Tosha Tillotson has taken to heart a history lesson learned as a student at Sacramento’s Loretto High School.

Now an eighth grade teacher at St. John the Evangelist School in Carmichael, Tillotson is committed to making sure her students learn about tolerance for others and are inspired to live it out in their lives.

In recognition of Tillotson’s successful teaching experiences in the classroom and her knowledge of Holocaust history, she has been selected by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. as a 2007-2008 Museum Teacher Fellow.

Established in 1996, the Museum Teacher Fellowship Program trains and maintains a corps of skilled secondary school teachers who serve as leaders in Holocaust education, both locally and nationally.

The fellowship program enables teachers from a variety of disciplines to work with museum educators and Holocaust scholars to enhance both their historical knowledge and teaching skills, and to create outreach projects involving schools, communities and professional organizations.

Fellows must have at least five years of Holocaust education experience and are selected based on their knowledge of Holocaust history and literature, successful teaching experience, and professional and community involvement.

Tillotson, who serves as both a teacher and vice principal at St. John the Evangelist School, sees inherent in her role as a teacher the responsibility of making sure students leave her classroom “empowered to make a positive change” in their community.

“We are teaching tomorrow’s moral leaders and it is important to me that those leaders know what has happened in our world, and what to do to make sure (in the case of the Holocaust) that it never happens again,” she said.

Since Tillotson began teaching at the Carmichael school in 2000, she has incorporated a four-week Holocaust unit into the eighth grade English, literature, religion and social studies curriculum.

The unit includes reading assignments of diary accounts of victims and heroes of the Holocaust, written research papers on the subject, and Tillotson’s personal photographs from a trip to Poland with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Jewish Labor League in 2005. She also shares with students a personal account of her visit to Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp.

Tillotson said that a study of the Holocaust empowers students to live out a tenant of the social justice teaching of their Catholic faith.

“I feel it is important students learn tolerance, with the hope of ending prejudice and hatred,” she said. “Learning about the Holocaust through literature, history or religion helps them realize they can make choices that positively affect our community.”

A Holocaust scholar, Tillotson has attended two Western States conferences of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum at UC Berkeley and at Stanford University.

As one of 10 Museum Teacher Fellows selected this year, Tillotson plans to create a Holocaust program that may be used in grades seven through 12 and adapted to meet educational needs in the greater Sacramento area.

Her plans include working in partnership with the Sacramento Diocese to offer teacher training on the Holocaust unit next spring.

Domenic Puglisi, superintendent of Catholic schools for the diocese, commended Tillotson’s “commitment, compassion and passion” as a teacher, and said he looks forward to working with her in offering workshops to Catholic schools in the diocese.

“She will now be able to share her passion with others,” Puglisi said.

Tillotson will also collaborate with two Sacramento-area public schools on the Holocaust unit and adapt the program to be utilized in other settings, such as community centers.

In July 2008, she will return to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to present stories of success as a Museum Teacher Fellow.

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