Quilt Inspires 7th Grade Class to be Upstanders

Michele Tyler, 7^th grade Language Arts teacher at Clark Middle School in Saint John, Indiana, attended an educator institute in Lafayette, Indiana.

Integrating the lessons that she learned into her classroom, Tyler developed a project allowing each student to choose one Jewish partisan to learn about. “They each created a quilt square to represent their partisan, and then we sewed the squares together.” When teaching about the Holocaust to her class the central theme for Tyler is to explore the issue of “am I an upstander or a bystander?” Her class examines this concept by reading Children of Willesden Lane and the stories of the partisans to support her central theme.

Tyler generally begins the unit with a KWL (What You Know, What You Want to Know, and What You’ve Learned) chart about the Holocaust. She has since discovered that many students have studied the Holocaust, but most of them have never heard about the partisans or the Kindertransport. Tyler commented, “I use the KWL as a jumping off point to introduce these two stories. At the end of the unit, students are asked to integrate what they have learned into an action plan for their own lives—how they will live as upstanders.”