Melanie Dadourian is an active member of the Next Generation Council because she understands all too well the dangers of silence and denial. Her grandparents were Armenian Genocide survivors who escaped certain death in Turkey by fleeing to the United States and that history deeply affects her. “All genocides are horrible,” she says, “but ours is particularly difficult to educate people about because the Turkish government denies it to this day. It’s been written out of history.”

Stories have the power to educate, change people’s world view, and inspire empathy,” says David Zaslav, a member of USC Shoah Foundation’s Executive Committee and the president and CEO of Discovery Communications. “It’s a kind of understanding that can’t be replicated by history books.”

Peggy Walker’s students at McCall Middle School in Massachusetts have changed the way they do research based on their experience with IWitness. Walker first began using IWitness last year, after using educational resources she found on the USC Shoah Foundation website. She began exploring IWitness and said she “immediately” saw the potential it could have for her students.

After seeing his students’ remarkable achievements both inside and outside the classroom, Matt Silvia thought they could make a real difference by entering the IWitness Video Challenge. And he was right. Silvia’s students at Chicago’s Walter Payton College Preparatory Alana Chandler, Yu Jing Chen and Natalia Wang are the grand prize winners of the 2017 IWitness Video Challenge for their video “Who Are You? Embracing Identity in Our Community.”

IWitness Video Challenge winner Alana Chandler gravitated toward the subject of identity in her project because she has always grappled with her own. Growing up Jewish and Japanese (and attending a Jewish middle school and Japanese Saturday school), Alana said she often felt torn between the two sides of her identity. At the middle school, kids joked about her Japanese heritage, and at Saturday school, kids expressed confusion about her religion.

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.

IWitness Video Challenge winner Natalia Wang was inspired by testimony in IWitness to share a message of acceptance with her whole school. Natalia and her teammates Alana Chandler and Yu Jing Chen won the 2017 contest with their video “Who Are You? Embracing Identity in Our Community.” The three are rising seniors at Walter Payton College Preparatory High School in Chicago, and were encouraged to enter the contest by their teacher Matt Silvia.

After discovering Professor Melissa Kravetz’s IWitness “digital essay” assignment on an internet forum for historians, Visiting Assistant Professor of History April Trask developed her own assignment for her students at Amherst College that many students say is one of the most meaningful they’ve done. Trask has long been interested in digital pedagogy and wanted to find digital resources for her history students at Amherst that offered more than just a digital presentation of traditional written materials, she said.

In one testimony in the Visual History Archive, a Rwandan Tutsi Genocide survivor recounts a disturbing story from his childhood: At his school, he and the other Tutsi students were put on lockdown in their dorms while the school administrators met with the Hutu students to tell them that their Tutsi classmates were plotting to kill them.