IWitness Archive Gives Voice to Holocaust Witnesses: Free Webinars and Student Contest

Facing History Offers IWitness Webinars for Teachers May 9 and May 14 2013
In May 2013, Facing History will offer two free webinars for educators on powerful ways to use the IWitness tool.

Grandmothers of Steel
When my Grandmother spoke, I listened. She survived Nazis, Communists and grandchildren. Yet she always had time for making schnitzel. Grandmothers are special; we know this. The partnership our students have formed with a very special grandmother has been inspiring. Her name is Lisbie Rae and over the last 2 months she has made regular visits to our classroom. This energetic and inspiring woman is a part of the Grandmothers of Steel! This amazing group has partnered with the Stephen Lewis Foundation (SLF) and with TD Canada Trust, raising over $200, 000 in the last 4 years to help grandmothers in Africa. Grandmothers helping grandmothers! What makes this program such a great fit for a Facing History Classroom is that Grandmothers of Steel and TD has given our class $250 to spend as Lisbie calls it, “seed money.” Students brain storm fundraising ideas and are given what they need to buy supplies and then the profits are donated back, while returning the $250 for next year. This concept is known as Table Banking. Table banking is used in Rwanda to help grandmothers there raise their orphaned grandchildren. Rwanda is a central unit in teaching Genocide. What better way to connect students to the history than to fundraise for the survivors of Rwanda. Students are able to study the genocide and then help with the healing.

I was recently very fortunate to be invited to join a trial UDHR Glogster project with Facing History (see samples of student work). The purpose of the project was to have students complete a project about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights using Glogster.
In this project, we, the teachers, were given tutorials in the application of Glogster.

An innovative new collaboration taking place in Canada this spring is connecting classrooms and teaching students literacy and performance skills through the study of history and spoken word poetry. “Stand Up, Speak Out,” a four-week program designed by Facing History and Ourselves, is bringing professional spoken word artists into Grade 11 classrooms as part of a unit of study that explores the history of genocide and issues of identity, tolerance, and community.

One of my most powerful childhood memories is seeing "The Ten Commandments" in the original "Cinemascope" at the now demolished Glendale Cinema on Avenue Road. I never forgot the grandeur of the huge screen especially in scene where Moses (Charlton Heston) epically raised his arms with the Rod of God aloft, and the sea crashed down upon the pursuing Egyptians while Pharaoh (Yul Brynner) gasped in awe and said: "The Lord is God." So much for nostalgia. I wonder what Moses would have said watching a synagogues of Germany burn down on Kristallnacht when firefighters stood idle and crowds gathered to gawk? He might well have asked, as do my students, "where was God"?

My last couple of posts have focused on the educational methodology of teaching media savvy students how to examine visual evidence of the Shoah. I have recorded some of our class conversations and you must wonder: what is the atmosphere like in this classroom? Is it terribly negative considering what is being learned? Mustn't it be especially upsetting for students in a Jewish day school to learn the horrific details of the Shoah, the Holocaust, that wiped out an entire Eastern European civilization? My students find this study enlightening and are not depressed but eager to learn more and empowered by what they discover. I would like to share how this can be done. For me, this is an issue that transcends ethnicity, nationality, or religion. How are students affected by learning about genocidal attempts that strike 'close to home"? Let me begin with a story that exemplifies what Facing History is all about.

The Facing History resource “Pigeon” demonstrates the impact a short film can have. Set amid the tension of occupied Europe during World War II, it is an example of the power an individual has to make a difference, if they choose to do so. A viral video is a video that results from online distribution and sharing, an excellent route to engaging our students. Finding short videos online is, therefore, a powerful teaching strategy.

Video clips are accessible to many learning styles, and of particular value when teaching the applied and essential level student. As ‘clips’, they are brief, thus benefiting shorter attention spans and working well in the structure of the 3-part lesson for the 75 minute classroom. They are easily shared if a student is absent (unlike a film) and easily re-watched (either individually or collectively) without generating a great burden on classroom time, which is so precious. And they play to the sensibilities of the digital generation (which in turn allows us as teachers to create the pretense to a shared sense thereof).

One of the challenges many teachers experience is trying to meet the needs of their diverse student population in their respective classes. Differentiated instructions strategies (D.I.) enables teachers to better meet these varied needs and in turn enables students to be successful because their needs are met at their level of readiness, interests and learning styles.

In this interview, we asked Rob Simon, Assistant Professor of Multiliteracies in Education at OISE/University of Toronto (Dept of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning), to tell us more about the Teaching to Learn Project so we could better understand how and why collaborative (teacher-adolescent) curriculum planning worked, why he chose Elie Wiesel's Night as the study text, and where he got the idea to ask project participants to paint on the pages of the text as a form of reading response.

The images below are the culmination of those responses, which were mounted in an exhibition titled After Night.