Facing History and Ourselves - San Francisco/Bay Area Feed

"Smithsonian Magazine" Features Facing History, Voice of Witness

EmilyBlackie — Fri, 22 Nov 2013 19:46:29 +0000

press_type:

In the News

November 22, 2013

Smithsonian Magazine has featured the San Francisco-based organization Voice of Witness, co-founded by author Dave Eggers and human rights activist Dr. Lola Vollen. Voice of Witness highlights contemporary examples of human rights violations by publishing oral history book series. In 2010, Facing History and Ourselves helped found the educational component of Voice of Witness to help change the way stories from history are taught to students. Facing History help craft a study guide, The Power of the Story, for educators who want to teach stories from the Voice of Witness program in their classroom.

Read “Upending the Narrative of the Great Man” in Smithsonian Magazine.

Read more about Voice of Witness on facinghistory.org.

Facing History Participates in Center for Genetics and Society Symposium

EmilyBlackie — Wed, 13 Nov 2013 16:38:46 +0000

press_type:

In the News

November 7, 2013

San Francisco-based Center for Genetics and Society invited staff from Facing History and Ourselves to plan and participate in the public symposium Future Past: Disability, Eugenics, & Brave New Worlds at San Francisco State University on November 1, 2013.

Facing History Senior Program Associate Milton Reynolds conducted a panel discussion on the history of eugenics, and discussed how classrooms and teachers will play an important role in creating new frames for understanding its legacies and implications.

The daylong event drew over 100 participants of diverse backgrounds and disciplines including local Facing History teachers and students.

Read more about the event on the Center for Genetics and Society website.

Learn more about Facing History’s work in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"Outbeat News" Features San Francisco Office Director Ahead of Community Conversation

EmilyBlackie — Mon, 04 Nov 2013 20:33:15 +0000

press_type:

In the News

October 27, 2013

San Francisco-based radio program Outbeat Radio News sat down with Facing History and Ourselves’ San Francisco Bay Area Office Director Jack Weinstein to discuss the upcoming film screening and Community Conversation Matt Shepard is a Friend of Mine.

Matt Shepard is a Friend of Mine tells the story of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man murdered in Laramie, Wyoming in October, 1998. His murder made headlines around the world and set the stage for historic anti-hate crime legislation. Directed by a close personal friend and produced by a former Facing History student, the film comes on the 15th anniversary of Shepard’s death and examines the dangers of hatred and intolerance through a truly personal lens.

Weinstein said the film allows people to discover who Matt Shepard was as a person, "rather than as a victim of a crime..."

Listen to the interview here [10 minutes into the recording].

Learn more about Facing History’s work in San Francisco and the Bay Area.

Register for this free event on Tuesday, November 12 at the Sundance Kabuki Cinema in San Francisco.

These events are a part of a national series of Community Conversations presented by Facing History and The Allstate Foundation. Prominent scholars, authors, filmmakers, and policy leaders speak and participate in free community-wide dialogues about civic engagement, individual and collective responsibility, and tolerance.

Creating Inclusive History Curricula With Facing History

Rachel Chaikof — Wed, 16 Oct 2013 14:32:35 +0000

October 30, 2013

For everyone to view

Teacher

Stacy Wickware Classroom 2.JPG

Walking into Stacey Wickware’s history classroom is like walking into the classroom you always dreamed about in high school. There are nearly as many beanbag chairs as there are traditional desks and chairs. Bright posters hang from the walls and art supplies vie for shelf and drawer space next to textbooks, rulers, binders, and maps.

Early on a Wednesday morning, the 20 or so students in Wickware’s AP United States history class snack on what’s left of their school breakfasts and chat until Wickware dims the lights, a cue class is about to start. “Today we’re going to do a little bit of reading and then we’re going to watch a short film,” she tells the class as she holds up a DVD of The Lynchburg Story: Eugenic Sterilization in America. The film, she explains, explores the history of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded near Lynchburg, Virginia, where, between 1927 and 1972, staff forcibly sterilized over 8,000 children and young teenagers.

The American eugenics movement in AP history? It’s clear to any visitor that this history class is out of the ordinary – in more ways than just the beanbag chairs.

At Dozier-Libbey Medical High School, which is located in the San Francisco Bay Area and part of the Antioch Unified School District (AUSD), U.S. history includes both the conventional – units on the Civil War and the civil rights movement – and the unexpected – units on health-related subjects such as eugenics, as well as Facing History and Ourselves core themes such as upstander/bystander behavior, issues of identity, and choosing to participate. Wickware worked with Facing History Senior Program Associate Milton Reynolds to develop the course’s eugenics unit, which explores the practice in Californian, American, and world history and incorporates selections from the Facing History resource Race and Membership in American History: the Eugenics Movement.

Dozier-Libbey began working with Facing History as part of a 2009 settlement between the ACLU of Northern California and the AUSD. As a result of the settlement, the AUSD brought various organizations including Facing History into schools as part of a comprehensive series of steps designed to prevent discrimination against minority students and ensure that school administrators and staff protect students from race-based harassment by their peers.

The 2009 settlement came at a difficult moment in AUSD history. Traditionally a white, working- and middle-class community, the city entered a time of transition during the recession. As new religious, ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic groups moved in, longtime residents began to move out, and hostilities, frustrations, and incidents of intolerance increased. The same issues played out in AUSD schools. Hostilities between students increased, educators struggled to meet the needs of a changing student body, and administrators found it difficult to foster tolerant, inclusive learning environments.

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As it happened, 2009 was Wickware’s first year as a teacher at Dozier-Libbey. At the beginning of the year, she joined educators from across the district in the first Facing History training, a three-day intensive seminar on race and membership in American society. Facilitated by Facing History staff members, the seminar used Facing History resources and teaching methods to explore how Americans defined citizenship and membership in the early part of the 20th century, and how issues of citizenship and membership continue to play out today, both in American society and locally in Antioch.

“I was immediately able to connect with this content, but also with the teaching strategies presented and could see new ways of bringing this material into my classroom,” said Wickware, who went to high school one town over from Antioch. “Even though I grew up here, I had no idea who the people really were who lived here. I hadn’t ever really done that inventory of my own community. The training made me pause and think.”

That year, Wickware taught 10th-grade English and world history at Dozier-Libbey. “I went back to school and right away applied the content, resources like the book Night by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, and the strategies I had learned,” she said. Together with fellow history and English teachers, Wickware worked to create an integrated history and English curriculum for the sophomore class. “In world history, the students studied the history of the Holocaust and then they came to English and saw the same themes. They saw the same content, but from different perspectives. The questions they asked were deeper and more personal,” she said. “You could see light bulbs going off for the students and ‘Ah ha!’ moments. There’s some kind of magic that happens for a student when those bells go off. When students get the connections between content, they have more to offer, which feels good to them.”

The following school year, Wickware enrolled in Facing History’s online seminar “Choices in Little Rock,” which explores the history of the civil rights movement in the United States. She then took two week-long seminars, “Holocaust and Human Behavior” and “Race and Membership in American History.” When Wickware returned to school in the fall to teach her second year of AP U.S. history, as well as AP government and politics, and economics, she incorporated Facing History strategies like Big Paper and popcorn reading, primary source documents, and resources into each course.

“You saw [students’] personalities begin to come out as they did things geared toward the way they would learn best – things like taking in a film and then moving around to write reflections on boards around a room, or doing small group work, or exercises like creating found poems, things they wouldn’t normally do in a history classroom,” Wickware said. “They had a lot to say. There were connections being made all over the place. It was just a livelier classroom.”

Working together with a fellow U.S. History teacher, Wickware incorporated Facing History resources such as Choices in Little Rock and the memoir Warriors Don’t Cry into junior year history coursework. Additionally, with support from a 2011 Facing History teaching grant, Wickware arranged for speakers including storyteller Awele Makeba, who uses oral history to bring stories from the American civil rights movement to life, to come to her classroom.

The following year Wickware and her colleagues brought six Freedom Rider veterans to school to speak about civil rights and participation in the U.S. “We realized that we wanted to change school culture and not just have identity, membership, and tolerance be themes we explore in one lesson, or one unit, or in just one classroom,” Wickware said.

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In 2011, Dozier-Libbey joined Facing History’s Innovative Schools Network, a group of 52 schools from around the world that use Facing History content and teaching strategies throughout their schools – in humanities classes, advisory groups, faculty meetings, and activities with the broader community. In 2012, the school overhauled its advisory program and implemented an “open door” policy that allows students to seek out classmates and teachers they want to connect with or get help from.

The school also established a freshman support network and a student-led diversity training program, created a medical ethics class that is required for all seniors, and began recognizing a Student of the Month whose contributions benefit the school community. “We realized that we weren’t showing off our students’ upstanding behavior,” Wickware said. “Now we catch and celebrate it when kids do the right things.”

These efforts have resulted in real outcomes. “Dozier-Libbey students come from various neighborhoods and communities. Some travel quite a ways to get here. The kids don’t live near each other and many arrive here never having socialized before,” said Wickware, who is now the chair of Dozier-Libbey’s History Department and a member of the School Leadership Team. “There are racial pockets in the greater Antioch community and there are working class pockets. It’s a very diverse community. When I started here, I don’t think the students knew what it meant to be a Dozier-Libbey student. There was no identity for that. Now, the students know. They have pride. We see them getting together over the summer. Things have just gotten better. We notice more unity. Today, students feel special being a part of this campus.”

Wickware sees a change among staff as well. “There’s more sharing now,” she said. “There’s a collaborative environment. You see teachers who feel reenergized by what they’re doing. I think we all feel sort of like better people as a result.”

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Download free PDFs of the resources mentioned in this article and sign up for professional development opportunities in the San Francisco Bay Area today.

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Facing History’s Julia Rappaport wrote this article. You can email her at Julia_Rappaport@facing.org.

Screen Time: Technology and Your Classroom

Rachel Chaikof — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 16:15:51 +0000

August 27, 2013

For everyone to view

Teacher

John Kittredge Facing History educator.preview.jpg

In most high school classrooms, the phrase “civil rights” tends to come up in conversations about voting equality or nonviolent protests by people such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. But when Facing History and Ourselves educator John Kittredge teaches his students about civil rights, he talks about technology.

“I consider what we do a primer for social living in the modern world,” Kittredge said during a break in classes at Envision Academy of Arts & Technology, an Oakland, California charter school where he teaches the freshman course Digital Literacy and Expression. “I am an advocate for technology in the school and in the classroom because it’s how the world works now. I advocate for tech training as a basic civil right.”

In Kittredge’s classroom, computers line desks where, in years past, notebooks and pencils rested. Cables spill out of drawers stocked with digital recorders and cameras. But this isn’t your average tech class. While his assignments do involve creating spreadsheets and using social networking tools and online learning platforms, Kittredge’s students also use technology to understand our world and find their place within it.

To make his class as relevant as possible, Kittredge ties his assignments to lessons from his students’ other classes. For example, when his students studied African history in their social studies class, Kittredge used the documentary film Reporter from award-winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and the accompanying Facing History resource guide, Teaching Reporter, to explore the dilemmas journalists faced while covering the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. When students read texts about identity and difference in English class, Kittredge had them create blogs that explored questions like Who are you? What is your identity as a writer? Who and what influences that identity?

“How do you live in a digital world? How do you stay safe in a digital world? How do you express yourself in a digital world,” Kittredge said. “These are the questions we’re hoping our students come out of here more prepared to answer.”

Kittredge first discovered Facing History as a new history teacher.

“It was my second full year of teaching world history. I had been teaching primarily from the text book and it just wasn’t working that well. There was so much missing and I could see that the kids weren’t engaged,” Kittredge said. That changed after he went online and found the Facing History resource Totally Unofficial: Raphael Lemkin and the Genocide Convention, which looks at the history of the word “genocide” and the creation of the first international laws against it. “It made a huge difference,” he said. The following year, Kittredge took his first Facing History seminar, Holocaust and Human Behavior.

“Learning this hard history, and how to teach it, it really changed everything for me,” he said. It’s an approach that Kittredge carried with him as he began to develop his Digital Literacy and Expression course. As a technology teacher interested in civics education, he also took advantage of Facing History’s Digital Media Innovation Network, which connects educators around the world through digital media and enables teachers and students to share tools, resources, and strategies for learning with technology.

The network has given Kittredge’s students in California an opportunity to share work, ideas, and assignments with their peers in big cities and small towns from all over the map. “Through Facing History and with technology, my students have been able to have conversations with kids around the world – in South Africa, Canada, the United Kingdom, and China. That opens their worldview,” he said.

Last year, Kittredge’s students participated in a two-day online workshop through the Digital Media Innovation Network that brought together over 400 students and explored themes of community using multimedia resources including digital photography and the documentary film Not in Our Town: Light in the Darkness, as well as the photo sharing site Flickr. During the workshop, students photographed their communities, neighborhoods, and hometown streets, and shared and discussed their work through the online application VoiceThread. “It is our hope, through this exploration, that the students will individually and collectively become better citizens in a confusing world,” Kittredge said at the time. “Something like this makes [history] real. It makes [students] see their place in it.” This spring, his students will participate in another Digital Media Innovation Network project, this one focused on Holocaust survivor testimony from the USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness website.

So what is at stake for urban students like Kittredge’s if technology is not incorporated into classrooms and lessons? “Everything,” he said. “We live in an age where kids are more used to getting their information from a device than from a human being. So in one sense, you use technology because it’s what kids know. It provides interest. But in another sense, you use it because technology is literacy. Being technologically literate is a necessity for these kids. Without it, students, especially students in the urban classroom, just don’t have as many options, as many opportunities.”

One of Kittredge’s most rewarding teaching moments occurred two years ago, during Envision Academy’s annual Upstander Project, a collaboration between freshman history and Digital Literacy and Expression students. That year, students were asked to research a social justice issue in their own community and create a plan to educate others about it. One of Kittredge’s students, whose focus was on teen prostitution, used digital tools from Kittredge’s class to produce a pamphlet for young women looking to leave this lifestyle. The student distributed the pamphlets, which listed support organizations and resources in Oakland. A few weeks later, she received a call from one of the organizations listed. “They called to say that a young woman had come in, pamphlet in hand, for help,” Kittredge said. “So this young woman, she may have been able to find another chapter in life. And my student, she walked away feeling like, ‘Yes. Small things do have big impacts.’ And then you could see that radiating out amongst her friends, who recognized not only the quality of the brochure she made in class, but the idea that she had the skills she had learned to actually go out and make it real. They could see effort and idea turn into social good.”

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Learn more about Facing History’s work in the San Francisco Bay Area and subscribe to our Interfacing Blog to keep up on all things tech in the classroom.

Facing History's Julia Rappaport wrote this article. For questions or tips on how you're using Facing History in your classroom, email her at Julia_Rappaport@facing.org.

Creating Change One Person at a Time: Anne Kronenberg on the Life and Legacy of Harvey Milk

Rachel Chaikof — Thu, 08 Aug 2013 17:54:32 +0000

August 8, 2013

For everyone to view

Scholar

On May 15, 2013, at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, California, Facing History and Ourselves and The Allstate Foundation, in partnership with the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus and Harvey Milk 2013: Living the Legacy, presented a free Community Conversation honoring the life and legacy of Harvey Milk.

Harvey Milk became the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in California when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Featured panelist at the May 15 Community Conversation, Anne Kronenberg, served as campaign manager of Harvey Milk’s historic 1977 campaign and was his political aide in City Hall. On November 27, 1978, Supervisor Dan White assassinated Milk and Mayor George Moscone. Kronenberg is the co-founder of The Harvey Milk Foundation.

These two clips feature Kronenberg answering audience questions about Harvey Milk and remembering him as a leader by example, an advocate for education, and believer that change happens one person at a time.

Becoming a Vessel of Positivity: Daniel Nicoletta on Lessons from Harvey Milk

Rachel Chaikof — Thu, 08 Aug 2013 17:49:34 +0000

August 8, 2013

For everyone to view

Scholar

Featured panelist Daniel Nicoletta is an American photographer, photo journalist, gay rights activist, and friend of Harvey Milk. These three clips feature Nicoletta reflecting on issues that Milk would be passionate about today, the importance of art in history, and recollecting Milk’s advice to him – above everything, be yourself.

Harvey Milk became the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in California when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. On November 27, 1978, Supervisor Dan White assassinated Milk and Mayor George Moscone.

“Armenian Reporter” Features Facing History in California, Michigan

EmilyBlackie — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 13:19:16 +0000

press_type:

In the News

July 3, 2013

The Armenian Reporter has featured workshops and events presented by the Genocide Education Project (GenEd) this past spring, some of which were also held in partnership with Facing History and Ourselves.
In San Francisco, California, students from Lick-Wilmerding High School heard from third generation Armenian Genocide survivor Roxanne Makasdjian, a frequent speaker for GenEd. Makasdjian spoke to students of Mary Finn’s full semester-long Facing History course, “Genocide and Human Behavior,” at Lick-Wilmerding High School. Students in the course focus on the Holocaust and other examples of genocide and mass violence throughout history and spend at least three weeks studying the Armenian Genocide.

In April, Facing History’s Senior Historian Mary Johnson facilitated a workshop for Michigan educators in Grosse Point that used primary source documents, multimedia resources, and Facing History’s Crimes Against Humanity and Civilization: The Genocide of the Armenians study guide. Facing History and The Armenian Genocide Group, a group sponsored by the Detroit chapter of the Knights of Vartan, organized the workshop.

“Through workshops focused on resistance, residual effects of genocide, and survivor stories, the message was communicated that education is the most effective way of remembering and preventing genocide,” the Armenian Reporter wrote.

Read “Genocide Education Events in California, Massachusetts, and Michigan” in the Armenian Reporter.

Download Crimes Against Humanity and Civilization: The Genocide of the Armenians for free today.

Learn more about Facing History’s work in the San Francisco Bay Area and across the United States.

Facing History Staff Moderate Bay Area Discussion on Bioethics

EmilyBlackie — Mon, 08 Jul 2013 16:14:36 +0000

press_type:

In the News

June 6, 2013

Biotechnology and its impact today was the topic of a panel discussed moderated by Facing History and Ourselves Senior Program Associate in San Francisco Milton Reynolds. Featuring Stuart Newman, PhD, the free community event, “Patent Pending – the Rise of Genetically Modified Humans,” explored the study of genetically modified human beings, the technology that supports this science, and the moral and ethical implications behind it.

Based on his extensive experience examining Facing History’s primary resources Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement and Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior, Reynolds reflected on the eugenics movement in the United States and how those lessons inform pursuits in biotechnology today. “One of the things I was struck by before I first read [Race and Membership], is that I had no real knowledge of eugenics,” he said. “But as I moved into the history, I was struck by how something so simple has been hidden in plain sight.”

This event is part of a series, The Promises and Perils of Biotechnology, sponsored by East Bay Conversations.

Watch Milton Reynolds and Stuart Newman discuss biotechnology.

Download a free copy of Facing History’s resource guide Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement and Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior today.

Learn more about Facing History’s work in the Bay Area.

San Francisco Educator Receives Facing History Funding to Create Resources on Eugenics

EmilyBlackie — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 15:18:51 +0000

press_type:

Press Release

May 29, 2013

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Press Contact: Emily Blackie
Facing History and Ourselves
Emily_Blackie@facing.org
216-321-9220 x226

San Francisco Educator Receives Facing History Funding to Create Resources on Eugenics
Innovation grants honor 20 Facing History educators around the world

May 29, 2013, SAN FRANCISCO, California – This spring, the Brookline-based international educational non-profit Facing History and Ourselves awarded $40,000 dollars to fund 20 innovative, cutting-edge classroom projects around the world, including $1,500 for high school teacher Kate Mullen Wiley at Lick Wilmerding High School in San Francisco, California. Wiley’s senior seminar students will extend their study of Race and Membership and the eugenics movement to create supplemental readers and sourcebooks for schools throughout the state of California. This work aligns with a statewide initiative titled the FAIR (Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful) Education Act. Read more about Kate Wiley’s work with Facing History.

About the Margot Stern Strom Innovation Grants
The Innovation Grants were established in 2006 but reintroduced this year with a focus on technological innovation and collaborative learning. Each year, Facing History will review the previous year’s award winners and their projects. At the end of the year, one grand prize finalist will receive $5,000 to continue their work. For a complete listing of individual winners and winning projects, click here.

About Facing History and Ourselves
Facing History and Ourselves was created in 1976 by Brookline, Massachusetts, by educators who believed that instilling intellectual vigor and curiosity goes hand-in-hand with teaching facts and figures. We provide training, professional development, and resources that support the practical needs, and the spirits, of educators worldwide who share the goal of creating a better, more informed, and more thoughtful society. With 10 offices around the globe, we reach more than two million students each year through our worldwide network of more than 29,000 trained educators.

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