To celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week, Judiana Moise, a senior at Blackstone Academy Charter School in Pawtucket, RI, shares her story of how her teacher, Stacy Joslin, has made an impact on her life. Stacy has been a Facing History and Ourselves teacher for nine years. She has taught Facing History lessons including Race and Membership, Identity, Choices in Little Rock, and Holocaust and Human Behavior. Stacy likes that Facing History gives her students the opportunity to wrestle with difficult and complex material. She says her favorite part of being a teacher is watching students find themselves through projects and discussions during the school year.

On Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, it is our job as teachers to ensure that the memory of the Holocaust is not forgotten. It is our hope, as a society, that the preservation of these memories will  prevent these events from happening again, any place in the world, and that the words of the survivors will ring out as alarm bells today.

Tomorrow is College Signing Day – a chance to celebrate students for making a commitment to higher education. Facing History and Ourselves is proud to support this exciting day for students all across the country as part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Reach Higher Initiative. This movement is a way for educators, counselors, and parents to encourage those heading to college, and for students to inspire and encourage others, too.

It is impossible to imagine what Raphael Lemkin would be thinking and doing if he were alive today. He dedicated his life to stopping mass violence against people based on their identities and to holding those who were responsible accountable for their crimes. As a young man, he studied past slaughters, including pogroms against Jews, and he immersed himself in understanding the mass murder of the Armenians by the Turkish state, the failure to stop it, and to punish those who were responsible for it. In the midst of his efforts to draw attention to these issues, he lost 49 family members, including his parents, in the Holocaust. They died in the Warsaw ghetto, in concentration camps, and in the death marches.

We couldn’t believe it ourselves: Over 4,000 students entered our 2016 Facing History Together Student Essay Contest!

This month – National Poetry Month in the U.S. – is a great time to explore just how powerful words can be. When it comes to understanding difficult moments in history, poetry and writing can help students process and express their own thoughts about the world. Explore these three ways you can bring poetry into your classroom using tools from Facing History’s partner, USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.

Guest blogger Dr. Becki Cohn-Vargas is the director of Not in Our School, a program that creates safe, accepting, and inclusive school communities. She’s challenging you to take the Not on Our Ground pledge, a growing movement with Adobe and the NBA champion Golden State Warriors against bullying, violence, and hatred. At Facing History and Ourselves, we encourage you to be an upstander in your community - so take action today. 

 Guest blogger, Lisa Bauman, shares the importance of teaching voices of the Holocaust. As a United States Holocaust Memorial Regional Education Corps Educator, she and her colleagues - Bonnie Sussman, and Colleen Tambuscio - have been bringing students on Holocaust Study Tours in Europe since 1998. Hear how their students rallied together to plan a commemoration in the Czech Republic for Otto Wolf, his family, and the residents that saved them from deportation during World War II.

April is Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month. Throughout the month, we’ll be featuring stories on Facing Today that reflect upon genocide throughout history. Hearing personal stories of survival can be a powerful learning experience. In this post, we’re shining a light on the inspirational stories of two genocide survivors.

On Easter Sunday, a splinter group of the Taliban killed more than 70 people, including children, in Lahore, Pakistan. The group said they were targeting Christians who had gone to Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park to celebrate the holiday with their families. It was mostly Muslims who were killed.

On Tuesday, March 22nd, at least 35 people were killed and hundreds more were injured in Brussels, Belgium. Victims came from across Belgium as well as from the US, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, France, the UK, Italy, and China. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack on Brussels' airport and a subway station in the center of the city. There have also been attacks in Turkey, Nigeria, Kenya, the Ivory Coast, Syria, and Iraq.