Facing History and Ourselves to Host IWitness Twitter Chat Jan. 13

The first IWitness Twitter chat for educators of 2016 will be hosted by Facing History and Ourselves, on Wednesday, Jan. 13 at 4 p.m. PST/7 p.m. EST.

All educators, whether longtime IWitness users or just discovering it, are encouraged to follow and participate in the chat @USCIWitness or #IWitnessChat. The guest moderator @facinghistory will lead a discussion focused on “Helping Students Make Connections Between the Past and Present.”

IWitness Twitter chats will be held twice a month on the second and fourth Wednesdays. The chats are an opportunity for educators around the world to talk about IWitness and share ideas and insight with each other and the IWitness staff at USC Shoah Foundation.

Facing History and Ourselves is an international educational and professional development organization whose mission is to engage students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice, and antisemitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry.

In October 2015, USC Shoah Foundation partnered with Facing History and Ourselves to develop meaningful and engaging learning resources centered on Holocaust survivor testimonies.

As part of the partnership, USC Shoah Foundation, working with Facing History and Ourselves, has provided video testimony from its Visual History Archive to complement the teacher’s resource guide Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior. The stories in that collection, also available in IWitness, are told by survivors, witnesses, and rescuers. For deeper exploration into these individual's stories, links to their full length testimonies are available in IWitness.

Facing History and Ourselves, working with the USC Shoah Foundation, is building new IWitness activities that complement the Holocaust and Human Behavior program and align with the Facing History pedagogy and USC Shoah Foundation methodology.

The first activity, Choosing to Rescue, is now published on IWitness. In this activity, students learn about and reflect on the decisions made by individuals who rescued Jews during the Holocaust.