OCTECHS teachers Shelley Wagner, Bridgette Profit and Mark Perales were awarded a potentially life-changing grant by the Education Foundation.
To Walk in their Shoes will take a group of OCTECHS students to tour the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. The grant is for $4,500.
There will be cross-curricular activities between history and English, adding on the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, the state curriculum.
English includes informational text and research and history includes U.S. involvement.
The human rights part of the museum goes into the Civil Rights movement in America, specifically in Dallas.
“Their display is basically where it started in Dallas, the Piccadilly Cafeteria downtown. We learn about Clarence Broadnax in my class. They research him and his role in it. He’s the first person that started it,” Wagner said.
They are taking 76 juniors on the trip, which will be in January. There is no exact date yet.
“We’re going to have a good amount of people that are going to help out,” Wagner said. “The museum requires one parent for every 10 students.”
OCTECHS took students to the museum for the first time last year.
They had been awarded the grant before, but the trip was delayed due to COVID.
“It’s a really powerful experience. I think the part that they love the most is there’s a hologram there of a survivor. The one that we experienced last year was Max Glauben, who had come to our school previously and then spoke in person. It’s basically artificial intelligence. But they’ve asked so many questions about the Holocaust and then they record their answers and then they project him on the stage. It’s real intimate space … The hologram’s not far away, so you stand up and you ask a question, and he’ll answer it. There’s some random questions that they asked him. They asked him to sing, for instance; sing your favorite song. … It’s really powerful,” Wagner said.
Glauben died in April this year.
Wagner said the students will work on a podcast about their experiences when they get back for history.
“It’s basically centered on the museum’s focus, which is perpetrator, upstander, bystander and victim. So those four categories and how they could be any one of those four at any point in their life. … You get bullied in school, you’re a victim. You bully someone else, you’re a perpetrator. You stand by and watch somebody, or you stand up. It’s all about the upstander in Dallas,” she said.
It’s not based on the perpetrators as much as those who stood up against them, Wagner added.
Wagner said she would definitely encourage other teachers to apply for the Foundation grants.
“We wouldn’t be able to afford that kind of trip without the Education Foundation’s help,” she added.
The application process has gotten even simpler. Everything is filled out on an online form, so there’s no paper that you have the fill out.
“The only difficult part about it is, of course, grant writing itself. That’s a learned skill. You can do it. Anybody can do it. It’s just you’ve got to learn how,” Wagner said.
The Foundation also provides workshops and they’ll give you feedback, if you ask them for it, to help you through the process, she added.
