"Especially Special": Learning About Jews in a Fundamentalist Christian School

TLDR: The authors examined the image of Jews conveyed through a Holocaust unit as taught at a fundamentalist Christian school and argued that studies of abstracted others studied about rather than interacted with within communal religious schools potentially pose problematic implications for students' multicultural sensibilities.

Abstract: Based on the premise that private religious schools function sociologically as crucibles for collective memory work, this study examined the image of Jews conveyed through a Holocaust unit as taught at a fundamentalist Christian school. After presenting an analysis of both the enacted and experienced curricular dimensions of the unit, we argue that studies of abstracted othersFothers studied about rather than interacted withFwithin communal religious schools potentially pose problematic implications for students’ multicultural sensibilities. Moreover, we claim that, given these implications, religion, as a category, ought to be both more consistently included within multicultural education frameworks and more closely examined within lived, classroom practice.