IWitness Launches Summer Teacher Fellowship

Thu, 04/23/2015 - 5:00pm

Eight teachers who are passionate about IWitness will engage with USC Shoah Foundation in an exciting new way this summer: a three-day teaching fellowship.

The fellowship was awarded to eight teachers from across the United States who will spend July 8-10, 2015, at the USC Shoah Foundation office Los Angeles. Fellows will work closely with IWitness staff to develop new IWitness activities and other multimedia resources. Participants will be provided with orientation, ongoing support throughout the duration of the program and will work with the IWitness development team to reach specific goals for content development.

Applicants constructed their own original IWitness activities as part of the application. The fellowship is intended to engage more educators on IWitness and enable development of more teacher-created IWitness activities. Hopefully educators will find these activities created by their peers especially valuable.

The fellows include four teachers (Christa Calkins, Keith Stringfellow, Laura Pritchard Dobrin and Soljane Quiles) who participated in USC Shoah Foundation and Discovery Education’s Auschwitz: The Past is Present professional development program in Poland this past January. The other fellows’ accomplishments include Teach For America, Teaching Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Gilder Lehrman Seminar participant at Stanford University, and master’s degrees in education, among other achievements.