By Leyna Krow, Editor, JTNews
Charles Wright Academy instructor Nick Coddington received the Spirit of Anne Frank Outstanding Educator Award at a ceremony in New York on June 12.
The award honors teachers who have created special programs that drive home the horrors of racism and bias-related violence, specifically with regard to the Holocaust, and also that empower students to stand up against prejudice when confronted with it in their own lives.
In his three years at the Tacoma-based private school, Coddington, who teaches 20th-Century World History and U.S. history, has developed a unique curriculum based around modern instances of genocide, with an emphasis on the Holocaust. His classes take a hands-on approach to the material, engaging his students in projects that impel them to connect with both victims and survivors on an emotional level.
Coddington was nominated for the award by the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center.
“[Nick] has developed this wonderful program,” said Laurie Warshal Cohen, co-executive director for the Holocaust Center. “I think it’s just fantastic circumstances to have someone like him living and teaching in this region.”
Coddington noted that much of the motivation for the program he has developed at Charles Wright came from the 21 years he spent as an intelligence officer for the U.S. military and for NATO, particularly when, during the Rwandan genocide, he was confronted head-on with the horrors of that humanitarian disaster and what he saw as an insufficient reaction from the outside world.
“[I] watched as the world, and especially the international community, turned its back on humans in need,” Coddington wrote in an e-mail to JTNews.
When he started teaching in 2005, he said he was disappointed by how little attention most history books paid to genocide. So he decided to design his own curriculum, which starts with the Armenian genocide and works through to the present, to the Darfur region of Sudan. He uses the Holocaust as the focal point of his course, in the hope that, if his students can connect with what has happened in the past, they will be prepared to step up and take action against current and future atrocities.
With the help of the Holocaust Center, Coddington presents the stories of those impacted by the Holocaust to his students in a variety of ways, including videos, archival materials and in-depth research projects. But he noted that the most powerful experience for his students is in actually meeting and talking with survivors of the Holocaust.
“I can show videos all day long, but when Klaus Stern rolls up his sleeve and shows them the numbers tattooed on his arm, they get it. No longer is it about some statistic in a book; it is about their friend,” he wrote.
Coddington’s commitment to Holocaust education also extends beyond the walls of the classroom.
In 2006, Coddington attended a seminar on Holocaust education in Washington, D.C. run by the Jewish Foundation For the Righteous. There, he met a Polish high school teacher with whom he discussed the possibility of doing an exchange program between their two schools. The following spring, Coddington took a group of students to Poland to see the Majdanek and Auschwitz death camps firsthand, as well as to give them a chance to get to know the culture and landscape in which the events they had been studying took place.
Charles Wright Academy then hosted twelve Polish students who came to Tacoma last fall. The trip and exchange have since become annual traditions, with Coddington taking his second group of Tacoma students to Europe this past May.
He is confident that these trips, as well as his in-class curriculum, will leave a lasting and meaningful impression on his students.
“I know someday my students will be in a situation where someone states [that] the Holocaust was a fabrication,” he wrote. “And in that moment, my students will bear witness: they will tell the story, they will prevent history from being forgotten.”