Today’s educators face numerous challenges, including how to teach and discuss difficult topics and events—particularly those that may be triggering for students. Supported by a grant from the Vogt Family Foundation at the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo, Sophia’s Legacy is a new training component of Buffalo State University’s Anne Frank Project (AFP) that provides Western New York educators with tools to bring lessons about genocide and conflict education into their classrooms.
The professional development program, named for Holocaust survivor Sophia Veffer, trained its first pilot cohort of six Buffalo Public School teachers at no cost to the district. The Vogt Family Foundation recently granted Sophia’s Legacy an additional two-year grant, which will allow AFP to continue and build upon its initial success with the pilot cohort of teachers and school social workers. The pilot teachers will now train other teachers.
Sophia’s Legacy was developed over a year’s time with the Anne Frank Project in partnership with Buffalo State’s School of Education, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda, a longtime partner of the Anne Frank Project.
The program includes three major components: content, centered on twentieth- and twenty-first-century genocides and including Veffer’s personal experiences during the Holocaust; trauma-informed work, including how teachers can handle a situation when students deal with emotional triggers, and social media literacy; and story-based learning, an innovative kinesthetic curricular platform that places the student at the center of the experience by taking an approach of simultaneously teaching an academic lesson while also addressing students’ multiple socioemotional needs.