NMHS Teacher Chosen for National Honor

Colleen Tambuscio, a teacher at New Milford High School, has been selected by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute to participate in its third annual Teaching with Testimony workshop this week as a candidate of its Master Teacher Program. The Institute maintains an archive of nearly 52,000 video testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. 

“This workshop equips teachers to become ambassadors of testimony-based education in their communities,” Stephen D. Smith, Executive Director of the Institute, said. “The rigorous training in which they participate will prepare them to enhance students’ learning through the use of testimony and demonstrate its value to their colleagues in the field.”

Tambuscio—who teaches special education classes and Holocaust and Genocide Studies—is one of 17 highly experienced middle and high school educators from 15 cities and seven states chosen to participate in the weeklong workshop out of a nationwide pool of more than 90 applicants. This year’s class comprises public and private middle school, high school, and community college educators who teach subjects that include English, film, government, history, instructional technology, literature, screenwriting, student leadership, drama, and character education.

“Each participant will learn how to craft a testimony-based classroom resource by the end of the week,” Sherry Bard, Project Director of Educational Programs at the Institute, said. “But they will also come to understand the core concepts related to the educational use of testimony and its intersection with new media, as well as its potential applications across the curriculum. Moreover, they will be able to share these concepts with other teachers, with administrators, and with community leaders as well.”

Tambuscio will benefit from a variety of unique professional development experiences. Institute staff and other specialists will present a comprehensive overview of the methodology for designing testimony-based projects, and participants will also hear from graduates of last year’s workshop, who will share their experiences developing and piloting their own projects.

Participants will train using the Institute’s Visual History Archive search engine, which enables users to locate and view segments of testimony that deal with specific themes or topics; they will also be among the first educators trained to use IWitness, a groundbreaking new resource for teachers and students that will make 1,000 English-language testimonies available on the Internet.

Other sessions include a discussion on ethical editing facilitated by faculty from the USC School of Cinematic Arts and the USC Institute for Multimedia Literacy, as well as meetings with Renée Firestone, a Holocaust survivor and educator, and Edith Umugiraneza, one of the first survivors of the Rwandan Tutsi genocide to give testimony to the Institute. 

Next summer, Tambuscio and all other participants will return for a follow-up workshop, at which they will receive 12 Continuing Education Units and a Teaching with Testimony certificate from the USC Rossier School of Education.

The Teaching with Testimony workshop is part of the Master Teacher Program, the cornerstone of the Institute’s Teacher Innovation Network. The Teacher Innovation Network is made possible through generous funding by the Leichtag Family Foundation.

“The testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses contain important lessons for humanity, and they can be used within an academic framework to satisfy curricular learning objectives,” Smith said. “The opportunity for educators and students is profound, and we are extremely grateful to the Leichtag Family Foundation for its vision and strong commitment to testimony-based education.”