Mary Hendra

As Program Director for Los Angeles and Organizational Innovation for Facing History and Ourselves, Mary has led workshops, seminars, and professional development in the greater Los Angeles area for many years. Her work included coaching individual teachers and faculty teams implementing Facing History in their classrooms, piloting new uses of digital tools and resources for education, and collaborating with formal and informal education organizations across Southern California. In April 2022, she joined the California Global Education Project.

Recent Posts

How do you stay engaged?

Posted by Mary Hendra on December 10, 2015

This is not the blog post I wanted to write. How do you respond when lives have been lost? Paris, Chicago, San Bernardino. And what about the lives lost which don’t make national news?

Walking into the metro station earlier this week my husband and I started talking with one of the station workers. He was holding his breath as he walked upstairs with us – hoping not to find the dead body of a homeless man, as had happened the day before.

Are we, like this station worker, holding our breath to not have a dead body to deal with today?

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Topics: Classrooms, Students, Facing History Resources, Facing History and Ourselves

Using Video in the Classroom: Active or Passive Learning?

Posted by Mary Hendra on October 22, 2015

When you use video in the classroom, are you asking your students to be passive or active?

I can certainly appreciate the leisurely watching of movies and television shows, even documentaries. But as a teacher, when I chose to use valuable class time to view videos, I wanted my students to be as engaged as possible.

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Topics: Video, Flipped Classroom, Facing Technology, Lesson Plans, Learning, Zaption

How I Learned About the Forgotten Genocide

Posted by Mary Hendra on April 21, 2015

I am not Armenian.


I did not grow up learning about the Armenian Genocide.

I attended schools in two of the best public school districts in Southern California and achieved not just an undergraduate degree, but two master's degrees. I had been teaching for several years before I ever learned about the Armenian Genocide.

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Topics: Armenian Genocide, Facing History Resources, Genocide/Collective Violence, Teaching Resources, Video, History

Talking to Students About Ferguson

Posted by Mary Hendra on November 25, 2014

As a teacher, you carefully prepare for your students, plan your lessons, develop curriculum that will meet expectations of administrators, engage students, and build critical skills for academic success. And then, there are the news items – local or global – that capture students’ hearts and minds

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Topics: Classrooms, Facing History Resources, Safe Schools, Teaching, News, Identity, Race and Membership, Teachers, Civil Rights

At Facing History and Ourselves, we value conversation—in classrooms, in our professional development for educators, and online. When you comment on Facing Today, you're engaging with our worldwide community of learners, so please take care that your contributions are constructive, civil, and advance the conversation.

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Welcome to Facing Today, a Facing History blog. Facing History and Ourselves combats racism and antisemitism by using history to teach tolerance in classrooms around the globe.

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