Scott Templeton, a Grade 6 educator and a student in the University of Winnipeg’s Post Baccalaureate Diploma Program in Education, is visiting Europe next summer to learn about The Holocaust.
Although Templeton has no family connections to The Holocaust, this will be his third tour dedicated to deepening his understanding of the subject.
When I go back to the classroom and I’m teaching about this, I feel that I can do a much better job.
Scott Templeton
“I feel like I now personally have a connection to this,” he said. “Hearing from survivors, and going to these places, and walking in the footsteps of so many that never made it home – it’s got a deep kind of personal connection to me.”
The 2026 tour is being hosted by Holocaust Memorial Sites Study Tours for Educators (HMSSTE) – a non-profit organization co-founded by UWinnipeg history professor, Dr. Jody Perrun.
“Since the province has mandated Holocaust education in public schools,” Dr. Perrun explained, “we’ve put together this organization to take Manitoba teachers over and do a professional development field trip. We will take them to places where it all happened, teach them about it, and suggest how they can bring this material into the classrooms in ways that are appropriate for students at various ages.”
The tour will take educators and education students to places like the Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz death camps. They will visit Jozefow, Poland, where a massacre was carried out in 1942. They will also visit museums and memorials in Warsaw, Kraków, Vienna, Salzburg, and Munich.
“What I’ve heard from former students, and from other people that have traveled with me on these tours, is that it’s a life-changing experience,” Dr. Perrun said. “It hits you like a sledgehammer when you go to a place like Treblinka or Auschwitz-Birkenau. No one comes away from that unmoved.”
The tour program will also include lectures from scholars and Holocaust survivors, as well as pedagogical materials that teachers can take into their classrooms.
“When I go back to the classroom and I’m teaching about this, I feel that I can do a much better job,” Templeton said. “There’s the curriculum aspect, but there’s also the human aspect. It’s not just six million lives anymore. It’s six million people.”
“As an educator, regardless of what subject area you teach, you will always be able to connect with that human aspect,” he said. “These were children that had lives in schools, and friends, and hobbies and things that made them happy.”
“Regardless of what you teach,” he added, “you’ll come back and you’re going to look at your students in a different way.”
Tours are open to all current and future educators. Thanks to fundraising efforts through HMSSTE, the educational tours will be subsidized for UWinnipeg Faculty of Education students and others who are eligible.
The 2026 tour is currently full, but you can add your name to a waitlist. Additional tours are planned for 2028 and 2030. You can find more information on the Holocaust Memorial Sites Study Tours for Educators website.
