One of the first steps in the UK’s National Holocaust Centre and Museum’s partnership with USC Shoah Foundation was for James Griffiths to participate in the IWitness Teaching Fellowship this summer.

Griffiths is the director of learning at the National Holocaust Centre and Museum in Nottinghamshire, England (which was co-founded by USC Shoah Foundation executive director Stephen Smith). The museum receives over 20,000 students ages 9-18 every year and provides pre- and post-visit resources. USC Shoah Foundation and the Centre are currently exploring opportunities for designing new IWitness activities and delivering teacher training within the UK, so Griffiths’ participation in the IWitness Teaching Fellowship in July was a crucial step in furthering the Centre’s work with IWitness.

Griffiths said the fellowship gave him the opportunity to understand IWitness in more depth and learn from the other teachers who are currently using IWitness.

During the fellowship, Griffiths said he learned that IWitness is an engaging and challenging resource for teachers and students. He was especially interested to participate in a Skype session with high school student Ruth Hernandez, the 2014 IWitness Video Challenge winner, and hear about how she connected testimonies of Holocaust survivors in IWitness to her own family history and current immigrants.

“The programme works on so many levels but of particular interest to me was the possibilities it provides to engage with testimony in a way that it encourages young people to relate to the issues that are happening in their own communities today,” Griffiths said. “What Ruth had to say resonated with the work we promote at the Centre in the UK of encouraging young people to become critical thinkers and active citizens in their own communities.”

During the fellowship, Griffiths designed a new IWitness activity that could be used as a follow-up to students’ visits to the museum. It encourages them to think critically about memorialization and museums.

Next month, the Centre is holding a series of focus group meetings with primary and secondary school teachers to discuss how the Centre can support them in the classroom. Based on the outcome of these meetings the Centre will be designing a series of activities using IWitness that will meet their needs. He will also meet with colleagues in the field to explore how to expand use of IWitness throughout the UK.

For Griffiths, the main benefit of the IWitness Teaching Fellowship was the time it afforded him to focus on IWitness without any interruptions from his other job responsibilities. He could really focus on constructing an activity for the Centre that will be relevant and impactful, and could collaborate with the other participants on ideas and feedback.

“Furthermore the opportunity to have staff from USC Shoah Foundation available to support this process was critical because they were not only able to support with technical issues but they were also critical friends to discuss and develop ideas for the activities being created,” Griffiths said.