Though her students are only 10 or 11 years old, Suzi Gantz jumped at the chance to introduce them to IWitness for USC Shoah Foundation’s first elementary classroom pilot of a new IWitness activity.Gantz’s fifth grade class at O. A. Thorp Scholastic Academy in Chicago is currently pilot-testing an unpublished IWitness Mini Quest activity: “Use Your Voice Against Prejudice.” USC Shoah Foundation staff reached out to elementary teachers in the Chicago area for any who would be interested in piloting an IWitness activity, and Gantz was selected after a brief screening process.

At the Canadian International School of Beijing (CISB), Gary Goodwin’s students represent an especially vast range of nationalities and backgrounds. So it’s only fitting that he uses IWitness to teach not just the Holocaust, but also the Nanjing Massacre and Rwandan Tutsi Genocide.Goodwin teaches 10th, 11th, and 12th grade humanities within CISB’s International Baccalaureate curriculum. He was inspired by Schindler’s List to get a master’s in history and from researching the movie discovered USC Shoah Foundation and IWitness.

For many educators in the greater Los Angeles area, Matthew Friedman is their first introduction to teaching the Holocaust.

Simone Gigliotti teaches in the history program at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, and is a member of the Holocaust Geographies Collective, a group of researchers who study the Holocaust in terms of geography and movement of survivors and victims. She is the first official visiting scholar to the Center, which includes a week-long residency for Gigliotti to conduct research in the Visual History Archive and give a public lecture at USC.

Brooke Horn inspires her students to think about how they can change the world. To do so, she drew on the first-ever IWitness Video Challenge, with award-winning results.Horn, a seventh and eighth grade language arts teacher at Coppell Middle School North in Texas, uses IWitness as a resource for her students to learn from survivors and apply lessons from testimony to current social topics.

After experiencing intolerance throughout her life, Emily Bengels has strived to model kindness and acceptance for her students at Readington Middle School in New Jersey. Participating in USC Shoah Foundation and Discovery Education’s professional development program Auschwitz: The Past is Present will, she hopes, guide her teaching of the Holocaust and inspire her students to stand up for humanity.

Though his students at Agohozo-Shalom Youth Village in Rwanda are all too familiar with genocide, Gamariel Mbonimana has found IWitness to be an engaging, powerful tool that sparks their curiosity.Agohozo-Shalom Youth Village (ASYV), in Rwamagana, is home to more than 500 orphaned and vulnerable children. Mbonimana teaches General Paper courses to upper secondary students and was one of the first teachers to attend USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness educator training sessions at Kigali Genocide Memorial in 2013.

At 12 years old, Anna Krisztina Berecz first learned about the Holocaust from Miklos Nyiszli’s book Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account.  The experience was so haunting that she decided to forget it as quickly as possible.

From her master’s thesis to the Holocaust workshops she leads for students in England, the Visual History Archive has always been an important part of Jennifer Craig-Norton’s work.