We all need as much hope and inspiration as we can get right now. At Voice of Witness, our narrator communities—educators, students, and activists from and/or supporting those impacted by the criminal justice and immigration systems, including individuals facing displacement, financial uncertainty, and more—have been hit particularly hard. We are here for you during this [...]
Voice of Witness has an ongoing consultancy with the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), providing professional development to middle and high school teachers and librarians. VOW’s trainings offer oral history and personal narrative workshops centered around increasing student visibility and voice, as well as connecting oral history projects to district standards for writing and [...]
Voice of Witness is excited to introduce our new Curriculum Specialist, Suzanne Methot, for our oral history book project, How We Go Home: Voices From Indigenous North America. How We Go Home is a forthcoming collection of first-person Indigenous stories of the contemporary, ongoing effects of displacement and settler colonialism. Each book in the VOW oral history book series includes Common Core-aligned [...]
For Black History Month, Voice of Witness put together a list of 10 key resources for deepening understanding of black history and racial justice. The list includes a mix of organizations, resources, and nonfiction books (including oral history!), in no particular order: 1. Book: The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson 2. Film: [...]
Through a consultancy with the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) Teacher-Librarians Department, the VOW Education Program has been working with several middle and high schools around the city to develop oral history projects for their classrooms. At the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, VOW collaborated with teacher Bruna Lee to create a podcast [...]
By Stephanie He | Based on an interview conducted with Caroline Le Stephanie He is a student at Impact Academy of Art and Technology in Hayward, CA. This story was written as part of a classroom project led by our Germanacos Fellow, Maria Bucon-Scales. After reading oral histories and The Things They Carried, Maria's students interviewed a [...]
This summer, we have been fortunate to have four wonderful interns join us to support our work. In this post, two of our interns Margaret O'Hare from Haverford College and Eliana Swerdlow from Yale reflect on their summer at VOW. Margaret O’Hare My internship at Voice of Witness this summer has been an incredible learning experience and [...]
This summer, we have been fortunate to have four wonderful interns join us to support our work. In this post, two of our interns Molly Hawkins and Ari Kim from Haverford College reflect on their summer at VOW. Molly Hawkins In mid-July, Ari, Margaret, and I were able to attend an oral history workshop [...]
Since 2015, the VOW Education Program's Sharing History Initiative has supported passionate and underfunded teachers, storytellers, and community leaders in bringing social justice-based storytelling into their communities. In summer of 2016, the VOW Education Program launched the Germanacos Fellowship for Sharing History, which provides support for outstanding Sharing History Initiative participants to explore groundbreaking new [...]
A Q&A with our Education Associate Erin Vong & Teacher Sam Aguirre from O'Connell High School This past year, we’ve been working on a consultancy project with San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) to introduce our justice-driven oral history process to their teachers and students, and support them in creating storytelling projects in [...]
