**2. Method**

### **2.1 Participants**

Based on a non-probabilistic convenience sample, 1125 Spanish secondary school teachers with the following socio-demographic characteristics agreed to participate (**Table 1**).

#### **2.2 Instrument**

The research applies the instrument *Holocaust Education and Human Rights Education* (THRE) [12]. This instrument is constructed on the basis of a statement on the relevance of teaching about the Holocaust and human rights education as a specific curricular part of education for democratic citizenship, and is accompanied by four socio-demographic variables (age, educational level [undergraduate-postgraduate], gender [female-male] and existence-inexistence of previous initial and/or on-going training in the field of human rights education). It also includes a variable linked to the teachers' didactic positions on controversial issues in the social sciences classroom as an effective part of their teaching programmes or, failing that, not relevant in these programmes. The six variables assume a dichotomous nominal nature.

### **2.3 Design and procedure**

This study is developed in non-experimental designs of a cross-sectional nature and at the explanatory and predictive levels of research, insofar as it seeks to reveal the socio-demographic, formative and didactic causes of the phenomenon or event of interest, and its level of occurrence.

The questionnaire was administered by email and hosted on the free *Google Forms* application. Teachers received the questionnaire in their institutional email, and were informed of the purpose of the research study and the confidentiality with which the answers would be treated. They were also asked for their consent to use their answers in the study. The questionnaire was administered from December 2020 to January 2023.

## **2.4 Data analysis**

In order to identify causal relationships between the independent variables (age, educational level, gender, previous training and didactic positioning of teachers in relation to controversial issues), and the relevance of Holocaust and human rights education in education for democratic citizenship, we conducted a binary logistic regression analysis. Once the assumptions of logistic regression (absence of the


**Table 1.** *Socio-demographic characteristics.* linearity principle, independence of error and non-existence of multicollinearity among the variables) are verified, we seek to reveal the predictive capacity of the socio-demographic variables and of the didactic stances on the relevance of teaching the Holocaust and its specific link to human rights education.

## **3. Results**

The omnibus test reports a Chi-square significance of less than .05 (*χ 2* (5, *<sup>n</sup>* = 1125) = 386.845, *p* = <.001), evidence that the model constructed can explain the relevance of Holocaust and human rights education. Regarding the assessment of the model's usefulness, Cox-Snell's and Nagelkerke's R2 account for the extent to which socio-demographic variables and didactic positioning predict this knowledge by 0.291 (29.1%) and 0.391 (39.1%), respectively. The coefficients of determination R<sup>2</sup> are close to the one given by Cohen's Kappa index, obtained from the ratio between the real response values (variable to be predicted) and the values corresponding to its prediction = .37 (*p* < .001) (37%). The evaluation of the model's usefulness was completed with its predictive ability, whose values were as follows: accuracy = 71.4%, error = 28.6%. The percentage of the number of cases that the model is able to predict correctly or the overall percentage correctly classified exceeds 50% of the cases (71.4%), a circumstance that proves an optimal explanatory capacity of the model and, therefore, its acceptance.

The relationship between socio-demographic variables and the didactic positioning of teachers in relation to controversial issues as an effective part of their teaching programmes, and the relevance of the specific teaching of the Holocaust and Human Rights education shows that initial and/or on-going training in Human Rights education and didactic positioning are two causal factors in this relationship (0 ∉ Wald statistic, *p* = <.001). Therefore, teacher training and its impact on teachers' didactic stances are proposed as two of the most significant factors in the inclusion of the Holocaust and human rights as specific curricular content in education for democratic citizenship. Age, gender and level of education, on the other hand, are not explanatory factors for this inclusion.

The established relationship is positive (sign + of βi); that is, both factors motivate higher probabilities of considering these teachings. Likewise, in these variables, the exp.(βi) is far from 1. Consequently, their strength in explaining the event of interest is adequate (**Table 2**).

### **4. Discussion and conclusions**

We agree with Pettigrew [4] that there is no intrinsic reason why civic-social or moral educational approaches to Holocaust education should necessarily result in a distortion of the past, unless a clear positioning is defined in the historical disciplinary approach. Indeed, 'learning the history of the Holocaust and drawing moral [as well as civic, sociological, political and/or philosophical] lessons for today are mutually exclusive. History is the story of human experience and behaviour and, in studying the history in depth, we may yet learn more about ourselves' ([13], p. 268).

Although the Holocaust is often maintained as content associated with the World War II, recent research [14] shows the need and opportunity to define it more explicitly in the context of education for democratic citizenship. Along these lines,

*What Predictors Explain Holocaust and Human Rights Education in Spain? A Study with… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.112553*


**Table 2.**

*Equation variables, regression coefficients, Wald statistic and OR value = Exp(βi).*

during the *Holocaust Education in Today's World*, a scientific meeting organised by the Holocaust Centre North and held on 9 March 2023, Andy Pearce, professor of history education at the Centre for Holocaust Education, stated that, despite the representation of this phenomenon in different subjects in the British curricula, it continues to be a priority in the history classroom. The potential of its transversality would therefore lie in the dangers of making this content independent as a 'unique phenomenon in history', a circumstance equivalent to its lack of contextual comparability or historical relationship. In addition, the curricula do not seem to stipulate the specific objectives, the time needed for teaching and the assessment of learning about Holocaust education, and this can be extended to other European curricula.

According to the results obtained in this first research, initial and in-service teacher training is one of the explanatory axes of the curricular inclusion of the Holocaust and human rights as specific contents of education for democratic citizenship. Finally, more data collection instruments with sufficient empirical evidence of validity and reliability are needed to ensure the accuracy of the analysis of the development and historical understanding of this phenomenon among students [15].

### **Funding**

This research has been carried out with the support and funding of the project 'Future education and democratic hope. Rethinking social studies education in times of change' (PID2019-107383RB-I00), funded by the State Research Agency - Ministry of Science and Innovation (Government of Spain). This research is part of the 2022–2023 research plan of the Chair of Democratic Culture and Human Rights - Auschwitz-Birkenau National Institute Spain, approved in collaboration with the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (Poland) and the support of the Ministry of Universities (Government of Spain).
