Education

Researching Holocaust Education and Activism on Social Media

by Dr Stefania Manca How is Holocaust memory being reshaped in the age of TikTok, Instagram, and digital activism? Drawing on her journey from educational technology to digital Holocaust memory and education, our latest visiting fellow explores how social media can both distort and revitalise the memory of the Holocaust. I have been a researcher in educational technology for almost 30 years, focusing on the opportunities and challenges of using digital tools in education. My background in education sciences has helped me develop methods and strategies to integrate digital practices into teaching and learning. In 2018–2019, I decided to connect this professional expertise with my long-standing personal interest in the Holocaust. This step marked the beginning of my engagement with Holocaust memory and education through a digital lens. I started a Doctoral programme in Education and ICT (e-learning) at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Spain, with a project entitled “Teaching and learning about the Holocaust on social media: A learning ecology perspective.” Since 2011, I had already been studying the use of social media in education, so it felt natural to bring these two fields together. At the time, research in this area was still scarce, as highlighted in [...]

Serious TikTok: Can You Learn About the Holocaust in 60 seconds?

by Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann and Tom Divon, Hebrew University, Jerusalem In this month's post, our guest contributors explore multimodal education and commemoration of the Holocaust on today's most popular social media platform. In less than a year, the trending short-video platform TikTok transformed from a mostly entertaining environment for lip-syncing, dancing, and other self-performances into an interest-based platform for sharing information about politics, sexuality, identity, history, and other topics. This development was accompanied by the rise of a format which we describe as “serious TikTok”. In such videos, users communicate socio-political affairs in engaging ways through digital storytelling while harnessing the platform’s features, aesthetics, and dialects, allowing them to creatively unpack complex topics, contextualise and provide information. Following a controversy about TikTok users who performed as fictional Holocaust victims in a #POVHolocaustChallenge in August 2020, as well as the increase in antisemitic harassment and hate speech on the platform, ways of seriously dealing with the complex history of the Holocaust on TikTok gained special attention. In the following, we explore the specific modes individual and institutional TikTok creators use to address the history and memory of the Holocaust in their short video-memes and their ways of using TikTok’s aesthetics and vernaculars [...]