This thesis is a critical analysis of the candidate’s research into school based Holocaust education in Scotland between 2002-2012. In this thesis, Holocaust education comprises learning about the Holocaust and learning from the Holocaust which leads to its justification in history and citizenship programmes. ‘Citizenship’ permeates each chapter of this thesis because the candidate considers that the Holocaust has an important role in developing young people’s understanding of aspects of citizenship such as individual responsibility, racism, antisemitism, human rights and genocides. The critical review of literature in this thesis begins in the wider Holocaust educational context, discussing the developments and challenges to Holocaust education, and adopted theoretical perspectives. This leads into the Scottish context which focuses on local policy issues. The methodology section explains the candidate’s constructionist and interpretivist positions and critically reflects on her adopted approaches at every stage of the research process. The section on the candidate’s publications provides an overview and critical discussion of these publications and shows that the candidate’s learning over the course of this research included specific ways of developing communicating with external funders, meeting ethical requirements, and designing questionnaires. The candidate’s case studies’ findings have contributed to scholarship in Holocaust education by demonstrating the impact of the introduction of Holocaust Memorial Day in one authority, suggesting that learning about the Holocaust in the primary school can have an immediate and longer lasting impact on pupils’ values, and providing insight into student and teacher participants’ views of the Lesson From Auschwitz Project. The candidate’s publications in the primary context have also demonstrated that the Holocaust can be taught appropriately to primary pupils, contributing to the debate on this issue. In addition, the candidate’s publications have raised the international profile of Holocaust education in Scotland.

This study employs qualitative methods to investigate the types of learning that occurred when students in a single school encountered the Holocaust. The study explored the experiences of 48 students, together with two of their teachers and a Holocaust survivor who visited the school annually to talk to the students. A thematic analysis was conducted to identify prevalent similarities in the students’ responses. Three themes were identified, analysed and discussed. The three themes were: ‘surface level learning’ (their academic knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust), ‘affective learning’ (their emotional engagement with the topic) and ‘connective learning’ (how their encounter with the Holocaust fitted their developing worldview). The first theme revealed that students had a generally sound knowledge of the Holocaust, but there were discrepancies in the specifics of their knowledge. The second theme revealed that learning about the Holocaust had been an emotionally traumatic and complicated process. It also revealed that meeting a Holocaust survivor had a significant impact upon the students, but made them begin to question the provenance of different sources of Holocaust learning. The third theme showed that students had difficulty connecting the Holocaust with modern events and made flawed connections between the two. Finally, the study examines the views of the Holocaust survivor in terms of his intentions and his reasons for giving his testimony in schools. The study’s conclusions are drawn within the context of proposing a new conceptualisation of the Holocaust as a ‘contested space’ in history and in collective memory. A tripartite approach to Holocaust Education is suggested to affect high quality teaching within the ‘contested space’ of the event.