Education Staff Present at the 2026 Winter Institute for the California Teachers Collaborative
Colleagues from the USC Shoah Foundation’s education team presented at this year’s Winter Institute, “School Leadership to End Hate and Inspire Courage,” for the California Teachers Collaborative for Holocaust and Genocide Education on March 2 in Sacramento, California. Over 145 educators, district superintendents, principals, and teachers representing more than 25 districts across California were in attendance. Keynote speakers included California Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Thurmond and State Senator Henry Stern, a key supporter of the Collaborative.
Dr. Lesly Culp and Dr. Sedda Antekelian led two sessions on how to integrate eyewitness video testimony into classroom curricula to support student learning. The first session explored the topics of peoplehood, identity, and belonging through audiovisual testimony sampled from across the Institute’s large Archive, drawing from the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the Cambodian Genocide, and the Guatemalan Genocide of the 1980s.
The second session introduced classroom-ready lessons on the USC Shoah Foundation’s educational website, IWitness, for 6 to12th-grade students that examine identity and culture through firsthand accounts of survivors and witnesses of genocide, including the Holocaust and Armenian Genocide. This included a lesson on Cultural Identity—Food Traditions from our Mindful Explorations suite of activities that featured the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, Pinchas Gutter, Sarah Friedman and Eva Neumann and emphasized how food can shape one’s sense of identity, followed by strategies for how to engage in virtual conversation with the interactive biography (Dimensions in Testimony) of Dr. Khatchig Mouradian, a genocide scholar and 3rd generation descendant of Armenian Genocide survivors.
“What made these sessions so powerful was the room itself,” Dr. Culp, the director of education, remarked. “We had teachers, principals, superintendents, and state leaders from across CA learning alongside one another. You could feel the shift as participants realized that testimony is not just a resource, but that it's a powerful approach to help students, and school communities, grapple with identity, history, and belonging in a deeply human way.”
Established in 2021 by the JFCS Holocaust Center, the California Teachers Collaborative for Holocaust and Genocide Education is a statewide network of 15 organizations that unites California’s leading Holocaust and genocide education organizations with diverse community leaders. Through standards-aligned lesson plans, expert-led training, and rich educational resources, we empower educators to teach the lessons of history and the dangers of unchecked bias.
The USC Shoah Foundation hosted workshop sessions for the CA Collaborative for the inaugural Summer Institute held on the USC Campus in 2023 and has continued to lead sessions at the collaborative’s annual Summer Institutes in the years since.