(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)November 1, 2011

(Mahwah) – “Online Testimonies in the Classroom”was the title of a Gumpert Teachers’ Workshop held at Ramapo College on November 1, 2011 and sponsored by the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in cooperation with the New Jersey State Commission on Holocaust Education and University of Southern California (USC)’s Shoah Foundation Institute.

Encompassing more than 1,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses, the USC’s Shoah Foundation Institute’s visual archive is a treasure trove for teachers to help deepen students’ understanding of Nazi Germany’s war against the Jews. To tap this amazing resource for classroom use the Institute has been working on an online application, iWitness, that will empower students to participate in their own learning by providing them with the tools to think critically, investigate, develop, analyze, and collaborate with others.

Our workshop was a hands-on opportunity for thirty teachers to pilot the use of the application before it became generally available. Colleen Tambuscio of New Milford High School, who is also a member of the Center’s Advisory Board, conducted the morning session, held in one of Ramapo College’s computer classrooms, in which she guided workshop participants through iWitness’ rich array of multimedia resources and tools. She showed how in addition to enabling educators to support and use new multimedia applications in their classrooms to achieve curricular goals and standards in a variety of disciplines and grade levels, iWitness would provide an opportunity to enhance students’ digital, visual, and media literacy skills and encourage them to develop their own video projects and relate the survivor and witness stories to their own personal experiences and to make connections to contemporary events.

In the afternoon, Sandy Rubenstein, who teaches at the Horace Mann School in New York City and is also the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, showed workshop participants how she was able to use the a three-hour visual and oral testimony of his recollections of the war years that her father completed under the auspices of the Shoah Foundation to tell his story as a means of relating the history of the Holocaust. In her classroom presentations, which she has called Marked with a Stone, she shares excerpts from his book and intersperses video clips of her father speaking directly about his experiences. According to Rubenstein, in listening to the presentation of her father’s story, students are riveted and full of questions. In her view, Marked with a Stone, which providing students with a first-hand account of the Holocaust, also encourages students to reflect on their own moral responsibilities to stand up against hate, bigotry, and genocide today. In addition, Sandy Rubenstein also shared the project, Incorporating Testimony into the Teaching of Holocaust Literature: Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, that she developed under the auspices of the USC Shoah Foundation and has modeled with her 4th-grade students at the Horace Mann School.

Judging by the evaluations that participants completed after the workshop, they found the time that they spent learning about the iWitness application very worthwhile.

Colleen Tambuscio

(Left to Right) Colleen Tambuscio & Sandy Rubenstein

Sandy Rubenstein

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