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Kupferberg Holocaust Center-NEH Book: Approaches to Mass Atrocity Education in Community Colleges: Chapter 10

"Humanistic Pedagogy Across the Disciplines": An edited volume featuring insights from QCC faculty members who incorporated the Kupferberg Holocaust Center's resources into their classrooms

Chapter 10: Outcomes of an Academic-Service-Learning Project on Mass Atrocity with an ELL Population

About the Chapter:

This chapter depicts an extremely successful project that involved the collaboration of an upper-level ELL reading class and a pre-service education class that was conducted as part of Queensborough Community College’s 2015-16 KHC-NEH Colloquium Series, “Gender, Mass Violence, and Genocide.” Both groups of students learned about the colloquia theme as they provided service to each other and read Jasmina Dervisevic-Cesic’s memoir of the Bosnian Civil War, The River Runs Salt, Runs Sweet. This chapter provides a project outline and rationale, curricular focus, and a summary of the themes that emerged from a recursive assessment of student learning and participation. In doing so, the chapter portrays the pedagogical benefits of employing a peer-to-peer Academic Service-Learning model about crucial topics to enhance ELL learning.

About the Author:

Julia B. Carroll, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of English, developmental English, and ESL at Queensborough Community College, CUNY. She has co-authored multiple peer-reviewed articles focused on teaching reading and writing skills to multilingual learners utilizing curriculum related to the Holocaust, genocide, and mass atrocity. She is also a practitioner of academic service-learning, and her research in this area has been published in the following three journals: AAC&U’s Diversity and Democracy; Teaching English in the Two-Year College; and Basic Writing eJournal.

Additional Online Resources

Bosnian Genocide survivor Jasmina Dervisevic-Cesic speaks to Stoughton High School Students

"The Defense of Bosnia" (A War Documentary)

“The Bosnia List,” a lecture by Kenan Trebincevic

Relevant KHC-NEH Event

“Multiple Girlhoods: Growing up in Bosnia Before and During the Civil War” on November 18. 2015. To watch, please click here.