculum documents (Framework educational program for basic education and Israeli curricular documents 1 for primary and secondary school education). Emphasis is placed on the Israeli curriculum, which can be considered exemplary in its structure due to the defined terms. The Israeli curriculum is compared with selected Czech curriculum document in the context of the first phase of the research survey focused on the views of teachers of Czech language and literature at the second grade of primary school. We try to explain the identified differences in connection with the need of strategies regarding historical, social and geographical aspects. The theoretical basis for the interpretation of concepts in world curriculum documents is formed by the ideas of selected world experts in the field. Based on their ideas, we try to expose the topicality of the defined issues, and the associated great need for its implementation into Czech curriculum document. We compare the application of the given terms in the Czech curriculum document with the results of the first phase of the research conducted among teachers of Czech language and literature in one region of the Czech Republic. Based on the response of a randomly selected sample of respondents, we find that the extent of application of the defined terms is to a large extent reflected in the presented knowledge.