Facing History and Ourselves Foundation

Facing History and Ourselves is a professional development program for teachers across the United States and in countries around the world. Educators with whom the program works understand that the academic and emotional growth of students is interwoven with their commitment to growing and learning as adults and as educators. A nonprofit educational organization that serves teachers of middle and high school students, Facing History helps teachers master important skills in classroom pedagogy: how to conduct a discussion in which students truly talk and listen to one another; how to raise controversial topics; and how to establish a classroom atmosphere of trust. Since its founding in 1976, more than 17,000 educators around the world have participated in Facing History workshops and/or weeklong institutes. An estimated 1,500,000 students are reached each year through Facing History's educator network, with regional offices located in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Memphis, New York, San Francisco, and Europe. In addition, educators and the lay public have access to Facing History and Ourselves resources through the organization's Web site: http://www.facinghistory.org.

The Facing History and Ourselves curriculum is based on the belief that education in a democracy must be what Alexis de Tocqueville called “an apprenticeship in liberty.” Facing History aspires to help students find meaning in the past and recognize the need for participation and responsible decision making.

Facing History has engaged teachers and students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice, and anti-Semitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry. By studying the historical development of the Holocaust and other examples of collective violence, students make the essential connection between history and the moral choices they confront in their own lives.

Facing History and Ourselves offers educators in schools and communities opportunities to engage with the past, explore new ideas and approaches, and develop practical models for civic engagement that link history to the challenges of an increasingly interconnected world and the choices that young people make daily. Facing History believes that students can be trusted to examine history in all of its complexities, including its legacies of prejudice and discrimination, resilience and courage. This trust encourages young people to develop a voice in conversations with their peers, as well as in the critical discussions and debates of their communities and nations. Facing History's philosophy promotes an understanding of different perspectives, competing truths, and the need to comprehend one's own motives and those of others.

The Facing History journey includes a pedagogy rooted in the concerns and issues of adolescence: the overarching interest in individual and group identity, in acceptance or rejection, in conformity or nonconformity, and in labeling, ostracism, loyalty, fairness, and peer group pressure. It integrates a developmental framework, including the adolescent's newly discovered ideas of subjectivity, competing truths, and differing perspectives, along with the growing capacity [Page 436]to think hypothetically and the inclination to find personal meaning in newly introduced phenomena.

Since the examination of difficult and complex issues of human behavior in critical moments in past and present requires careful thinking and reflection, Facing History teachers employ effective strategies to encourage students to listen, to take another's perspective, to understand differing points of view, and to undertake intellectual risks in their analysis and discussion. Meaningful intellectual growth is a process of confronting imbalance and dissonance as students grapple with new ideas and different perspectives that contradict unexamined premises, so these teachers carefully challenge generalizations and push for clear distinctions in language and explication. Building on the increasing ability to think hypothetically and imagine options, Facing History teachers stretch the historical imagination by urging delineation of what might have been done, choices that could have been made, and alternative scenarios that could have come about.

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