Over 15 years, Bloomington Junior High School teacher Greg Kocourek has earned a reputation — both locally and nationally — for consistently incorporating the Holocaust into his social studies classroom.
But if a recent trip to Israel's memorial to the Holocaust taught him anything, Kocourek said, it's that there's still more to learn.
"I feel like it was part of studying the Holocaust and studying human rights that I hadn't gotten to yet," Kocourek said of a recent trip to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Memorial Center. "I feel like that was a perspective that I think was in some ways sort of lacking from my own experience."
Kocourek was one of 30 teachers nationwide selected for a July trip to Yad Vashem. The trip was sponsored by Echoes and Reflections, a group founded in 2005 that provides related professional development and educational materials to teachers for free.
The trip allowed educators a chance to attend seminars and study the museum's archival material at length, in a behind-the-scenes way Kocouruek said wouldn't be possible on a self-guided, tourist trip.
A former teacher fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Kocourek said the visit to Yad Vashem provided a different experience — a different vantage point, in a way.
"The U.S. Holocaust Museum is amazing, but it sort of has that American lens. It's not exactly an American story — it kind of is, but it's not primarily. So to be in Yad Vashem is unique," he said. "When you leave the museum, you're looking at Israel and this is a part of what happened... or continued to develop, as a result of some of the things that were happening in eastern Europe."
There were informational pieces and stories that were new to him, Kocourek said, but it was how stories were told that stuck with him the most. What made them so impactful is still something "I'm trying to unpack," he said.
At any rate, he said, "it reminded me of how important that is in history — that history is about stories and telling those stories in a way that's engaging and ... honest about what happened."
Personal interest in the topic began for Kocourek as an undergraduate student at Illinois State University; when he became a social studies teacher, he found the Holocaust a subject students engaged with in part, possibly, because it poses large questions.
"You really have to confront the reality of when governments break down and when we don't take care of people in our community — (whether) we're a part of that group or we're not a part of that group," he said.
His students, he said, have typically been ready to look at those questions, analyze the context of the history they're presented with.
"They're craving that nuance where it's like, 'I don't want that simple answer,' because they know the world is more complicated than that," he said.
Kocourek said that in addition to honing his storytelling skills, he hopes to incorporate lessons from a seminar at Yad Vashem on how themes, tropes and images from WWII-era German propaganda can be seen today.
"The main thing that I want people to know is that the work I was doing this summer was 30 teachers getting together from all over the country, trying to figure out how we get the story right. How do we teach this better?" he said. "We're taking kids into a dark era in history — how do we show them light? How do we find stories of hope and how do we tell them stories about people who did things to resist?"
"That's something I'm always thinking about."
