THUNDER BAY -- A dark period in history was brought to light Thursday for students at Sir Winston Churchill Collegiate and Vocational Institute, who learned about the Ukrainian Holocaust, also known as the Holodomor.
One by one, these Grade 10 and 11 students entered a mobile classroom, launched in 2015 to create awareness to an era in history most in the modern era have learned little about.
The Holodomor was a famine-genocide carried out againstUkrainian residents by the Soviet Union and dictator Joseph Stalin in the 1930s.
Mobile classroom facilitator Stephanie Bailey said learning about what happened during the Ukrainian genocide can help students develop critical thinking skills for the future.
“There’s a lot of learning to be done around this genocide,” Bailey said. “We can talk about how the media was managed at the time.”
“Stalin had managed, not just media at home he was managing western media as well, so that’s another example of fake news today and how students can assess that, think about that and where does that come from.”
Churchill history teacher Rory Bains said his grandmother straight from Ukraine around the time Stalin started exercising authoritarian powers.
“That’s when the Ukrainians fled, but back to question, when the (students) come out of the bus I hope they have a real depth understanding of where they are standing in this country and how many struggles are happening currently in this world as well as in history,” Bains said.
Bailey says much of the information on the Ukrainian genocide was hidden until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
(TBT News)
