Cheryl Beal

Cheryl Beal: Bringing Students Closer to the Eyewitnesses of History
by Melissa Dorfman

Cheryl Beal uses innovative ways to bring students in her English 4 Holocaust elective closer to those that experienced the horror of this most tragic event in world history. iWitness is an educational website sponsored by the USC Shoah Foundation. It “provides access to more than 1,500 full life histories, testimonies of survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust and other genocides for guided exploration. iWitness brings the human stories of the Institute's Visual History Archive to secondary school teachers and their students via engaging multimedia- learning activities.”

Another tool that Ms. Beal and her students use is “Echoes and Reflections.” A site that supports "students’ development of the skills to examine the effects of prejudice, bigotry, and antisemitism." The site seeks to "encourage the use of visual history testimony in the classroom, thereby exposing students to the narratives of those who were witnesses to history and providing opportunities for them to examine their own personal narratives.” Ms. Beal's students recently completed a project incorporating these resources to examine an aspect of their choice on the Concentration Camps of the Holocaust such as culture, education, and religion. Student groups were able to choose their own preferred method to present these topics. They needed to use primary resources and were encouraged to use the supplemental resources described. Ms. Beal has created a very innovative and important project for the students of this new and thought provoking course!