Small Trunks Carry Big Message about Tolerance, Character

By Mark Hoerrner

Teachers arguably have a lot on their plate as it is without asking them to take on politically sensitive subjects such as Holocaust education. Yet it’s this kind of education that helps develop understanding, tolerance, and character. In addition, teaching about this dark time in world history gives teachers the ability to branch out across all curriculums, bridging work on a single topic through math, English, art, history, and more. Planning these courses has always required considerable research and preparation and as such, sometimes takes a back seat to more traditional instruction.

Thanks to an innovative idea by the Holocaust Museum Houston’s education department, teaching Holocaust education just got a little easier. Videos, posters, artifact kits, books, lesson plans, activities, CDs, CD-ROMs, and more items are stuffed into a steamer trunk. It’s a complete class, packed into an oversized piece of luggage.

The trunks are designed to be age-specific, presenting ideas and information on prejudice awareness without going too deep into the horrors of the Holocaust.

"In a lot of cases, teachers don’t have a large budget for the purchase of materials," said Christina Vasquez, HMH’s director of education. "Each trunk has about $3,000 worth of materials in it, and we don’t charge teachers a dime. We’ll ship the trunks anywhere in the U.S. and we pay all the shipping."

HMH staffers discovered several years ago that cost of materials was keeping specialized instruction out of schools. With the trunk program, teachers can plan ahead, order the trunks, and make use of them for up to five weeks depending on how many teachers at a school are using the supplies.

The program keeps expanding. Just this year, HMH added an elementary-school level trunk to its program, which already includes trunks for middle school, high school social studies, high school language arts, and even a package for high school advanced placement students.

But that’s not all. The city of Houston, Texas, where the museum is located, is now about 37% Latino, Vasquez said. So the museum has decided to develop trunks for Spanish-speaking students with the aid of generous funding from Duke Energy and The Jewish Conference on Material Claims Against Germany. "Even in second and third generation families," Vasquez said, "you still have members who do not speak English. We don’t want to miss any opportunity to build tolerance and character in our community."
She noted that the Spanish-language trunks also give foreign-language teachers of Spanish a new dimension of instruction they can include for advanced students.

The big push, however, is to get the trunks into Latin America. While many people believe that the region played host to a myriad of Nazi officials, many European Jews also took refuge in areas like Bolivia, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, and Peru when immigration restrictions or outright anti-Semitism kept them out of other countries.

"We really want to push the trunks to larger markets and to also take those trunks into Latin America," she said, adding, "because we recognize that while funding is short here in the United States, it’s near impossible to find such materials in Latin America. It’s an area where this kind of tolerance instruction, especially Holocaust instruction, has really been overlooked. These trunks can change that."

Teachers interested in obtaining an education trunk should visit the museum’s website, www.hmh.org, or call (713) 942-8000 and ask for the education department.