PR Newswire
Tuesday 12:13 PM EST
Chicago high school students win USC Shoah Foundation's 2017 IWitness
Video Challenge
LOS ANGELES,
A group of students from Chicago who inspired their fellow students
to embrace each other's unique identity has won the 2017 IWitness
Video Challenge sponsored by USC Shoah Foundation.
As the first-place winners of this year's short-video contest - which
invites students to make a positive contribution to their communities
- Alana Chandler, Yu Jing Chen, and Natalia Wang of Walter Payton
College Preparatory High School in the Chicago Public School District
will split the $5,000 in scholarship money for their project,Who are
You?: Embracing Identity in Our Community.
Initiated by USC Shoah Foundation - which collects and uses
testimonies of genocide survivors and witnesses for education and
research - the IWitness Video Challenge asks students to submit short
videos to show how they were inspired by testimony to make positive
choices and create value in their community. The contest is open to
middle and high school students across the United States and Canada
(except Quebec).
Using the testimony of Armenian Genocide survivor Haig Baronian, who
was forced to shed his own Armenian identity as a child, the winners
had their fellow students illustrate their own identity.
The drawings didn't focus on any one thing; they featured collages of
flags, maps, musical instruments, yoga mats, trees, and even paw
prints - things that illustrated that the students saw themselves as
complex people with various ways to define themselves.
"We want the audience to learn more about themselves, to reflect on
who they are and their identities, after watching our video," Yu Jing
said. "We want them to realize that they are not alone and that they
should always fight for an accepting environment."
This year's contest - the fourth annual - offers prizes for
scholarships and additional money for educators and schools. In all,
$10,000 in prizes was awarded courtesy of the Institute's partner Ford
Motor Co., which is sponsoring the event as part of its commitment to
innovative educational outreach.
Also helping to make this year's challenge the most successful to date
was the Institute's partnership with Discovery Education, the leading
provider of digital content and professional development for K-12
classrooms, which administered the challenge and helped maximize reach
and impact through its deep partnerships with school systems,
administrators and educators worldwide.
In addition to splitting a $5,000 college scholarship, the winning
students have secured a $2,500 grant for their school to be used for
the betterment of the community. Their teacher, Matt Silvia, will
receive a $1,000 grant awarded in the form of a check, to be used to
promote tolerance and empathy at the school.
A $1,000 scholarship went to second-place winner Acadia Grantham of
the School of Biotechnology, Health and Public Administration at
Olympic High in Charlotte, N.C., whose project,Silence, tackled the
topic of bullying and the consequences of not speaking up. And a $500
scholarship went to Shayna Kantor of the Berkshire Country Day School
in Stockbridge, Mass., for her project, Are You Listening?,which dealt
with efforts to connect with the deaf community after watching
testimony from a deaf Holocaust survivor.
The contest is based on one of the more than 150 activities found in
IWitness, USC Shoah Foundation's free educational website
(iwitness.usc.edu), which brings the human stories from the
Institute's Visual History Archive - the world's largest repository of
testimony from survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust and other
genocides - to teachers and their students via engaging
multimedia-learning activities.
The IWitness Video Challenge first presents students with selected
testimonies from survivors who demonstrate what is possible when we
make the courageous choice to act. Then, the Challenge takes students
through the steps necessary to identify a problem, determine how to
contribute to solving that problem, and how to create a video that
captures their efforts and impact on helping to solve a problem in
their community. Students will then be instructed on how to use the
built-in video editor in IWitness to construct, edit and submit their
one- to four-minute video project. No prior video editing knowledge is
needed to participate.
About USC Shoah Foundation
USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education
is dedicated to making audio- visual interviews with survivors and
other witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides, a compelling
voice for education and action. The Institute's current collection of
more than 54,000 eyewitness testimonies contained within its Visual
History Archive® preserves history as told by the people who lived it,
and lived through it. Housed at the University of Southern California,
within the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and
Sciences, the Institute works with partners around the world to
advance scholarship and research, to provide resources and online
tools for educators, and to disseminate the testimonies for
educational purposes.
About Discovery Education
Discovery Education is the global leader in standards-based digital
content for K-12, transforming teaching and learning with
award-winning digital textbooks, multimedia content, professional
development, and the largest professional learning community of its
kind. Serving 4.5 million educators and over 50 million students,
Discovery Education's services are in half of U.S. classrooms, 50
percent of all primary schools in the UK, and more than 50 countries.
Discovery Education partners with districts, states, and like-minded
organizations to captivate students, empower teachers, and transform
classrooms with customized solutions that increase academic
achievement. Discovery Education is powered by Discovery
Communications (NASDAQ: DISCA, DISCB, DISCK), the number one
nonfiction media company in the world. Explore the future of education
at
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.discoveryeducation.com&d=DwIFaQ&c=clK7kQUTWtAVEOVIgvi0NU5BOUHhpN0H8p7CSfnc_gI&r=LVw5zH6C4LHpVQcGEdVcrQ&m=KILcQdd3xonVTq4gNMi8S395mFYAY8o0csFvutjTmu4&s=vcv2ZGbyfhZwapXJP3b_p3NB9osOKnvk6NbjFFKtD3M&e=
.
Visual History Archive® is a registered trademark of USC Shoah
Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education Reg. U.S.
Pat & Tm. Off.
Contact: Josh Grossberg 213-740-6065
[email protected]
Rob Kuznia 213-740-0965
[email protected]
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SOURCE USC Shoah Foundation
