Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Initiative

Boaz Dvir, a filmmaker and Penn State associate professor, created the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Initiative at Penn State University in 2019 to enable K-12 educators to provide their students with the opportunities to gain critical thinking, fact finding, active listening and civic discourse skills, as well as empathy.

[2] The initiative was launched in response to Pennsylvania's Act 70 of 2014, which called on educators to develop programming about the Holocaust, genocides and other human rights violations.

The module, which takes about six hours to complete, provides participants with strategies to facilitate and engage in planned and unplanned discussions about difficult topics.

[9] Some of the scholars who independently reviewed the papers described the Initiative's research-based nonpartisan approach, which combines practitioner inquiry with trauma-informed and asset-based practices, as novel, innovative and widely needed.

[11] As part of the initiatives, Dvir led a discussion in the Schreyer Honors College's “Dialogues of Democracy,” titled “Building a Stronger Democratic Future.