“I have to be there for this, I want to be here.”
These are the words Mayfield senior Kaylee Klymkow had after spraining her ankle and facing the possibility of missing Jennifer Doty’s special class that day. Too much thought, planning and preparation had gone into this important event — it simply could not be missed.
Doty has been teaching social studies for 30 years, 20 of them at Mayfield Central School District. In that time she has committed herself to honoring and preserving Holocaust education.
Social studies teacher Jennifer Doty speaks with her distance learning students.
“I decided that if I was going to teach this course, I was going to give it my all,” said Doty, who recently had an article detailing her classroom work published in an online journal.
As a Fulbright-Hays Program scholar, she deepened her understanding of this time in history by spending six weeks in Poland and visiting the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum. Doty comes from a Jewish background and this experience also gave her an opportunity to explore her own family’s history.
It was then that Doty made it her mission to have a Holocaust survivor speak to her students each school year, knowing that hearing first-hand from people who lived this history would make an impact like no other. Until now.
With Holocaust survivor numbers dwindling, Doty embarked on a journey to keep the past alive by partnering with Dave Reckess, the executive director of 3GNY, an organization that engages grandchildren (3Gs) of Holocaust survivors to share their family stories; and Zack Ellis, a 3G himself and founder of TheirStory, a platform that records remote interviews and automatically generates searchable transcripts, and subsequently, lasting resources of information.
This project provided 20 seniors in Doty’s distance learning classes from Mayfield and OESJ with an opportunity to interview 3G volunteers and ask them personal and specific questions about their family history and how it shaped their lives.
As Doty watched her students become emotionally connected to and passionate about their work, she realized she had found something special — not only for Holocaust education, but for learning and teaching across all areas of history.
“This project impacted students in ways that surpassed the academic goals I had set,” said Doty. “Rather than waiting for the bell to ring, these students were engrossed in their interviews.”
Doty, Reckess and Ellis presented this partnership at the 2024 New York State Council for the Social Studies Annual Conference in Albany, hoping to inspire other educators to explore this model of learning.
In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Doty’s article “Witness to witness: My journey reimagining Holocaust education” was published in eJewish Philanthropy, an on-line publisher that highlights news, resources and thought pieces on issues facing the Jewish philanthropic world. As her retirement years approach, the possibilities this partnership presents are her gift to the educational community.
Readers can access Doty’s online article by subscribing to eJewish Philanthropy (a free subscription that can be canceled any time) or CLICKING HERE.