As a featured speaker at the 2014 Ambassadors for Humanity gala in Los Angeles, Michelle Sadrena Clark said that the USC Shoah Foundation had changed her life and her teaching.

“We learned about that last year” is something a teacher never wants to hear her students say, but those are exactly the words Michelle Sadrena Clark heard from her students. What concerned her most was that they were talking about the Holocaust, as if it were just another history topic to cover once and then check off the list.

Michelle was faced with the questions of how to encourage her students to take an interest in the Holocaust? And how could she help them understand its implications and draw from it lessons that would have a positive effect on their character?

Michelle found her answer at USC Shoah Foundation when she applied to its Master Teacher Program and spent a week at the Institute learning how to design her own classroom activity based on testimony using IWitness. She called the activity, Rinse, Wash and Don’t Repeat and introduced it to her students the following year.

 Michelle’s IWitness activity allowed the students to focus on topics of their choice. Some students were interested in women's rights, others on religious persecution; her school is close to the border with Mexico, so family separation through deportation and racial profiling received a lot of interest in her class. One of her student’s project focused on Holocaust children who had been left without parents and who had eventually been adopted; for her this was personal, because she also had been adopted. Her connection to these survivors who were adopted was very different from that of a student who wasn’t adopted. It was very personal and relevant.

“It is one thing to get students to transform thinking––it is another to get those students to actually transform their actions.  With testimony I believe consequences are much more personal and emotional, and it inspires thought and action among my students.”

At the gala, she also performed a spoken-word poem about how testimony can teach students to respect one another and break the cycles that can lead to intolerance and hate.

Michelle is already designing another classroom activity in IWitness, called Hope and Humanity. Through it, she wants to encourage her students to consider the positive choices people made during the Holocaust, often in spite of risk to themselves.

To watch student works created using IWitness, including one from Michelle’s activity, Wash, Rinse and Don’t Repeat, visit http://iwitness.usc.edu/SFI/Share/

Michelle Sadrena Clark is a teacher at High Tech High North County in San Marcos, California. She earned her master’s in Pacific International Affairs at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California, San Diego. Clark received her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Irvine. Currently she is pursuing a degree in dance at Palomar College. With a dual passion for education and dance, Clark embraces an energetic teaching style that truly motivates students to learn. She is a graduate of the USC Shoah Foundation’s 2011 Master Teacher Workshop.