“In conversation, we were all able to see and understand circumstances beyond our own..."

In 2011, when I was 13 years old, my family and I traveled to South Africa. My dad was born and raised in Cape Town. In 1976, the Soweto Uprising and corrupt Apartheid government prompted his parents to move their family to Toronto, Canada. During our trip, I spent time in Khayelitsha, Langa, and Gugulethu, black townships near Cape Town, with children close to my age who shared many of my interests. I was struck by their harsh living conditions and bleak educational futures relative to my own. The connections I made inspired my desire to make a positive difference. But, at the time, I was in middle school and I had no clue how.   

Topics: International, New York, South Africa, Shikaya, Intern, Learning

2015 marks a decade of partnership between Facing History and Ourselves and The Allstate Foundation. Together, we have held over 100 Community Conversations in ten cities, engaging more than 70,000 teachers, parents, and community members. 

Topics: Facing History Together, Video, Sonia Nazario, Isabel Wilkerson, Community Conversations, Wes Moore, Deborah Prothrow-Stith, Douglas Blackmon, Don Cheadle, Bryan Stevenson, Lynsey Addario, Margaret Stohl

“Aligning to the Common Core does not mean ignoring what we’re passionate about...The key is to do both: challenge our students to develop their literacy skills while examining difficult histories and issues of social justice.”

Topics: Common Core, Common Core State Standards, Webinars, Literacy Design Collaborative

Imagine preserving the voices and stories of an entire generation over a single holiday weekend. That’s our hope, as Facing History and Ourselves partners with StoryCorps for the 2015 Great Thanksgiving Listen. We will work with high school teachers across the country, whose students will interview a grandparent or elder over the 2015 Thanksgiving holiday weekend, and record their story with the StoryCorps mobile app.

Ahead of the Great Thanksgiving Listen, we sat down with Dave Isay, the founder of StoryCorps and winner of a 2015 $1 million TED Prize. Isay made public radio documentaries for nearly two decades before starting StoryCorps 12 years ago. (The interview has been slightly condensed.)

Topics: Student Voices, Memory, Identity, History, Community, David Isay, StoryCorps

On November 5, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sonia Nazario will join Facing History in Cleveland, Ohio, for a Community Conversation—one in a series of public talks held across the country in partnership with The Allstate Foundation. You can RSVP here today. Ahead of the talk, we sat down with the author of the bestseller Enrique's Journey to discuss immigration, reporting during times of conflict, and the power young people have to shape our world for the better.

Topics: Books, Events, Immigration, Facing History Together, Sonia Nazario, Community Conversations

For many years, my past as a Jewish child hiding from the Nazis during the second world war was obliterated from my memory. Finally I realized that I needed to face a huge and painful void in my life. The opportunity came as a friend invited me to speak to a Facing History and Ourselves classroom.

Topics: Antisemitism, Choosing to Participate, Identity, Holocaust, Survivor Testimony, History

What is our responsibility to refugees fleeing from war and genocide?

On September 3, the BBC's Inside Europe Blog published images of police officers in the Czech Republic writing on the hands of detained migrants as a way to identify them. In the post, reporter Rob Cameron observed that the images “are an uncomfortable reminder of a different event and a different era. But the Czech authorities appeared totally unaware of the unfortunate visual connotations with the Holocaust, when prisoners at Auschwitz were systematically tattooed with serial numbers.”

Topics: Rescue, Immigration, News, History, Universe of Obligation, Europe, Refugees, Refugee Crisis

One of the reasons I went into teaching was for the opportunity to transform lives, but I didn’t anticipate how much my students would transform me. A Facing History and Ourselves classroom naturally lends itself to fostering a deep sense of community, collaboration, and constructed knowledge. And through this process, everyone ends up seeing the world a little differently, including the teacher.

Topics: Poetry, Spoken Word, Identity, Facing History Together, Video, Music, Hurricane Katrina

Recently, I drove from Facing History’s office in the East Bay to Silicon Valley to attend a youth civic hackathon. As I passed by the giant “like” sign at Facebook’s sprawling campus on One Hacker Way in Menlo Park, I found myself thinking about hacking, technology, social media status updates, and also about empathy.

Topics: Classrooms, Teaching, Schools, San Francisco Bay Area, Teachers, Empathy, STEM

The killing of Cecil the Lion on July 1st attracted both heavy news coverage and a flurry of responses on social media. An interesting thread emerged from these responses: questions about how people can become so outraged over the death of a lion on the other side of the world, when there are larger scale, or more local, stories of individuals and groups of people suffering unspeakable violence and injustice. The underlying theme that unites many of these confrontations is “Which story about tragedy or injustice is more worthy of our attention?”

Topics: Classrooms, Teaching Strategies, Choosing to Participate, Students, Facing History Resources, Teaching, News, Universe of Obligation