Educators in the Detroit area are being exposed to IWitness in greater numbers than ever before with the help of Amy Bloom, Oakland Schools Intermediate School District’s Social Studies Education Consultant.

Since 2015, Bloom has been involved with IWitness Detroit, USC Shoah Foundation’s initiative to widen student access to IWitness in the greater Detroit area through teacher training seminars – which range from one-day ITeach workshops to last summer’s three-day IWitness Summer Institute.

She was invited to serve on the IWitness Detroit Advisory Board, made up of USC Shoah Foundation education staff and local Detroit educators, to help guide the initiative and plan its implementation.

Bloom was invited to join the IWitness Detroit Advisory Board in part because of her previous work with the Center for the Study of Citizenship at Wayne State University and the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Mich. Though it was her first time learning about IWitness, she was quickly impressed by how “powerful” it could be for educators and students.

“History tends to be static out of a textbook so IWitness really brings it alive and adds that emotional aspect to the learning and it connects students with people in terms of their stories,” Bloom said.

Since students today are very connected to their multimedia devices, Bloom said IWitness can really hold their interest and allow them to learn in a manner that is comfortable for them. 

“Kids living in the multimedia world that they do, the best way to engage them is to get them where they live,” she said. “IWitness does that and it has so many powerful messages beyond just the history of it, teaching kids to be upstanders instead of bystanders and empowering them to make a difference in their world.”

Two weeks ago, Bloom led an ITeach workshop for the first time. The three-hour workshop, held at the district office in Waterford, Mich., was an introduction to how teachers can use testimony from the Visual History Archive as a resource and how to navigate the IWitness website. Bloom showed the teachers how to save clips and activities to their dashboard and techniques for proper use of testimony in the classroom. She also introduced the IWitness Video Challenge and the 100 Days to Inspire Respect program.

Bloom led the participants in an exercise to demonstrate how powerful audiovisual testimony can be in teaching students about history, empathy and tolerance. She showed them a clip from the testimony of Lászlo Kiss first without sound, then with sound but no subtitles (the clip is in Hungarian), and finally just the transcript. When they compared the words on the screen with the image of Lászlo himself telling his story, the teachers could see how much more powerful the video was, with its human presence and voice.

Bloom has also initiated IWitness trainings for other educators in her district, including language specialists and even a bullying prevention consultant. She said teachers and students are making so many connections to IWitness and its resources especially in light of recent current events.

“It has unleashed so much hate and vitriol, it’s time to bring in the warning bells to people, that this is just not OK and that we need to take a stand,” she said.