The Voice of Witness education team would like to take a moment to share appreciation for teachers and students as they begin the new school year.
The challenges of the pandemic and other factors are making the start of this school year particularly difficult. While it’s important to acknowledge the uncertainties and challenges that lie ahead, it’s also critical to acknowledge the resilience, skill, and commitment demonstrated by educators, students, and families. It is in this spirit that we offer our oral history-based education resources. It’s more crucial than ever to support learning that nurtures empathy, critical thinking, communication, and social and emotional learning. Throughout the year, we will remain dedicated to sharing tools for amplifying unheard voices in your classrooms and communities.
In solidarity, The VOW education team
Classroom Material: Unheard Voices of the Pandemic
Voice of Witness has launched a new oral history project called Unheard Voices of the Pandemic, documenting how marginalized communities are being disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 crisis.
These short narratives can be used directly in the classroom as first-person examples of ongoing current events and how they are experienced in different communities. We also encourage pairing these narratives with our short video featuring student voices from San Francisco as they share how the pandemic has affected their own lives.
VOW Education Workshop: Oral History in the Virtual Classroom
Voice of Witness is excited to present a FREE online education workshop called "Oral History in the Virtual Classroom" on Tuesday, October 13th. This interactive workshop will provide teachers with ideas, activities, and tips for transitioning oral history practices into the distance learning format.
VOW Education Specialist Erin Vong will be presenting alongside Ria Fay-Berquist, a Humanities teacher at Latitude High School in Oakland, CA and a former Germanacos Fellow for Sharing History.
Educators, have you joined the Voice of Witness Learning Community yet? This Facebook group provides individuals and organizations interested in social justice education, community building, and critical thinking with a space to share resources and engage around the transformative power of storytelling.
Voice of Witness (VOW) is an award-winning nonprofit that advances human rights by amplifying the voices of people impacted by—and fighting against— injustice. VOW explores issues of race-, gender-, and class-based inequity through the lenses of migration, displacement, and the criminal justice system. The VOW Book Series depicts human rights issues through the edited oral histories of people—VOW narrators—who are most deeply impacted and are often at the heart of solutions to address injustice. The VOW Education Program connects over 20,000 educators, students, and advocates each year with these stories and issues through oral history-based curricula, trainings, and holistic educational support.
