Education staff present at the 2026 Winter Institute for the California Teachers Collaborative

2026-03-09 - 14:44

Colleagues from the USC Shoah Foundation’s education team presented at this year’s Winter Institute, “School Leadership to End Hate and Inspire Courage,” for the California Teachers Collaborative for Holocaust and Genocide Education on March 2 in Sacramento, California. Over 145 educators, district superintendents, principals and teachers representing more than 25 districts across California attended. Keynote speakers included California Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Thurmond and state Sen. Henry Stern, a key supporter of the collaborative. Dr. Lesly Culp and Dr. Sedda Antekelian led two sessions on how to integrate eyewitness video testimony into classroom curricula to support student learning. The first session explored the topics of peoplehood, identity and belonging through audiovisual testimony sampled from the institute’s large archive, drawing from the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the Cambodian Genocide and the Guatemalan Genocide of the 1980s. The second session introduced classroom-ready lessons on the USC Shoah Foundation’s educational website, IWitness, for sixth- through 12th-grade students that examine identity and culture through firsthand accounts of survivors and witnesses of genocide, including the Holocaust and Armenian Genocide. This included a lesson on Cultural Identity — Food Traditions from the Mindful Explorations suite of activities — featuring the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, Pinchas Gutter, Sarah Friedman and Eva Neumann, and emphasizing how food can shape one’s sense of identity. The session was followed by strategies for engaging in a virtual conversation with the interactive biography (Dimensions in Testimony) of Dr. Khatchig Mouradian, a genocide scholar and third-generation descendant of Armenian Genocide survivors. “What made these sessions so powerful was the room itself,” said Dr. Culp, the director of education. “We had teachers, principals, superintendents and state leaders from across California learning alongside one another. You could feel the shift as participants realized that testimony is not just a resource, but a powerful approach to help students and school communities grapple with identity, history and belonging in a deeply human way.” Established in 2021 by the JFCS Holocaust Center, the California Teachers Collaborative for Holocaust and Genocide Education is a statewide network of 15 organizations that unites California’s leading Holocaust and genocide education organizations with diverse community leaders. Through standards-aligned lesson plans, expert-led training and rich educational resources, the collaborative empowers educators to teach the lessons of history and the dangers of unchecked bias. The USC Shoah Foundation hosted workshop sessions for the California Collaborative during the inaugural Summer Institute held on the USC campus in 2023 and has continued to lead sessions at the collaborative’s annual Summer Institutes in the years since.