For the past couple years, high school English teacher Matthew Otis has incorporated IWitness into his unit on the Holocaust and intolerance. Now, IWitness’s 100 Days to Inspire Respect program has inspired him to share his students’ process of cross-cultural understanding with a larger audience.

Otis, who teaches at Everett Area High School in Pennsylvania, first learned about IWitness and Echoes and Reflections at a teaching conference last year and since then has used testimony as a resource in his unit on the Holocaust.

The unit includes reading Night and Man’s Search for Meaning, researching genocides and religions other than their own, creative song writing, writing to pen pals from different cultures, meeting foreign exchange students, and a trip to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

Otis has shown testimony clips in class and encourages students to do research on IWitness for their projects on genocides and world religions. He has found it an effective way to introduce students to the concepts of the Holocaust from eyewitnesses themselves, not just novels.

“To gear them up to the Holocaust museum trip, I find the testimonies are really helpful in bringing it to life and making it more of an authentic experience,” Otis said. “It’s one thing to read about it, but when you’re hearing people talk about it, a lot of them are talking about their teenage experience, and getting that perspective [for the students] is quite real.”

This year, Otis has been following the 100 Days to Inspire Respect program through weekly emails from IWitness highlighting the upcoming resources. The program offers one new educational resource every day from January 20-April 29, focusing on themes of hate, racism, xenophobia, civil responsibility and more.

When he noticed IWitness’s suggestions for sharing students’ reactions to testimony on social media as part of the 100 Days program, Otis decided to make a video about his Holocaust unit this year.

The video shows the students’ conversation with foreign exchange students from Pakistan and Tunisia, their visit to USHMM, and their world religion presentations, along with their thoughts on the importance of cross-cultural understanding – the Week 9 theme of 100 Days to Inspire Respect.

Coming from a rural town without much diversity, Otis said the theme of cross-cultural understanding helps his students not only be introduced to different cultures they might not otherwise get to know but also apply lessons of acceptance and kindness to other forms of division they experience in their lives.

“A theme of the lesson is it’s hard to hate up close. When you get to meet a person from a different culture, stereotypes can be broken really quickly and really easily,” Otis said. “Even social groups within high school at a rural school like our own, you can break stereotypes, like the jocks and the nerds or whatever it might be, if you get students to get to talk to the other person. They find out that these stereotypes are pretty silly.”

Otis said their goal is to share the video through social media and hopefully spread a message of tolerance, understanding, and education beyond the walls of his classroom, in a way that resonates with 21st century students.

“How can we get kids to talk to other kids? Lets make a video of kids talking about their experiences and share it on social media,” he said. “That’s their world right now.”