Providing Transformative Learning Tools and Educator Professional Development

The Institute’s Visual History Archive contains the life experiences and perspectives of 51,761 eyewitnesses of genocide from 57 nations in 33 languages. Each interview is a testament to history and humanity. Each is a unique source of insight and knowledge.

Already reaching 39 countries in more than a dozen languages, the Institute aims to provide meaningful educational experiences in formats that can be deployed globally and can also be scaled to meet the cultural, language, and curricular needs of local communities.

The Institute recognizes the corresponding need to appeal to today’s young learners, a generation that is highly mobile and connected to one another, as well as to their personal technology. Whether for social, recreational, or educational purposes, they are deeply engaged with visual and digital media. In a global economy, where connectivity is key, even students without regular access to computers, Internet, or high-tech environments need to develop skills in digital, visual, and media literacies.

The Institute builds learning tools that leverage the medium of the testimonies and interactivity of the Internet to develop these vital 21st century literacies. At the same time, these tools invite deep engagement with testimony that involves cognition, emotion, attitudes, and behaviors. Students learn core subjects such as history, language arts, and civics, and gain critical thinking skills to address socially vital topics such as identity, family, fear, hope, and survival.   

• IWitness

  IWitness brings more than 1,300 full life histories, testimonies of survivors and other witnesses to the Holocaust and other genocides from the Institute’s Visual History Archive to secondary school teachers and their students via engaging multimedia-learning activities.  Designed to be participatory, academic and student-driven, IWitness addresses education standards from the Common Core State Standards Initiative (United States) and the International Society for Technology in Education, among others.

• Resources and Programs for Educators

  Looking for lessons or other educational resources for the classroom? Looking for opportunities for professional development? The Institute offers both online and offline resources as well as teacher training workshops.

• Schools and Students

  Learn about opportunities available to students who want to get involved and make a difference in the world.  Find out about becoming a USC Shoah Foundation Partner School.

• Evaluation

  Our educational programs are responsive to the demands of the educators and students.  Evaluating our programs allows us to publish on our work, to ensure wider dissemination of our educational programs, and to make an impact on fields of inquiry such as Holocaust education, genocide studies, and scholarship of teaching and learning.