Presentation
Introduction to the session dedicated to individual components of the project
Speaker: Aleksandra Kalisz, ICEAH, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
The second day of the conference was dedicated to presentations of all the different actions implemented throughout the three-year joint project with the Anne Frank House.
The project consisted of five components: online education, teacher exchanges, study visits for educators, training a group of young leaders and creating the scenario of a visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial from the perspective of visitors with special educational needs.
One of the most important objectives of the project was to make authentic memorial sites more accessible to those who could not see them directly. For example, online lessons allow people from all over the world to gain more knowledge about the Holocaust; teacher exchanges allow them to transmit the knowledge further to their students; young leaders can transmit information to their peers; and another project consists of the establishment of a visit for people with special needs to allow them to learn from a memorial site such as Auschwitz according to their various disabilities.
“When I was reading the elements of the project, when I was its co-ordinator, I saw that there was a strong accent on the availability of the memorial site for people with special needs. So it was the issue of the language that we are using, which is a large challenge for educators in Poland, and also for museum educators. How should we define the group which has very specific ways of learning about reality without stigmatizing these people? It is a very diverse group, we define them as visitors with special needs. These are people whose languages of communication are different from what we usually use.” – Aleksandra Kalisz, ICEAH.
To better understand this specific audience, the museum collaborated with civil society organizations and NGOs dealing with people having hearing and visual dysfunctions or disabilities, such as the Warsaw foundation “Culture without Barriers”. The team working on the project also took part in various training sessions and workshops in Wadowice to understand the different types of visual dysfunctions.
After this research period, a particular visit entitled “Difficult Simple Words” was created. “It is designed for people with mild to moderate learning difficulties or cognitive impairment.” The narrative is adapted to their needs; it is not as detailed as the traditional visit, nor so complex because the accumulation of details is too difficult for them. Strenuous work was undertaken to select the key terms, dates, important names and feelings like hunger, humiliation, persecution and suffering to communicate through the visit, using specific words so as to be understandable.
This visit is also available in English to be able to reach as many recipients as possible. Later on, an exhibition will be added to this learning process. It is an ongoing project prepared by Robert Płaczek and based on art made by the former prisoners, aimed at presenting the everyday experience of prisoners through visual material.
Concerning the access of historical knowledge for visitors with visual impairment, embossed relief prints were prepared to teach them as many details as possible about the camp’s topography. But the difficulty lies in the fact that with embossed prints, the fewer details the better. Once again, difficult choices concerning the information to communicate were made. Collaboration with foundations, experienced in museum education for visitors with special needs, are being considered to verify whether or not it is working.