The History of Jews in Győr in School Education, through Personal Interviews – Part III
by Ildikó Mesterházi,
Zachor Foundation and USC Shoa Foundation Ambassador for Győr
In previous articles, I have introduced you to the importance of video interviews used in education at the University of Southern California (USC) Shoa Foundation. We also learned about IWalk – video-interviewed local history walks in Győr, which allow you to independently explore the major sites of Győr’s Jewish community, while learning about the stories of local Holocaust survivors.
In this article, I would like to draw your attention to the USC Shoa Foundation’s IWitness platform, which has been created with a specific educational purpose. Therefore, you are reading a short awareness-raising article, which is not intended to present all the details and features of the platform.
If you are an educator, you will find links at the end of this article that will help you to get to know the platform better and to put it into practice. If you are a layperson, you may also find it interesting to browse the interface and recommend it to students in your environment.
The IWitness educational platform aims to make the video interviews from the USC Shoa Foundation’s Visual History Archive as accessible as possible for teachers and students, and to support their use in pedagogical work by making the teaching materials based on the interviews easily available. It is worth registering on the platform as a teacher or student, but there are also a number of possibilities without registration.
Without registering, you can click on the Watch tab to browse thematic interview sets, searchable by topic and language.
In the Activities tab, you can see the description of the exercises and learning materials based on the video interviews, but you have to register to do them.
As a teacher, there are also many ideas and methodological descriptions that can help you to use the interview details in as many types of lessons and as many topics as possible. The ready-made teaching materials on the site can be used in history, civic education, Hungarian language and literature, ethics and morals, foreign languages, film and media studies, visual culture, or in special training delivered by a Head of Class, but they can also be used in workshops or school projects.
We can choose from a wide range of activities, adapted to the technical conditions of our educational establishment, the time available and the interests of our students. The common feature is that they are based on constructivist pedagogy. This means that the student is not only a passive recipient of the information offered by the teacher, but also uses his/her prior knowledge and his/her own opinions and feelings to construct and construct knowledge together by interpreting different sources and asking related questions. This can be done in group work or individually. In the latter case, the students are individually exploring the journey of knowledge in the online space. They formulate their answers independently, which the teacher has the opportunity to consult. Or we can conclude the exercise with a joint discussion.
Finally, allow me to conclude this short presentation with my personal opinion. Personally, I like the IWitness platform because it not only helps to deepen my students’ knowledge of the subject matter, but also helps to develop critical thinking. It helps students to be more open to what is happening around them, to become active citizens. It enables them to actively participate in the learning process.
For more information, click on the following links: