Robert Trivellini and Lisa Jester, Executive Director of the Millville Army Air Field Museum, a local World War II Museum

Trivellini’s and Jester’s innovative teaching idea, “WWII Veteran Interview Project,” will focus on developing and encouraging higher-order thinking among high school students while preserving important history. As part of the school’s partnership with the Millville Army Air Field Museum, a World War II museum, students will interview veterans and send the recordings to the Library of Congress for its Veterans History Project. Copies of the interviews will be used in history classes, given to the veteran, and kept at the Museum for research. The World War II veterans will act as teachers to the students, but not just about details of their wartime service. Students will learn about the character of the veterans, now all in their 90s, as they talk about difficult choices they had to make while in the service, often when they were still teenagers like the students. With the COVID-19 pandemic as a backdrop, students and veterans will discuss and compare overcoming severe adversity during World War II and the Great Depression.