Students make film on Holocaust as they learn

(Alexandra Regan, Darren Scortt and John Tipton film in Dachau, Germany, in April 2008 for a Carlsbad High School film.)

Carlsbad High School students are learning about the Holocaust while making a film about it.

Six students leave for Poland and Germany on Saturday to work on the CHSTV film "We Must Remember." Another group recently spent three days filming in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Students also have been interviewing local Holocaust survivors and WWII veterans who helped to liberate concentration camps.

“We want to bring history alive for teens,” said Doug Green, CHSTV advisor. “Presentation of the facts by peers is a powerful teaching tool.”

The project began when Green was in Germany and toured Dachau. "I felt immediately that I wanted to bring students to Dachau, and then had an idea that we could take the skills my students were learning in my broadcasting classes at Carlsbad High School and create a film," he said.

The final film, which its creators hope to complete by November, will include additional curriculum materials for eighth- to 11th-grade teachers and it will be made available to schools in California and the rest of the nation.

Carlsbad High School has a daily live news broadcast that reaches 3,100 students and staff members.

Students work on the film on their own time and help raise funding for it.

-- Mary MacVean

Comments

[MD]

It would have been more interesting if the students examined how the Museum's "We Must Remember" tagline seems to have a few qualifiers (i.e. We shall never forget! unless you happen to be Somalian, Rwandan, Cambodian, Bosnian, etc.)