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.

IWitness (and survivor Roman Kent) has had a profound effect on the entire eighth grade class at Saraland Middle School in Alabama, says teacher Donna Hughes.Hughes teaches eighth grade language arts and seventh grade journalism, and learned about IWitness at an Echoes and Reflections workshop. She has since incorporated testimony into her Holocaust curriculum in order to supplement her students’ reading and provide them access to real survivors, she said.

In each testimony in the Visual History Archive, survivors have the opportunity to show photographs and family artifacts. Though this segment usually comes as a footnote of sorts at the end of each testimony, after the survivor has finished telling his or her story, it’s here that Linda Kim, a recipient of USC Shoah Foundation’s 2014 Teaching Fellowship, will focus her research this summer.

USC Libraries presented its first-ever Research Award last month to a student who turned to the Visual History Archive to research transitional justice in South Africa and Rwanda.Nitya Ramanathan, a junior international relations major, took first place for her paper How do We Put Ourselves Back Together? An Analytical Comparison between Transitional Justice in Rwanda and South Africa, written for Professor Wolf Gruner’s Comparative Genocide course.

Last week, students from Cleveland High School in Cleveland, Tenn., saw a familiar face on the LIVE with Kelly and Michael show: Athena Davis, their English and Holocaust Literature teacher. Davis is one of five finalists who are vying to be named LIVE’s Top Teacher thanks to their exceptional work as educators and leaders in their schools and communities.

Twenty years ago, David Strick photographed Steven Spielberg surrounded by 12 Holocaust survivors – illustrating in a single frame the work and mission of the newly-founded Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.On a cool day this January, Spielberg again posed for a photo by Strick; only this time, students from middle school to college stood around him. This is the Shoah Foundation today.

Ruth Pearl is best known as the mother of late American journalist Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal’s South Asia Bureau Chief, who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan by terrorists in 2002. But it is her own life story that is preserved as part of USC Shoah Foundation’s new collection of testimonies from North Africa and the Middle East.

Documentary filmmaker J. Michael Hagopian didn’t have to look too far for survivors of the Armenian Genocide. Somehow, says his wife Toni Hagopian, they always found him.“The first time I experienced it, we were in New York on our honeymoon and there was a note left in the laundry asking if [Michael] was any relation to Mikael, which was Mike’s father,” Toni said. “The man said Dr. Mikael had saved his father’s life. We heard that a lot.”