Brooke Horn inspires her students to think about how they can change the world. To do so, she drew on the first-ever IWitness Video Challenge, with award-winning results.

Horn, a seventh and eighth grade language arts teacher at Coppell Middle School North in Texas, uses IWitness as a resource for her students to learn from survivors and apply lessons from testimony to current social topics.

She also assigns her students a persuasive unit called Fight for a Cause. Through persuasive techniques and identifying fallacies, they must promote awareness for a cause of their choice. Just as she was assigning the unit two years ago, Horn learned about the IWitness Video Challenge through Scholastic.

The challenge invites students from all over North America to be inspired by the voices in IWitness, to use their innovation and creativity to create positive value in their communities by doing something ordinary (or extraordinary), and then asks them to build a video telling the story about how they contributed to making their communities a better place. Because her students would be learning about the Holocaust later in the year, Horn thought it would be a good fit for the Fight for a Cause unit.

“It enables my learners to see the bigger picture and understand that social injustice is worth fighting for,” Horn said.

Horn said her students are often shocked by what they learn from testimony in IWitness, as it is the first time many of them have learned about the Holocaust and other genocides. But for all of them, it “makes the facts come to life” and provides great insight, she said.

One group from her class was a regional winner for last year’s inaugural IWitness Video Challenge. In their video Improving Our National Education, Alwin Wen, Mandy Meyers, Ethan Williams, and Fawaz Syed were inspired by testimony to hold a book drive for the nonprofit Reading is Fundamental.

Horn said IWitness allows students to see injustice and relate it to current social issues they, their communities or others in their world face.

“I believe IWitness is a wonderful tool for educators to use, especially in middle school ​because it is empowering for learners to see a world beyond the classroom, beyond the school and even beyond the community and realize that they have the ability and the responsibility as human beings to work towards change,” Horn said.