Cogent Education

Visualizing the Holocaust: Multimodal Narratives for Children and Young Adults in Education

Cogent Education is pleased to welcome you to submit your research to the Article Collection "Visualizing the Holocaust: Multimodal Narratives for Children and Young Adults in Education".

In recent decades, Holocaust and Shoah narratives intended for children and young adult readers have increasingly been presented through multimodal forms such as picturebooks, graphic novels, illustrated narratives, documentary albums, and other visual-verbal compositions. In these works, images, layout, typography, and paratextual elements function not merely as illustrations but as integral components of storytelling that actively shape meaning. Visual strategies contribute to how historical events are framed, how emotional engagement is generated, and how readers interpret complex questions of memory, trauma, and moral responsibility. As multimodal storytelling becomes a dominant mode of communication in contemporary culture, examining Holocaust narratives through the lens of visual culture and multimodality represents an important interdisciplinary research field connecting literary studies, education, memory studies, and media theory.

Teaching the Holocaust and the Shoah in educational contexts presents significant pedagogical and ethical challenges. For many young readers, literary narratives represent their first encounter with this historical topic, and multimodal texts often provide accessible entry points to understanding difficult historical realities. At the same time, visual representations of trauma raise important questions about the limits of representation, the ethics of depicting suffering, and the responsibility of educators when introducing students to traumatic pasts. Multimodal narratives can foster empathy, support historical understanding, and encourage critical reflection on memory and identity, yet they also require careful pedagogical framing. Investigating how such narratives are constructed and how they function in educational environments therefore contributes not only to literary scholarship but also to research in literacy education, visual literacy, and memory education.

This Article Collection invites interdisciplinary contributions that explore the representation and educational use of Holocaust and Shoah narratives in multimodal texts for children and young adult audiences. The Collection aims to bring together scholars working at the intersection of children’s literature studies, Holocaust education, visual culture, and literacy research. Contributions may examine both theoretical perspectives and empirical studies addressing how multimodal narrative strategies influence interpretation, teaching practices, and readers’ responses.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• picturebooks and graphic novels about the Holocaust and the Shoah
• multimodal storytelling and visual strategies in Holocaust narratives
• ethical questions of representing trauma for young audiences
• visual literacy and critical reading in Holocaust education
• intermediality and adaptations of testimonies, diaries, and archival materials
• the role of images, design, and layout in shaping historical understanding
• classroom approaches to teaching Holocaust literature
• reader response and reception studies
• cross-cultural and transnational perspectives on Holocaust representation

The Collection welcomes original research articles, theoretical contributions, review papers, and pedagogically oriented case studies that connect literary analysis with educational research and interdisciplinary approaches to memory and visual culture.

Meet the Guest Advisor

Dr. Milan Mašát is an assistant professor at the Department of Czech Language and Literature at the Faculty of Education, Palacký University Olomouc (Czech Republic). His research focuses on literature didactics, children’s and young adult literature, and the educational and ethical representation of the Holocaust and Shoah. He has published internationally on Shoah-themed literature and art as well as on the implementation of Holocaust-related texts in educational practice. His research combines literary analysis with pedagogical and interdisciplinary approaches, particularly in relation to multimodality, visual culture, and the teaching of difficult historical topics. In addition to his academic work, he teaches Czech language and literature at a Waldorf Lyceum, which informs his research on classroom interpretation and literacy education.