Lisa Farese is no stranger to encouraging her students to change the world.

This was the ninth year the English language arts teacher at Douglas Middle School has assigned her students a project called iCan Change the World and her first time including the IWitness Video Challenge as a component of that project. And just like that, her students Natalia Podstawka and Emma Heintz won the 2015 national IWitness Video Challenge competition.

Though Farese is not a longtime user of IWitness, she has been interested in the Holocaust since she was young. Her best friend growing up was the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, and her friend’s mom is a Holocaust speaker and has been to Farese’s school to speak several times. Upon her suggestion, Farese took a class from Facing History and Ourselves called “Holocaust and Human Behavior,” which introduced her to IWitness.

After getting the chance to meet Holocaust survivor Rena Finder, Farese was convinced of the power of testimony.

“I knew, with that conversation, that testimony would be something I needed to bring to my classroom,” Farese said. “For me, it allowed me to engage in the material on a deeper level than I had ever been able to before.”

She felt it was her obligation to provide her students the same opportunity to engage with testimony, so she assigned the IWitness Video Challenge to her eighth graders.

Farese thought Emma and Natalia’s project, in which they were inspired by testimony to spread kindness throughout their school by writing personalized, anonymous notes to every student, was eloquent and far beyond anything she would have expected from eighth graders. They are amazing, she said.

“To say that in this instance, I am the student, and they are the teachers does not capture the ecstasy that I felt when I saw the finished product,” she said. “These two young ladies reminded me that it is the small actions that truly affect those around us.”

She said she has literally laughed, cried and skipped through the halls from the joy of finding out that her students won the IWitness Video Challenge. She has been proud to tell everyone, including the district superintendent, about their accomplishment. The whole community is stronger because of Emma and Natalia, she said.

The IWitness Video Challenge provided the last piece to make her iCan Change the World project the best it could be, Farese said.

“I felt like the assigning of the project and working with Emma and Natalia gave me the final scaffolds that my students needed to take their research to the next level,” Farese said. “For me, it meant that my classroom expectations and rigor were enhanced because of the personal connection to the material.”