Can technology help school students to understand history? Brookfield High School teacher Miriam Necastro thinks so. Necastro has been awarded a $1,000 grant from Mark Schonwetter Holocaust Education Foundation of Livingston, N.J., to establish a virtual reality lab, school officials said.
Although she is an English teacher, Necastro teaches her 11th and 12th graders the Art Spiegelman graphic novel “Maus,” in which the author details the experiences of his father, a Holocaust survivor.
“Holocaust education often fails to convey the immense human and physical scale of the atrocity, leading to abstract understanding and a vulnerability to historical distortion,” Necastro said in her application to the Schonwetter foundation. “To address this, we propose integrating virtual reality technology into our secondary school curriculum to provide a transformative sense of presence.”
Activities that students can do with the headsets include “360-degree historical tours” of places such as the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and the Anne Frank house, Necastro said.
“While the majority of my students may not be able to visit Eastern Europe in their lifetime, we can bring those impactful pilgrimages to BHS,” Necastro said.
She also sees her students participating in Dimensions in Testimony programs in which students use VR to “interview” Holocaust survivors. Language processing technology matches student questions with answers culled from interviews done previously with survivors, according to the Candles Holocaust Museum and Educational Center, Terre Haute, Ind.
The VR experience “shifts students from passive recipients of facts to active investigators within historically grounded environments,” Necastro said. “These immersive tools are crucial for fostering deep historical empathy and enhancing spatial memory, offering a powerful defense against denial narratives.”
The grant money will be used to buy VR headsets, a secure charging cart, content licenses, and materials for teacher and student training, she said.
Necastro used a $1,000 grant from the Youngstown Area Jewish Federation’s Andrew L. Lipkin Tikkun Olam Grant program to buy copies of “Maus.”
VR technology has been used in the school before. The Educational Service Center of Eastern Ohio, which provides career counseling services to the school, supplied VR headsets so students could explore careers in the career studies class, according to a post on the district’s Facebook page.
