Attendees of the 2015 Ambassadors for Humanity gala in Detroit on Thursday will get to hear remarks from a Michigan educator who is one of USC Shoah Foundation’s most passionate colleagues.

Corey Harbaugh is a longtime high school English and Spanish teacher who recently transitioned out of the classroom to be director of teaching and learning at Fennville Public Schools in Fennville, Mich. He participated in USC Shoah Foundation’s Master Teacher program in 2010, which introduced him to the fundamentals of teaching with testimony. Since then, he has been dedicated to incorporating testimony into his own teaching of the Holocaust, and also introducing testimony and IWitness to other educators through professional development.

Harbaugh said he has always sought out professional development programs of the highest caliber to enrich his skills in teaching the Holocaust, which he feels is the most powerful subject he teaches. Ever since he became a USC Shoah Foundation Master Teacher, testimony has been “the most powerful part of [his] most powerful education.” It humanizes the content and makes the Holocaust real for his students, he said.

Harbaugh said one of the greatest discoveries he made about testimony is that every testimony is ultimately a story about family: the interviewee’s family’s background before the war, what happened to each family member during the war, and how they created their own family after the war. Harbaugh said this realization made him completely change his teaching.

“It’s so powerful and so profound, and its depth is rooted in identity,” Harbaugh said. “If I frame Holocaust testimony in that way, the students just get it.”

In the classroom, Harbaugh prefers to let his students direct their own exploration of the testimonies in IWitness. They come up with questions they want to know the answers to and then find testimonies that help answer their questions. They can focus on one or two testimonies or draw from several different testimonies. Then, they present what they’ve learned to the class.

“What’s amazing is it turns kids into teachers of themselves and of others,” he said.

Many educators get into teaching with dreams of making a real difference in their students’ lives, but pressures of the job can distract them from what they love most about their profession, Harbaugh said. Through testimony, however, teachers can return to what made them want to be teachers. In his speech at the Ambassadors for Humanity gala, Harbaugh plans to tell the crowd the same thing he’s told so many educators when introducing them to USC Shoah Foundation and IWitness.

“I tell both veteran teachers and young teachers, testimony is the thing that drew you in [to teaching] in the first place,” he said.