Overview information

Teachers: Pecoler Lorieta, Eskenazi Milutinovic Marsela, Isailovic Vera, Sterjova Daniela, Saric Melika, Cirino Katiusca
Type of school: Primary public schools, Public High Schools  
Subjects taught: History, Civic Education, Social Studies
Primary category: Sephardic Jewry in the Balkans
Grade level of students: Primary school - grade 9 (aged 14). High school – first to fourth year of studies (aged 15 to 18)
Total duration: One 45 minute lesson

Summary

In this 2015 Milton Wolf Prize winning lesson, students examine the extent to which individual choices shape community dynamics. By watching Survival in Sarajevo, examining images, engaging in group discussions, and creating a final project, students are able to explore how individuals have the capacity to make great changes in the world. This lesson lends itself to themes of community service and action, leadership, and responsibility.

Teachers use this activity for any project where students are asked to create a story on film or another visual presentation (Prezi, PowerPoint), including the Virtual Walking Tour project (students research the Jewish community in their town and create an online tour using Google Maps that others can take). The goal of this activity is to help students see how a story told in film is told through narrative, visuals and audio. Students watch a short Centropa personal story film three times, each time focusing on one aspect of the film-making.

An easy, step-by-step guide for teachers and students how to make videos on "The Jewish history of my town".

It is a Austro-Hungarian tradition for schools to take group photographs of graduating classes, and post them in shops around town and throughout the school for everyone to take pride in. If your school have tableaux or a yearbook of a class that graduated a few generations earlier, you may have a great project at hand. In this project, your students will choose one tableau to research by finding the people in the class, contacting and interviewing them, and making a film based on what they found. The focus of the questions is up to you.

This project will introduce you to editing in Adobe Premiere Pro, while letting you explore a social/historical issue. This issue affected many Jews in the 20th Century and is currently unfolding in Europe today as people from areas of conflict in the Middle East are fleeing and migrating into Europe. You will focus on the three areas of video production: preproduction, production and postproduction, and will form a narrative that has a beginning, middle and end.

This 2015 Milton Wolf Prize winning lesson stresses the importance of individual responsibility and accountability in the face of difficult choices.  Students will learn about individuals during the Holocaust who, in the face of incredible uncertainty and personal risk, chose to do the right thing and protect those who were being persecuted.  Students then have the opportunity for real-world application of their knowledge by recognizing individuals in their community who are making an effort to improve the lives of those around them.

This 2015 Milton Wolf Prize winning lesson is designed to introduce students to the UN Declaration of Human Rights and to help them realize the need for individual civic responsibility to assure that these rights are reality for all humans. The lesson uses Survival in Sarajevo as an example of this responsibility in action and its impact during the Siege of Sarajevo.  It is meant to be done as a Border Jumping exchange and was adapted by me from a lesson by Victor Gurevich to be done in conjunction with his students.

Too often, individuals or groups are labelled as the Other. The other is someone outside the group, they are considered diffferent; they are not wanted; they are labelled and stereotyped.  They do not belong.

This was an on-going, cross-cultural project consisting of several min- lessons taught over the course of the school year, designed and taught by Ilijan Kuzmanovic (Republika Srbska) and Jeff Renihan (US), who met at the 2014 Centropa Summer Academy in Sarajevo. Their classes shared pictures, set up interaction opportunities based on students experiencing the same lesson or activity such as a mix it up or mix match sock day, facilitated lessons using Centropa resources and, thanks to Classrooms without Borders, they have become friends.