As the Covid 19 pandemic requires educators to provide their students with new and unprecedented levels of social emotional support, The Willesden Project, a partnership of USC Shoah Foundation and Hold On To Your Music, is inviting teachers to a special webinar to learn strategies and engage with experts for using music and testimony as sources of healing in the classroom.

When the Coronavirus pandemic banished students and teachers from classrooms in March 2020, Liza Manoyan scrambled to shift to distance learning. Figuring out the technology was one thing. But she faced another challenge. “There are not a lot of digital resources for teaching in Armenian,” she said.

The Willesden Project, a partnership program of USC Shoah Foundation and Hold On To Your Music, today announced a new collaboration with the National Center for Families Learning (NCFL) to promote literacy and education through a variety of programs and activities over this school year.

USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education (USC Shoah Foundation), and Discovery Education today announced the winners of the 2021 Stronger Than Hate Challenge. The 2021 winners exemplify the power of youth voices to connect communities and the role of social-emotional learning in empowering students to overcome hate.

USC Shoah Foundation welcomes the creation of California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Council on Holocaust and Genocide Education.

USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen Smith, who in May offered expert testimony in support of the Council’s creation, said the group will play a critical role in arresting the current decline in awareness about the Holocaust and other acts of genocide among young people. 

USC Shoah Foundation today launches a redesigned IWitness website reimagined to make teaching with testimony more effective, approachable and cutting-edge.

The new site features all of the functionality educators have praised in IWitness—only better, faster, and more user-friendly.

A four-year initiative to bring together the expertise of USC Shoah Foundation and the Azrieli Foundation—Canada’s leading nationwide Holocaust education program—has culminated with the release of a robust new destination for teachers and students with a variety of bilingual educational materials based on the memoirs and testimonies of Canadian Holocaust survivors.

Claire Denault’s Southern California private high school had a problem with classism. So she decided to approach the issue in a way she knew would resonate with her peers: through story.

As the student government leader who facilitated a weekly school-wide forum, she invited students to anonymously submit testimonies and personal accounts about how they had been disenfranchised or marginalized because of their socioeconomic status. Claire and other students read those narratives at town hall, and intense dialogue followed—that day and for weeks after.

USC Shoah Foundation today launches its 2021-2022 Back to School package, a suite of testimony-based resources on IWitness to help educators navigate the complex issues created by the Covid-19 pandemic and surfaced by the recent upsurge in social movements demanding racial justice.

This year’s classroom activities and educator professional development modules are based on testimony from the Visual History Archive that help students to critically evaluate historical context, consider various perspectives and impacts, and reflect on personal connections.

USC Shoah Foundation and the Maimonides Institute for Medicine, Ethics and the Holocaust are partnering to develop new and innovative educational programing on medical ethics and the Holocaust.

The Holocaust marked a profound and sadistic deviation from traditional notions of medical ethics, with medical and scientific communities in the Third Reich actively participating in the labeling, persecution and eventual mass murder of millions deemed “unfit.”