Learning Opportunities

Since Centennial College received the John and Molly Pollock Holocaust Collection in 2000, a group of Centennial faculty has developed and is delivering three Holocaust-related courses. These courses, described briefly below, are General Education courses, available to all students. For each course, a faculty contact person is identified. If you would like to learn more about these courses or have a course outline sent to you, please call Centennial at 416-289-5000 and enter the faculty extension or click on the email address presented below.

Literature of the Holocaust, GNED-101

Outline:

The course offers the essential historical and cultural background that is required to understand and interpret selected literature of the Holocaust. Literary texts are studied in conjunction with a course manual designed to build students' knowledge of the subject. The contents of the manual intersect in several explicit ways with the recommended primary texts. The course surveys literature by the multiple victims of the Nazi era and key contemporary authors who reflect on the Holocaust. The focus of the course, however, is the Nazis' effort to destroy European Jewry. A guest lecture by a survivor of the Holocaust helps bring the literature into experiential focus.

Media:

The course may integrate various media, including contemporary musical recordings, slides (especially of drawings, paintings, sculpture, and architecture) films, CD ROMS, Web sites and background texts. The course examines selections of memoirs, plays, poems and fiction by men and women from oppressed groups.

Memoir:

A single complete memoir by a survivor, or appropriate excerpts from a variety of memoirs, form the core of the course and act as a point of departure for students' growing historical knowledge of the period. Memoir and diary excerpts may include work by authors such as Hannah Senesh, Alicia Jurman-Appleman, Etty Hillesum, Adam Czerniakow, Chaim Kaplan, Emmanuel Ringelblum, Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Charlotte Delbo, Paul Celan, Charles Reznikoff, Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen.

Overview:

A key play on the subject that is sometimes assigned is Martin Shermans' Bent, a highly accessible and gripping piece based on the Nazis' persecution of homosexuals. Finally, examples of prose fiction are selected from work by Ida Fink, Cynthia Ozick, Elie Wiesel, Anatoli Kuznetsov, Tadeusz Borowski, Jerzy Kosinski, and Primo Levi. "Literature of the Holocaust" fosters not only the development of analytical thinking skills, but also intercultural awareness and knowledge of the world through literature.

Contact:

David Kent at 416.289.5000 ext. 2228 or Michael Matthews at 416.289.5000 ext. 3540.

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Modern World History: The 20th Century, GNED 164

Outline:

This course surveys the major ideas, events and people who have helped shape history around the world in the last one hundred years. By examining changing patterns and power relationships in world history, students will be better able to understand the context of world events now and in the future.

The course has four key learning outcomes:

1. To examine the rise of the modern state, the causes and effects of World War I, and the key social, economic and political changes between 1890 and 1920.

2. To understand ideas, conditions and events between 1920 and 1945 that contributed to global instability, the Holocaust and World War II.

3. To consider global changes, various political independent movements and the struggle for civil rights after World War II.

4. To analyze the impact of the Cold War, changes in global power relations and the rise of "globalism" in order to explore their influence upon events unfolding now in the twenty-first century.

Contact:

David McCarthy at 416.289.5000 ext. 2981

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Propaganda, GNED 162

This course guides students through a world where thought is shaped more by deceptive persuasive techniques than by facts and legitimate reasoning, where awareness and biases are often subtly manipulated, and where public opinion is dictated, not developed.

Following an exploration of examples of mass manipulation, principally from the 20th century, the course helps students construct a means of seeing through propaganda's smokescreen - a propaganda filter.

Students also practice various means of responding and publicly objecting to how the worst kinds of it can be combated. The course contains a significant Holocaust component and offers a thorough but sensitively introduced analysis of Nazi antisemitic propaganda, its origins and its pernicious effects.

Contact:

David McCarthy at 416.289.5000 ext. 2981