Abstract:

Education in the 21st century need to respond to the challenges posed by digitalisation and the mass of online information and misinformation. For history education these challenges not only include the use of digital tools in the learning and teaching process, but also responding to the trend of youth becoming more and more disconnected and distanced from the past. The educational materials, developed by the Shoah Foundation and the Zachor Foundation in Hungary, using oral history in the form of video interviews, aim to respond to this challenge, develop soft skills such as critical thinking or empathy, and encourage a complex understanding of history, where personal and local history is crucial.

An explorative research study was carried out in secondary schools in Hungary in order to evaluate these educational materials. The research compared three history lessons, implemented in each school: one ‘traditional’ history lesson using no digital tools, a lesson using testimonies of Holocaust survivors, witnesses and perpetrators, and a lesson using the same testimonies, but where students work alone on the online platform iWitness. The authors hypothesised that that lessons using testimonies have different effects on students’ skills and attitudes compared to the traditional lesson. The research is based on quantitative methodology, using pre- and post-questionnaires for participating students (some open questions were included which were analysed qualitatively). With an explorative approach, the questionnaires considered a variety of aspects from self-evaluation of students’ skills, attitudes toward minorities, history and different learning styles, to students’ engagement in classes and their evaluation of the lesson.

The research serves as a case study of the involved schools, nevertheless, it yields important results indicative of different impacts of the different lessons. The lesson using video testimonies was the most positively evaluated by students, it was also where they were most engaged and which encouraged them to think beyond the actual material of the lesson. As the core of the lesson here was the same as the one using the iWitness platform, this highlights the role of the teacher present guiding the learning process. The lesson using the iWitness platform was more controversial among students, and showed overall smaller impact on students compared to the other two lessons. Furthermore, results show that the use of personal history, in the case of both non-traditional lessons, brought history closer to students, strengthened their empathy skills, contributed to their knowledge and understanding of the history of the Holocaust, encouraged them to reflect on their own lives and the world around them, as well as to examine situations from different perspectives.

Keywords:

Personal history, oral history, history education, video testimonies, iWitness platform, comparative evaluation.