I am applying for the LPDF grant so that I may attend 2015 ACTFL conference to give a presentation entitled Teaching the Holocaust as a Language Course. In so doing, I intend to share my ideas, and solicit ideas, from my colleagues on how to tackle the challenges associated with this important and complicated topic.
Specifically, I address the issue of balancing content and comprehension and the difficulty of staying true to the demands of language acquisition while trying to avoid the dangers of oversimplification. Those challenges make teaching the Holocaust as a language course relatively unique to other content language courses. The topic itself carries with it such sensitive emotional, psychological, political and socio-cultural material, that game based language teaching tactics often seem inappropriate or even dismissive of the enormity of the event. My presentation outlines some of the strategies, exercises and assignments, both successful and unsuccessful, that I have developed in an attempt to overcome the ever present challenges an instructor faces when teaching the Holocaust as a language course.