Teaching Genocide and Holocaust Education in ELA Classrooms

This book centers on a single, pressing question from a teacher: “What is my role as an ELA teacher in genocide education– and how do I do it ethically?”

Teaching Genocide and Holocaust Education in ELA Classrooms: Language to Remember, Witness, and Repair offers middle and high school English teachers a thoughtful, practice-centered approach to teaching histories shaped by human experience and the ways language has been used to harm, name, witness, and repair. Grounded in an Ethical Literacy Framework, the book brings together classroom-rooted practices—young adult literature, diaspora memoirs, poetry, oral histories, rhetoric, and multigenre research—to help students encounter human stories with care and responsibility. Each chapter offers adaptable structures, mentor texts, and reflective practices that support trauma-informed, student-centered instruction within the realities teachers already navigate, and concludes with reflection questions and resources to extend learning and support planning. Concepts such as critical empathy, the web of passivity, and imagining just futures guide students to examine how language shapes both violence and possibility.

Written for secondary ELA teachers, literacy leaders, and teacher educators, this book approaches genocide education as an ethical, relational practice.