Tacoma teacher honored with Holocaust educator award
Published: November 28, 2007
His students have met Holocaust survivors and seen former Nazi concentration camps in Poland with their own eyes.
Charles Wright Academy history teacher Nick Coddington wants to make sure the teenagers in his classes will be willing to stand up against genocide wherever they encounter it. On Tuesday, Coddington, a 45-year-old Tumwater resident, received national recognition for his teaching work.
He received the Robert I. Goldman Award for Excellence in Holocaust Education from The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous. Based in New York City, the foundation provides financial assistance to older and needy non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, the foundation’s Web site states. It also educates teachers and students about the history of Holocaust and rescue.
“He’s really able to connect his students in a very unique way to the events of history and current events and all with a focus on where your life is going to take you,” Althea Cawley-Murphree, a Charles Wright spokeswoman, said of Coddington. “He wants all of his students to be prepared if they ever have an opportunity to stand up.”
Coddington is in his third year as a high school teacher after spending 21 years in the Army, where he witnessed the effect of genocide in Bosnia. When he began thinking about how to design a 20th century history course for high school freshman, he wanted genocide to be a theme that connected the entire curriculum. Doing so would help teach students about tolerance, cultural awareness and diversity, Coddington said.
“It’s about just seeing people as people and not necessarily as different,” he said.
The Washington State Holocaust Research Center in Seattle helped Coddington develop the curriculum
which covers genocides in Armenia, Russia, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur
and helped him find survivors who came to talk to his students.
“This is the last generation that will hear the survivors” of the Holocaust, Coddington said. “These students now will be the ones to tell the stories years from now.”
Last fall, Coddington attended a weeklong training session at Columbia University with educators from across the United States and Europe who teach about the Holocaust. His roommate was from Swidnik, Poland, and they decided to create an exchange program in which 12 Charles Wright students traveled to Poland to participate in the annual Holocaust Remembrance Week. The students visited three concentration campus during their trip.
“I don’t know if they really grasp what they’ve been exposed to, but I think they will in the years to come,” Coddington said. “We’re teaching them to learn to care about other people, and I don’t think there’s anything more noble I could do as a teacher. … I think by taking kids on trips and meeting survivors, they learn to care, and I think that’s everything.”
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