In this activity, students will examine the impact that personal stories can have in inspiring others to action. They will listen and reflect on genocide survivor testimonies, discuss the concept of leadership and form belief statements about how they can become leaders in their communities.

By collecting clips of testimony to construct a "GeoStory" - a map and timeline with videos - students can discover how changes in time and place shape history.

The release follows the recent completion of 489 interviews with the survivors of the Guatemala Genocide at the hands of the Guatemalan military in the early 1980s.

In my role as part of USC Shoah Foundation’s Education Department, I have the honor of working with our team members both in the United States and around the world to create localized educational content using genocide survivor testimony. As a former classroom teacher and a lifelong believer in the importance of experiential learning, I was fortunate to take part in three IWalks in Budapest, Hungary, Prague, Czechia, and Warsaw, Poland while on a recent vacation.

The USC Shoah Foundation is looking for students in 7th– 12th grades who are interested in participating in its highly competitive William P. Lauder Junior Internship Program. The program provides a dynamic and unique learning opportunity for students to engage with testimonies – personal stories – from survivors and witnesses of genocide.

Lisa Farese’s eighth-graders learn about hate and ethical editing by watching IWitness videos, and then go to different corners of the school to discuss important issues.

At a time when the term “fake news” has become pervasive – and when rising nationalism worldwide has had an especially pronounced effect on Central Europe – USC Shoah Foundation’s representatives in the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary are introducing high school students to a suite of new IWitness activities that use testimony to provide a deeper understanding of propaganda.

During the Institute's inaugural summer William P. Lauder Internship Program, about two-dozen young people came to USC Shoah Foundation from across the country to participate in the intensive program, which focused on the causes and impacts of injustice and the ways an individual can respond.

USC Shoah Foundation’s annual Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century program is a one-year professional development initiative for educators that begins with a six-day seminar for educators.

This is the first year USC’s Undergraduate Student Government leaders have used clips of testimony for the orientation event. The new IWitness University activity is called "Countering Intolerance in Co-Curricular Spaces."

Ignited by students’ enthusiasm over IWitness's recent “100 Days to Inspire Respect” initiative, a campaign called #180DaysToInspireRespect has students at Robert Adams Middle School in Massachusetts volunteering each day to present about the respectful acts they’ve witnessed, received, read and heard about.

Education and Outreach Specialist Sedda Antekelian and Program Officer Manuk Avedikyan shared information about the educational use of testimony in the Institute’s Visual History Archive and on the Institute’s educational website, IWitness.

The Stronger Than Hate initiative will publish stories on a regular basis that will each highlight a separate learning activity in IWitness, tackling some of today’s toughest subjects for students in middle school, high school and universities.

In this activity, students examine stories that have the power to strengthen our human connection or create deep divides leading to hate, intolerance and violence.

Learning from eyewitnesses of some of history’s darkest moments, educators strive to teach the power of decency and respect.

USC Shoah Foundation is joining forces with The Genocide Education Project, which is dedicated to bringing curriculum about the World War I-era Armenian Genocide into high schools across the United States.

New video challenge inspires students and educators to fight against discrimination, injustice and hate by using the power of testimony to create a brighter future.

The controversial standoff between a tribal elder and a high school student that went viral has captivated the media and those on all sides of the political aisle. While all the details are still being uncovered, what strikes me is the climate that permeates our nation. We have devolved to a state of “othering” our countrymen, without reflecting on how our own actions may affect one another. We have stopped seeking to understand one another and instead just attack, sometimes even when the facts are not clear. 

As local communities assess and adjust to the needs of the world community—and as many schools shift from in-person to virtual classrooms—IWitness and its standards-aligned resources are ready to help educators and parents support students learning.

June 19, also known as Juneteenth, commemorates the day in 1865 when slavery ended in America - more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Lincoln. It is a day of commemoration and celebration of African American history and heritage, but also a day of reflection.

USC Shoah Foundation and Discovery Education announced the winners of the 2020 Stronger Than Hate Challenge. The Challenge and the 2020 winners exemplify the power of youth voices to connect communities and the role of social and emotional learning in empowering students to overcome hate.

This summer, USC Shoah Foundation education team hosted their annual Leadership Workshop—Action and Values presented by the William P. Lauder Junior Internship Program. The workshop calls for applicants who are preparing themselves to be in leadership positions in their communities. The focus is to cultivate, through the power of testimony, the confidence and courage to be an upstander. Testimonies, with their powerful universal messages, instill in students the importance of personal stories, values, and agency.

In January 2017, USC Shoah Foundation launched 100 Days to Inspire Respect to provide teachers of civics, history, English and other subjects new thought-provoking resources for the first 100 days of the incoming administration.   

USC Shoah Foundation will next week launch the U.S. premiere of The Tattooed Torah, an animated film that tells the inspirational story of a Torah rescued and restored after the Holocaust.  The film, based on Marvell Ginsburg’s beloved children’s book of the same name, recounts the true story of the rescue and restoration of a small Torah from Brno, Czechoslovakia. In the film, the Torah is described as the most “precious possession” of the Jewish people and is a symbol that represents memories tied to cultural heritage, family, hope and resilience. 

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.

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.

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.

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 USC Shoah Foundation and The Latin American Network for Education on the Shoah (Red LAES) have launched a new educational web page featuring the first Spanish-language Dimensions in Testimony (DiT), an interactive biography that invites students to engage in conversation with the recorded testimony of a Holocaust survivor.

On June 23, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) named IWitness, the Institute’s new online resource for teachers and students, one of the “top 25 Internet sites for enhancing learning and curriculum development” for school librarians and teachers.