Yu Jing Chen, a rising senior at Walter Payton College Preparatory High School in Chicago, teamed up with two classmates to produce the grand prize-winning entry of the 2017 IWitness Video Challenge.

Though it was Yu Jing’s first time entering the IWitness Video Challenge, she has already engaged with IWitness. She was part of a group of students at After School Matters in Chicago who participated in a pilot of the IWitness activity “Skittles, Deplorables and ‘All Lives Matter’: Leadership and Media Literacy” in October 2016.

During the pilot, which was held in instructor Michael Levesque’s C.O.O.L. Communicators program, the students learned about different types of rhetoric including argument, persuasion and propaganda, with examples drawn from the 2016 U.S. presidential election and testimony from the Visual History Archive, and constructed their own persuasive arguments about various topics from homelessness to criminal justice.

Just a few months later, Yu Jing and classmates Alana Chandler and Natalia Wang began working on a project for the IWitness Video Challenge at the suggestion of teacher Matt Silvia. They looked to current events and their own school community for inspiration on what issue to tackle before watching testimony on IWitness to hone their ideas further.

From the beginning, the concept of identity spoke the loudest. Conversations at their school about hate speech, intolerance, privilege and mental health urged the group toward the goal of helping students embrace their own identities as well as others’.

They landed on a clip from Armenian Genocide survivor Haig Baronian to include in their video.

“Haig Baronian’s testimony inspired me because it really hit hard how much of an impact other people and the media can have on people, even leading them to reject their own identity,” Yu Jing said. “It really inspired me to be conscious of influences like that and prevent them from impacting the way I feel about myself.”

Yu Jing, Natalia and Alana set up a table with paper and markers in their school hallway for students to draw and display their own “identity maps” – anything that they felt represented who they are, their interests and background.

Yu Jing said some students needed some encouragement to participate, but it was gratifying to see them stop and reflect on their identities and create artwork for the whole school to see.

“The most rewarding part was seeing the end result, to see people actually think about their identity and realize parts of themselves that they didn’t realize or to really take a part of their identity and wear it proudly, to champion it,” she said.

The IWitness Video Challenge allowed her to learn from history and empowered her to act, Yu Jing said. And it taught her an important lesson about the impact that even a small gesture can have.

“The video challenge impacted me because it made me realize that there is always a way to impact our communities and no matter how small our influence, we should always try in some way to make everybody feel welcome or a little bit better because there is always something we can do,” she said.