Digital Humanities at the Service of Remembrance: The Creation of Digital Archive-based Activities within the Project ‘Remembering the Past, Learning for the Future’

Abstract

This article explores the usage of testimonies in the Visual History Archive of the University of Southern California's Shoah Foundation to create learner-centred activities on the history of the Holocaust targeted at Portuguese students. We describe the project ‘Remembering the Past, Learning for the Future: Research-Based Digital Learning from Testimonies of Survivors and Rescuers of the Holocaust’, housed at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES). Via the international partnership (USC Shoah Foundation, Zachor Foundation, and the University of Eötvös Loránd), the ULICES team developed materials using testimony from witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust through digital tools with an innovative pedagogical methodology. We introduce the constructivist theory of learning, stressing the powerful impact of survival testimonies on raising student awareness and developing a wide range of skills. We also describe the methodological process that underlay this project, namely the creation of the six learning activities for the IWitness educational platform and the IWalk visits, focusing on the translation tasks of the written materials and the audiovisual translation of the videos. We also report on how students received the activities by retrieving information from teachers’ and students’ reports, and an onsite experience with two groups of students.