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ERIC Number: EJ1225169
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2015
Pages: 4
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0037-7724
EISSN: N/A
With Their Voice: Constructing Meaning with Digital Testimony
Haas, Brandon J.; Berson, Michael J.; Berson, Ilene R.
Social Education, v79 n2 p106-109 Mar-Apr 2015
The use of testimony in teaching about the Holocaust has long been a practice, relying on resources such as memoirs, diaries, and audio recordings. Having first-person accounts provides a window into the experience of those who lived the historical events that now fill the pages of text. As we mark the 70th Anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, it becomes increasingly difficult to find survivors and witnesses to share their stories with students. The question of how these personal accounts will endure once the last survivor is no longer here is a pertinent issue in the field of Holocaust education. Though not equivalent to in-person accounts, video testimony can provide an important experience. This article describes the Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation, which houses over 53,000 testimonies of survivors and additional witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides. These full life histories have been collected from individuals in 61 countries and 39 languages. Each of the testimonies is fully searchable and discoverable through the process of cataloguing and indexing each testimony using thousands of keywords. For example, students can search testimony using terms such as rescue, resistance, racism, or using locations such as Lodz or Auschwitz. IWitness (iwitness.usc.edu), the USC Shoah Foundation's educational website, provides access to over 1,350 survivor and witness testimonies. Secondary school students and teachers may search, watch, and interact with testimonies to construct multimedia projects in a secure, password-protected space. Teachers are using IWitness as a way to integrate twenty-first-century literacies into a range of subjects, including social studies, language arts, media studies, and psychology.
National Council for the Social Studies. 8555 Sixteenth Street #500, Silver Spring, MD 20910. Tel: 800-683-0812; Tel: 301-588-1800; Fax: 301-588-2049; e-mail: membership@ncss.org; Web site: http://www.socialstudies.org
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Elementary Secondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A