Holocaust Education at Australian Universities: Reflections on a Roundtable

For nearly a generation educational initiatives concerned with teaching and learning about the Holocaust in formal (and informal) settings have become more frequent and more visible in a growing number of countries. This globalising trend, by which the Holocaust has found its way into educational systems and sites of cultural pedagogy in nations both touched and untouched by the events themselves, is now beginning to be tracked by another development: namely, attempts to explore just what such teaching and learning entails, and examine the impact (or otherwise) it has

The Holocaust in the National Curriculum After 25 Years

This article provides a historical overview of the position of the Holocaust within the National Curriculum since 1991. Through close analysis of the five iterations of the curriculum, it traces changes and continuities in how teaching and learning about the Holocaust has been stipulated by successive governments. By contextualising these with reference to shifts in England’s Holocaust culture, it is shown that the National Curriculum has acted as a fulcrum for the evolution of Holocaust consciousness. However, it is also argued that many of the faults and failures, challenges and shortcomings within the National Curriculum are symbiotic and closely entwined with wider issues in Britain’s Holocaust culture

Holocaust Education 25 Years On: Challenges, Issues, Opportunities

This essay provides an introductory overview to the articles contained within this special issue. It suggests that the recent passage of 25 years since the Holocaust first appeared as a statutory subject in the English National Curriculum represents a key moment to “mark time”: that is, to make the first moves in constructing an anthropology of Holocaust education in the postmodern epoch. It is argued that the need for this is pressing, not least because landmark research by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education has highlighted serious issues in relation to students’ knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust. This national research has international significance, and is used in this special issue as the starting point for reflections from both educators and historians in England and beyond

What do students know and understand about the Holocaust? Evidence from English secondary schools

This research report has been written under the auspices of the University College London (UCL) Centre for Holocaust Education. The Centre is part of the UCL Institute of Education – currently the world’s leading university for education – and is comprised of a team of researchers and educators from a variety of different disciplinary fields. The Centre works in partnership with the Pears Foundation who, together with the Department for Education, have co-funded its operation since it was first established in 2008. A centrally important principle of all activity based at the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education is that, wherever possible, classroom practice should be informed by academic scholarship and relevant empirical research. In 2009, Centre staff published an extensive national study of secondary school teachers’ experience of and attitudes towards teaching about the Holocaust (Pettigrew et al. 2009). This new report builds on that earlier work by critically examining English school students’ knowledge and understanding of this history. In both cases, research findings have been – and will continue to be – used to develop an innovative and ground-breaking programme of continuing professional development (CPD) for teachers and educational resources that are uniquely responsive to clearly identified classroom needs. The UCL Centre for Holocaust Education is the only institution of its kind, both within the United Kingdom and internationally, where pioneering empirical research is placed at the heart of work to support teachers and their students encountering this profoundly important yet complex and challenging subject in schools. The Centre offers a wide-ranging educational programme appropriate to teachers at all stages of their careers through a carefully constructed ‘pathway of professional development’. This provides opportunities for individuals to progressively deepen their knowledge and improve their practice. It offers a national programme of Initial Teacher Education in Holocaust education and a variety of in-depth and subject-specific CPD. In addition, the Centre also offers online distance learning facilities, including a fully accredited taught Masters-level module The Holocaust in the Curriculum. Through its Beacon School programme, Centre staff work intensively with up to 20 schools across England each year in order to recognise and further develop exemplary whole-school approaches and effective pedagogy. All of the courses and classroom materials developed by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education are available free of charge to teachers working in England’s statefunded secondary schools. Further information can be found at www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust

Rats distinguish between absence of events and lack of evidence in contingency learning.

The goal of three experiments was to study whether rats are aware of the difference between absence of events and lack of evidence. We used a Pavlovian extinction paradigm in which lights consistently signaling sucrose were suddenly paired with the absence of sucrose. The crucial manipulation involved the absent outcomes in the extinction phase. Whereas in the Cover conditions, access to the drinking receptacle was blocked by a metal plate, in the No Cover conditions, the drinking receptacle was accessible. The Test phase showed that in the Cover conditions, the measured expectancies of sucrose were clearly at a higher level than in the No Cover conditions. We compare two competing theories potentially explaining the findings. A cognitive theory interprets the observed effect as evidence that the rats were able to understand that the cover blocked informational access to the outcome information, and therefore the changed learning input did not necessarily signify a change of the underlying contingency in the world. An alternative associationist account, renewal theory, might instead explain the relative sparing of extinction in the Cover condition as a consequence of context change. We discuss the merits of both theories as accounts of our data and conclude that the cognitive explanation is in this case preferred

The fate of redundant cues: Further analysis of the redundancy effect

Pearce, Dopson, Haselgrove, and Esber (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 38, 167–179, 2012) conducted a series of experiments with rats and pigeons in which the conditioned responding elicited by two types of redundant cue was compared. One of these redundant cues was a blocked cue X from A+ AX+ training, whereas the other was cue Y from a simple discrimination BY+ CY–. Greater conditioned responding was elicited by X than by Y; we refer to this difference as the redundancy effect. To test an explanation of this effect in terms of comparator theory (Denniston, Savastano, & Miller, 2001), a single group of rats in Experiment 1 received training of the form A+ AX+ BY+ CY–, followed by an A– Y+ discrimination. Responding to the individual cues was tested both before and after the latter discrimination. In addition to a replication of the redundancy effect during the earlier test, we observed stronger responding to B than to X, both during the earlier test and, in contradiction of the theory, after the A– Y+ discrimination. In Experiment 2, a blocking group received A+ AX+, a continuous group received AX+ BX–, and a partial group received AX± BX± training. Subsequent tests with X again demonstrated the redundancy effect, but also revealed a stronger response in the partial than in the continuous group. This pattern of results is difficult to explain with error-correction theories that assume that stimuli compete for associative strength during conditioning. We suggest, instead, that the influence of a redundant cue is determined by its relationship with the event with which it is paired, and by the attention it is paid

PERCEIVED AND INDUCED EMOTION RESPONSES TO POPULAR MUSIC: CATEGORICAL AND DIMENSIONAL MODELS

Music both conveys and evokes emotions, and although both phenomena are widely studied, the difference between them is often neglected. The purpose of this study is to examine the difference between perceived and induced emotion for western popular music using both categorical and dimensional models of emotion, and to examine the influence of individual listener differences on their emotion judgment. A total of 80 musical excerpts were randomly selected from an established dataset of 2,904 popular songs tagged with one of the four words happy, sad, angry, or relaxed on the last.fm web site. Participants listened to the excerpts and rated perceived and induced emotion on the categorical model and dimensional model, and the reliability of emotion tags was evaluated according to participants\u27 agreement with corresponding labels. In addition, the goldsmiths musical sophistication index (gold-msi) was used to assess participants\u27 musical expertise and engagement. As expected, regardless of the emotion model used, music evokes emotions similar to the emotional quality perceived in music. Moreover, emotion tags predict music emotion judgments. However, age, gender and three factors from gold-msi, importance, emotion, and music training were found not to predict listeners\u27 responses, nor the agreement with tags

Accumulation of embedded solitons in systems with quadratic nonlinearity

Previous numerical studies have revealed the existence of embedded solitons (ESs) in a class of multi-wave systems with quadratic nonlinearity, families of which seem to emerge from a critical point in the parameter space, where the zero solution has a fourfold zero eigenvalue. In this paper, the existence of such solutions is studied in a three-wave model. An appropriate rescaling casts the system in a normal form, which is universal for models supporting ESs through quadratic nonlinearities. The normal-form system contains a single irreducible parameter $\epsilon$, and is tantamount to the basic model of type-I second-harmonic generation. An analytical approximation of WKB type yields an asymptotic formula for the distribution of discrete values of $\epsilon$ at which the ESs exist. Comparison with numerical results shows that the asymptotic formula yields an exact value of the scaling index, -6/5, and a fairly good approximation for the numerical factor in front of the scaling term.Comment: 25 pages, 4 figure

Regulation of Mammalian Mitochondrial Gene Expression: Recent Advances

Perturbation of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) gene expression can lead to human pathologies. Therefore, a greater appreciation of the basic mechanisms of mitochondrial gene expression is desirable to understand the pathophysiology of associated disorders. Although the purpose of the mitochondrial gene expression machinery is to provide only 13 proteins of the oxidative phosphorylation (OxPhos) system, recent studies have revealed its remarkable and unexpected complexity. We review here the latest breakthroughs in our understanding of the post-transcriptional processes of mitochondrial gene expression, focusing on advances in analyzing the mitochondrial epitranscriptome, the role of mitochondrial RNA granules (MRGs), the benefits of recently obtained structures of the mitochondrial ribosome, and the coordination of mitochondrial and cytosolic translation to orchestrate the biogenesis of OxPhos complexes