After discovering IWitness for the first time at a professional development workshop led by the ADL, Kristin Ann Collins said she couldn’t believe she had never used video testimony in her classroom before.

Collins teaches the Holocaust as part of her English language arts classes at Shrewsbury High School in Massachusetts and is one of eight teachers chosen to be IWitness Teaching Fellows this summer at USC Shoah Foundation. Collins and the other fellows will spend three days at the USC Shoah Foundation office working with the Institute’s education staff to learn more about IWitness and develop new activities.

Collins used IWitness this year with her 10th grade class as they read Night by Elie Wiesel. Testimony supplemented their learning about topics and themes like ghettos and propaganda, and they also constructed their own video projects based on the Chance and Choice: A Survivor’s Story IWitness activity, which asks students to consider whether a particular survivor made it through the war because of choices they had made, luck, or a combination of both.

Collins said the testimonies really hit home with her students. They said at the end of the unit that testimony made the Holocaust so much more real for them.

“Some of the [videos] they put together were just unbelievably moving,” Collins said. “They were really invested in it as well.”

When her class completed end of the year surveys, many indicated that the Holocaust was the most intriguing unit – and the one in which they learned the most – of the whole year.

Collins said she is most excited about meeting the other fellows who are just as passionate about Holocaust education as she is.

“For me its very exciting to be in a room with people who have the same mindset in terms of student achievement and what we can do to teach students about the Holocaust so these things don’t ever happen again,” she said.

It’s troubling how little students actually know about the Holocaust, she said, and that the question she gets asked the most is why the Jews didn’t just leave Europe to escape the Holocaust. It’s important to teach them that genocides happen incrementally, not all at once, and that's why resources like IWitness are so important.

“It’s very, very upsetting to me how much they don’t know and so we have to continue to educate them,” Collins said. “I’m excited to do this work and disseminate those lessons to the audience so that more students can have the impact that mine had this year.”