When Students Come Back: What a Traveling Exhibit Reveals About Learning Through Testimony

The class visit was over. But some students kept coming back.

At Rye Country Day School in New York, students who visited the Common Circles Experience with their classes returned to the exhibit on their own. Some spent additional time exploring its materials. Others came back with friends and family. And some returned to continue interacting with the USC Shoah Foundation interactive biographies of Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and Jewish American liberator Alan Moskin, asking more questions and spending more time with their testimony.

Those return visits are among the findings in The Common Circles Experience Traveling Educational Exhibit: Independent Evaluation, conducted by Third Plateau at Rye Country Day School during the 2024–2025 school year and published in July 2026.

For the USC Shoah Foundation, the evaluation offers insight into how testimony can shape learning when students are given repeated opportunities to engage with it, explore independently, and connect the experience to their own questions.

The Common Circles Experience is a two-part traveling exhibit designed for schools and communities. The first section uses art, photography, and personal accounts from within the school community to explore identity, belonging, first impressions, and the dangers of othering and dehumanization. The second focuses on Jewish identity, antisemitism and the Holocaust. At its center are the USC Shoah Foundation’s interactive biographies of Lasker-Wallfisch and Moskin, which allow students to ask questions and receive relevant responses drawn from their recorded testimony.

Developed through the USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony initiative, interactive biographies are designed to help future generations engage with survivor and witness testimony in a conversational format. By combining recorded testimony with advanced technology, these experiences let learners ask questions and receive authentic responses from Holocaust survivors and other eyewitnesses, creating opportunities for deep personal engagement with history.

At Rye Country Day School, students encountered the exhibit over the course of the school year, both during organized visits and, in many cases, on their own. Of students surveyed, 85.6 percent reported visiting Part One at least once and 87.5 percent reported visiting Part Two at least once. Nearly half visited Part One outside of class, while 33 percent visited Part Two outside of class.

The independent evaluation, which included pre- and post-surveys, observations, and focus groups, found a statistically significant increase in the number of students who reported knowing a lot about the Holocaust. Students also demonstrated strong retention of historical content and details from the testimonies months after their visits. 

Students gravitated toward the interactive biographies.

Observers consistently rated student engagement with the exhibit, docents, and interactive biographies at four or five on a five-point scale, with a median rating of five. Students said they valued the opportunity to ask their own questions and engage directly with survivor and liberator testimony.

The report also found a statistically significant increase in the number of students who agreed that Holocaust survivors and liberators are trustworthy sources for learning about the Holocaust. In focus groups, students said that learning through primary sources made the history more engaging, personal, and valuable.

For the USC Shoah Foundation, preserving testimony has always been inseparable from ensuring that people can access and learn from it. The Common Circles partnership demonstrates one way to bring testimony directly into the places where young people are already learning and give them the time and space to encounter it through their own questions.

The exhibit also created opportunities for teachers to extend that learning. Some middle school teachers incorporated it into history and language arts instruction. At the same time, students returned for additional class visits and, in some cases, used the exhibit as the basis for end-of-year projects. Among teachers who completed the post-survey, 96.7 percent agreed or strongly agreed that the Common Circles exhibit was a good way to learn about the Holocaust. Teachers who participated in focus groups identified the interactive biographies as a crucial part of the experience.

While the evaluation focused on one school over one academic year, its findings offer encouraging evidence of what can happen when students have repeated opportunities to encounter testimony and connect it to what they are learning in school.

That opportunity is now growing. Common Circles is preparing to expand its traveling exhibits to Greenwich, Connecticut, and Scarsdale, New York. USC Shoah Foundation is exploring ways to support participating educators with testimony-based resources, educational materials, and opportunities to engage more deeply with the Institute’s archive and programs.

The goal is to reach students beyond the time the exhibit is at their school by giving educators ways to continue using testimony after the exhibit has moved on.

Perhaps the clearest sign of what is possible came from the students themselves. They did not always wait for another class assignment or scheduled visit. They came back.

And when they did, they kept asking questions.

For the USC Shoah Foundation, those return visits remind us that testimony’s impact isn't measured in a single classroom lesson or exhibit visit, but in the curiosity, care, reflection, and dialogue that continue afterward.