After its success in the Latino community of Watsonville and its use to enhance the self-esteem of Roma children in Hungary, the new methodology for teaching the lessons from Anne Frank’s life was discussed by Jan Erik Dubbelman and his International Department team. This could be a dramatically new way of working with the Anne Frank exhibition programme in other countries. Jan Erik saw the value of taking Anne Frank exhibitions directly into schools and training students in each participating school to be peer educators.
Surprisingly, the area chosen to pilot the new peer-education project in 2002 was as demographically far away from the culturally-diverse environments of Watsonville and Amsterdam as it was possible to find – the rural valleys of the Austrian Tirol. This was an unusual but carefully-considered choice of location. Unlike teeming metropolitan cities with excellent transport links enabling people to go wherever they choose, those who live surrounded by steep mountains have limited ability to travel. This creates strong feelings of community within each valley, something I also encountered when working with the Anne Frank project in the former mining communities of the Welsh valleys.
Amidst the towering pine trees and crystal streams of the Austrian Tirol, the exhibition ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’ travelled from school to school along the winding valleys. Those children of the Tirolean valleys were not aware that they were the guinea pigs for an educational philosophy that would change lives and empower the next generation of teenagers around the world. Jan Erik’s rationale was to take the learning experience of young people a step further into the realms of both teaching and learning. He explained, ‘The biggest change-makers in our society are kids themselves. Young people can relate to complex issues of prejudice even better than adults.’
The Anne Frank House’s educators Barry van Driel and Norbert Hinterleitner (whose surname coincidentally translates into English as ‘those who lived on the back slope of a mountain’) had the task of convincing schools in the hidden villages of the mountain valleys to take an Anne Frank exhibition and educational programme. This was far away from the high-profile government, embassy or corporate-funded international Anne Frank exhibition tours that the Anne Frank House had been accustomed to running. In the Austrian Tirol the participating schools were each encouraged to plan satellite events, such as lectures, discussions and film shows, for their own village community to take part in, while doing their own publicity and fundraising.
It proved easier than expected to convince the schools to take part. Schools in this sparsely-populated and inaccessible region of tall mountains and deep valleys were competing to attract students. The school principals each started to realize the value of showing that their school was thinking in a radically different way and engaging with the local community. Jan Erik explained, ‘In these deep valleys you grow up looking out at mountains all around you. This creates a strong and cohesive community in each village. We wanted to pilot the peer-to-peer method where we knew there would be whole community involvement.’ At the end of the Anne Frank exhibition’s tour of the Tirolean villages, this new way of working was deemed to be fruitful and it was time to develop it further.
The Anne Frank Trust’s Head of Education Lucy Glennon heard about the new methodology at an international education seminar she attended at the Anne Frank House in 2006. She came back to London enthused and wanted to discuss with me if somehow we could implement it in Britain. Happily, an interesting opportunity soon arose. Our Head of Fundraising Paul Tyack had a contact on Hackney Council, an Anne Frank enthusiast called Nicola Baboneau who was working in the Community and Partnerships team. When Paul called Nicola, she liked the idea of bringing a small version of the exhibition ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’ directly into secondary schools in the borough.
Hackney was an area of East London that had seen many waves of immigration. Its residents during the twentieth century had included my own Polish immigrant paternal grandparents. They had moved there just before the First World War from the grimy tenements of Whitechapel to an imposing new Edwardian house in what was then considered the leafy and quiet suburb of Hackney. I had spent much of my childhood visiting this Hackney house, but by then my cousins and I found ourselves playing in the street alongside other former grand houses that had been razed to the ground in the Blitz.
It was in Hackney in the mid-1950s that I vividly remember my first childhood experience of seeing a person whose skin wasn’t the same colour as mine. We were driving towards the famous Ridley Road food market and a football rolled into the road in front of our car. My dad stopped the car and waved to a boy to retrieve his ball. The boy, roughly 8-years-old, ran and got his ball and gave my Dad a bright smile of thanks. Dad explained to my confused brother and me why the boy looked so different – that he and his Mum and Dad had come from a hot sunny place, and that’s why his skin was dark to protect him from the hot sun. The first post-war wave of 492 immigrants from the West Indies had arrived in Britain on the ship the MV Empire Windrush only a few years earlier (ironically this vessel had originally been a German cruise ship during the 1930s) and maybe this boy’s parents were among them.
As you can guess, with my childhood memories I didn’t need much convincing that Hackney would be a great place to start our exciting new Anne Frank programme in 2006. This was an area of East London that still had a diverse population and many social problems, but parts of the borough were also becoming newly gentrified and affordable areas for young professionals. Nicola Baboneau was keen that as many secondary schools as possible in the borough should benefit from the Anne Frank programme, and so Lucy and Paul set about writing bids for funding for an anticipated year-long event. The Labour Government were supporting initiatives aimed at the Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities and we received funding from the Department for Education for half the salary of a project worker to deliver our work in the Hackney schools, plus a further two years in other London boroughs. The other 50 per cent for the first year came from the Prince’s Trust, the foundation set up by the Prince of Wales in 1976 to help disadvantaged young people. Not only did the Prince’s Trust agree to half fund the position of a Project Officer but our new project worker came through their ranks too.
In July 2006 we recruited a young man called Mukith Khalisadar who was on a Prince’s Trust training programme. Mukith was 20-years-old, from the Bengali community in the inner city area of Tower Hamlets and this would be his first job. Such was his inexperience in the working world that in his first week he popped his head around my office door and said to his Executive Director (i.e. me), ‘Darlin’ we are going for lunch now, are you comin’?’ (we still laugh about this together). Little did we know that more than ten years later Mukith would, as a married father of a young son, still be leading our London Schools Project and considered by the Prince’s Trust (and by the Anne Frank Trust too) as one of their greatest success stories. Mukith was so impressive and dedicated that for two full years his salary was funded by the investment bank Goldman Sachs.
As a Muslim man, the reasons for his dedicated work in educating about the Holocaust have sometimes been cynically questioned by teenage Muslim pupils and he has even been called a ‘Jew Lover’. But he has always patiently and sensitively deflected these attacks, by explaining the importance and relevance of everyone knowing about what happened to Anne Frank and why. It has been difficult for him, as well as other members of our education team, working in schools during heightened conflicts between Israel and Palestine, and within our organization there are deep emotional ties towards both sides of the conflict. Our strategy is to explain that the history of the Middle East is complex, with grievances on both sides, whereas the history of Nazism and the Holocaust is black and white.
As well as Mukith, Jamie Arden was appointed in 2006 as London Schools Project Manager, to oversee the year-long Hackney project and the next two years. Jamie had come through the drama in education route and was a hugely engaging and charismatic educator for teenagers. Th
e following year the tentacles of the UK’s Anne Frank peer education project started to spread outward from London. Fiona Ranson, who worked in the Ethnic Minority and Travellers’ Advisory Service at County Durham Council in the north-east of England, had heard about the project and called Lucy Glennon. She was enthusiastic about how it could be used in the former mining communities of County Durham and soon raised funding from an alliance of local trade unions and the local police. And so we took the new project northwards.
The Barcapel Foundation in Glasgow also heard about it via Jed Wilson who happened to be a Trustee of both our charities. The Barcapel Foundation had been set up by Jed’s family from the sale of their successful pet food business, which had at one time captured 20 per cent of the UK market. Our work in challenging prejudice particularly chimed with one of their Trustees, a lawyer called Niall Scott, whose 16-year-old son Mark had been the innocent victim of the Protestant/ Catholic sectarian hatred that still blights parts of the United Kingdom. Walking with friends past a Protestant pub in his Celtic football scarf, Mark was attacked and stabbed in the neck by Jason Campbell, the son of a convicted Loyalist terrorist. Campbell served fifteen years for Mark’s unprovoked murder.
Heather Boyce was employed in 2008 as our new Scotland Project Manager. Now based in York and married to our Fundraiser Paul Tyack (Anne Frank would love it that romance blossomed at her eponymous Trust), Heather is now responsible for the Trust’s educational development.
In 2009 we were invited to conduct a year-long education project in Addenbrooke’s NHS Trust hospital in Cambridge to teach their 7,000-strong staff, from the venerated surgeons all the way through the staff chain to hospital porters, the value of treating their patients and staff colleagues with equality and dignity. Val Ross came on board to manage the project, and since its completion in 2010 remained as the Trust’s East of England Project Manager. She has travelled extensively throughout this region (as a non-driver relying on often challenging public transport connections) bringing the peer education programme to schools in the predominantly rural eastern counties, from the county of Essex, immediately north-east of London, right up to the northern tip of East Anglia. Much of Val’s work has been funded by local trade unions, including the NASUWT teaching union.
And so our peer education project continued to expand across Britain. The Department for Communities and Local Government have been supporting the project since 2007, and the consistently high externally conducted evaluations our work has received resulted in many other sources of funds, including a five-year major grant from the Big Lottery to expand the Anne Frank Ambassadors programme. To date we work intensively in seven regions of England and Scotland where our Anne Frank Trust teams are active week in and week out in schools, whilst building their own local relationships and networks of support. Sadly, I can’t acknowledge every one of our expanding education team but I hereby put on record my immense pride in their work and huge appreciation of their dedication.
Even though it may appear that the peer-to-peer education programme is a very open style of presenting the Anne Frank story, there is a firm structure and ongoing evaluation lying beneath. The Trust implements the peer education programme in a school in the following way. Having visited the participating school several times, the Trust’s Regional Manager or a member of his/her team installs the exhibition ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’ in a designated area of the school. The installation usually takes place on a Monday morning and, as the exhibition stands and panels are flexible, durable and lightweight, two or three pairs of hands can get them set up in a couple of hours. The flexible structure means that they can be erected along a wall, or in different configurations around a central core, helpful when you are visiting a different busy and crowded school environment each couple of weeks.
Later that morning the team of young peer guides chosen for the task, anywhere between six and twenty in number, receive their training from the Trust’s team member. Usually each peer educator has a responsibility for guiding visitors through a set of panels, learning a couple of different sets of panels in case they are called upon to substitute for an absent guide. The peer educators vary in age, but usually they are between the ages of 12 to 15. It isn’t always the most obvious students – the quick learners, high achievers or good communicators – who are chosen by their teachers for the peer educator role. An astute teacher will often deliberately select a pupil who has had difficult issues to overcome – shyness, attention deficit or hyperactivity, a tough family background or has been the victim of bullying. Many of our peer educators have been from immigrant families, who have experienced difficulties of assimilation into their new school community, and some of our best educators have been refugees themselves from the wars in Kosovo, the Middle East and Africa. They have felt a particular affinity with Anne’s story. In turn, their audience has come to a deeper understanding of their peer educator’s own traumatic background.
During the week or two that the Anne Frank exhibition is in each school, the teachers have selected an enhancement programme from a range of accompanying workshops created and presented by the Trust’s education team. These are on topics such as ‘Rights and Responsibilities’; encouraging creative writing projects such as for our own year-long ‘Generation Diary’ online campaign; and addressing more current prejudices such as Islamophobia. In 2015, the Trust received a grant from the Department for Education to create a workshop and materials to help tackle homophobic, transphobic and biphobic bullying in schools, and was able to expand what it could offer to teachers even further. Where possible a Holocaust survivor, or survivor from a more recent genocide, will come to the school to tell their story.
But our programme does not end when the Anne Frank exhibition is taken down and moves on. Schools are then invited to sign up their peer educators for the ‘Anne Frank Ambassadors’ programme and twice a year the Trust conducts two-day training courses for new Ambassadors in each region. On this course the student will learn how to create social responsibility initiatives in their own community; or give a presentation on Anne Frank in their local primary schools; or create and run a campaign to tackle a local or national human rights issue. In many cases Anne Frank Ambassadors have used their skills to act as guides for the public at the large community exhibition held in their town, which since 2005 has been ‘Anne Frank + You’. The Anne Frank Ambassadors are expected to carry their ambassadorial title with pride and this is certainly the case.
Since 2001 and the inception of the peer-to-peer methodology by the Anne Frank House there have been thousands of feedback responses from teachers and from the students themselves, gathered from all over the world. Both the Anne Frank House and the Anne Frank Trust UK regard all this feedback as accumulated learning, constantly helping to improve the training procedures and relevance to changing school systems. The Trust’s attention to monitoring short-term responses and longer-term outcomes has resulted in the consistent renewal of Government grants supporting the programme and even expanding it to more regions of the UK.
Lucy Glennon echoed Jan Erik’s views about tasking teenagers in this role, ‘Whereas we as adults find ourselves talking in a rather self-conscious politically correct way about subjects like racial abuse, the children get straight to the point.’ Mukith Khalidasar agrees.
Peer education speaks the language of the audience. In my experience of working with young people when being taught about moral issues young people need to relate to the person talking to them. Teachers or adults, no matter how in tune they are with the youth of today, will still be seen as an adult rather than one of them. This is why when you put a young person in front of their peers it cuts out the mentality of ‘Oh it’s just another adult telling us what to do’.
Over 1,000 Anne Frank peer educators are trained each year in England and Scotland and of those approximately half go on to the Anne Frank Ambassador training. However, in the same way that learning about Anne Frank creates an emotive connection with the
destruction of millions of lives, relaying individual uplifting stories from some of the young people who have benefitted from being Anne Frank peer guides demonstrates the method’s impact even better than statistics. I have heard many of these directly from the beneficiaries as well as their teachers.
The programme has been particularly successful in the former industrial towns and mining villages in the north-east of England. Despite it being a predominantly white monocultural region, high unemployment means many pockets are recruiting grounds for extremist organizations. When I visited the former mining town of Ferryhill, the Principal of the Business and Enterprise College explained to me the huge value he placed on having the Anne Frank programme. He told me that this was a community where there could be up to three generations of unemployed men in one family as the last coal mine had closed in 1968. He saw the Anne Frank programme as an insurance policy to help keep the next generation of adults away from extremist politics and had brought the programme into the school for four consecutive years. Faye, one of the peer guides who had become an Anne Frank Ambassador and was now about to leave school, told me she was a carer for her mother and that this was the best thing that had ever happened to her.
A consistent relationship with a school such as Ferryhill Business and Enterprise College gives us the luxury of a longer-term assessment of our theory of change. When we first interviewed Jordan Wilson as a newly-turned teenager and Anne Frank peer educator he told us in a pre-pubescent voice that there was racism in his area. He shrugged his shoulders; he didn’t know how he could do anything about it. Interviewed again four years later, looking more a muscular adult, he said he felt much more confident to challenge racist remarks if he heard them. Jordan felt a strong responsibility to educate people about what he has learnt from working with Anne Frank and that this attitude affects everything he does. He even said ‘I think Anne Frank would be happy as there are so many people preventing what she went through from happening again.’
The Legacy of Anne Frank Page 32