Ian McAvoy teaches English and Film Arts at University City High School in San Diego, Calif. He learned about IWitness after visiting the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust with his class. He said the IWitness Video Challenge appealed to him because his students could use the website’s editing tools largely independently, and it would require them to synthesize their diverse learning about the Holocaust (via testimony, the museum trip, Elie Wiesel’s Night, and history classes) while encouraging altruism.

What did your students come up with? What do you think of the work they did?

It was rewarding as an educator to have students propose to me various ways that they intended to help others in the community.  The fact that such fabulous, uplifting ideas were inspired from educational testimonial speaks a lot as to how this contest is structured in a beautiful way.  The testimonial increased the students' awareness and understanding of the Holocaust, and of its chilling details.  I saw from their choice of testimonial that they did a good job in synthesizing information from the videos to meet their needs. 

I thought the winning video conveyed an application of their learning in a way that was a real success.  The work they created was a culminating project that showed not only a great deal of learning in the subject matter, but an application into the real world setting that made my course's subject matter come to life.

Why is it important for your students to watch and learn from testimony?

By watching the testimony, the students were better able to connect with how real people overcame horrid atrocities, and yet now are still strong, grateful people.  To see the positive attitudes of these survivors is quite uplifting.  The videos also provided various vantage points to supplement perspectives that the students had already encountered through class readings.  The ability to analyze various accounts of a subject in different mediums, which is what the videos allowed, actually directly addresses an element of a particular common core standard (CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.9-10.7, to be exact). In our case, Eliezer Wiesel's written word provides his internal struggles, whereas the videos provide testimonial of other people's internal struggles. 

During the creation of the videos, one of my students remarked how the testimonial she found showed a less conflicted devotion to religion than Wiesel.  The fact that this student is making this comparison and making a claim about the differing vantage points is quite impressive to me.

What does IWitness add to the learning experience, as opposed to textbooks, films, etc.?

IWitness takes the real life experiences from seventy years ago, and allows the student to create a seamless product of how these stories of history truly are timeless.  As demoralizing as the tales of the Holocaust can eventually be when a teacher studies them over the course of a unit, these testimonies and the video project help end the unit in an uplifting way.  Seeing the students focus their energies on a positive change in their communities was truly an uplifting experience for me as an educator.