The IWitness Summer Teaching Fellowship will provide an exciting and in-depth introduction to IWitness for Wesley Davidson.

An English teacher at Chicago Tech Academy High School, Davidson was introduced to IWitness through the work of Michelle Clark, a teacher at Chicago Tech’s partner school, High Tech High North County in San Marcos, Calif. Clark is an IWitness regional consultant who has been a longtime user and proponent of IWitness. Davidson explored the IWitness site and testimonies after learning of a project Clark had completed, and he introduced it to a few more colleagues who were cooperating on a Holocaust-related project.

This July, the first IWitness Summer Teacher Fellows will spend three days at the USC Shoah Foundation office in Los Angeles working with the Institute’s education staff to learn more about IWitness and develop new activities. The fellows come from around the country and teach a variety of subjects and grade levels.

Davidson joins the fellowship cohort with a fresh perspective, as he has not yet incorporated IWitness into his own classroom activities. But he said he is motivated to integrate IWitness into his curriculum for a few different reasons.

First, his school has switched to a cross-curricular project approach, so during the fellowship he hopes to develop lessons and units that can  combine two of the most important themes of his school: developing students' deeper understanding of the world outside of the bubble in which they exist in Chicago and the incorporation of technology as a means of processing the world around them.

The subject matter of IWitness and testimony also correlates with the concepts he and his colleagues want to teach their students, he said,

“The ideas that developed for me for IWitness projects or lessons seemed to match really well with some of the concepts like the role of bystanders or more generally the greater complexities of life at wartime that often get flattened out by simple versions of history, and I wanted the opportunity to have others challenge how I might use IWitness to explore these ideas and bring that back to my colleagues in Chicago as well,” Davidson said.

In addition, Davison wants to develop curriculum for a humanities course that would combine English and history.

Finally, the IWitness Summer Teaching Fellowship will introduce Davidson to other educators he can connect with to share ideas and resources for teaching the Holocaust to today’s students.

“I am hoping to further my own understanding of IWitness tools, to connect with other educators and professionals interested in similar work around Holocaust testimonials, and to find news way to challenge myself to create engaging curriculum that can also be shared with others,” he said.