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The debate in the U.S. House of Representatives
over whether the mass killings of Armenians that
began in 1915 should be declared "genocide" has
been resolved in practice in many American
classrooms. That era has become intertwined with
lessons on the Holocaust in the history
curriculum.
With an array of new curriculum resources, and
spurred in some cases by advocates'
public-awareness campaigns, teachers are finding
ways to give their students a more comprehensive
look at genocide historically and in current
events.
Human rights is one of the themes being
highlighted in the annual conference of the
National Council for the Social Studies next
month, and more than a dozen sessions—the most
in recent years—will take up teaching about
genocide, according to the council's president,
Gayle Y. Thieman, a professor of history
education at Portland State University in
Oregon. The council has also crafted sample
lessons for teachers on a variety of
human-rights issues, she added.
"When we're teaching about the Holocaust, I
think it's important for students to realize
it's not something that happened once in our
history, but that genocide is an issue that
erupts around the world in situations of intense
racial or ethnic conflict," Ms. Thieman said.
The United Nations Convention for the Prevention
and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines
genocide as any act committed with the idea of
destroying in whole or in part a national,
ethnic, racial, or religious group. Though
killing is the ultimate destructive act, it
isn't the only one, according to the convention.
Forcefully transferring children from one group
to another represents one element of genocide.
The New York City-based International
Association of Genocide Scholars, a global,
nonpartisan body that studies the causes and
consequences of genocide, formally recognizes
the Armenian genocide at the hands of the
Ottoman Empire and considers it undeniable.
State Directives
The attention to
genocide in part is the result of state policy.
Eleven states direct schools to include
materials about the Armenian genocide in history
courses. More than 30 recommend or require
teaching about the World War II-era destruction
of European Jews by the Nazis, or genocide
generally.
But teachers are also responding to the almost
instantaneous knowledge of extreme human-rights
violations around the world. Advocacy groups
help keep alive the concern even when interest
of the news media has waned.
Explicit attention to the Holocaust has been a
staple of secondary school history and
literature classes—think Anne Frank's
The Diary of a
Young Girl or Elie Weisel's
Night—for two decades or more. Courses or units within
courses focused explicitly on mass atrocities
linked to racial or ethnic identity, however,
are mostly a more recent phenomenon.
In her now nine-plus years of teaching at
Mountain View High School in suburbanizing
Stafford County, Va., Susan Roeske has always
included discussion of genocide, even the one
year she taught American history. In the past
few years, she has devoted a unit to genocide in
her global-issues classes, using materials from
the Choices for the 21st Century program at
Brown University's Watson Center for
International Studies. That curriculum now
encompasses even the crisis in the Darfur region
of Sudan.
"I snagged it immediately," she said of the
Choices program's 3-year-old genocide
curriculum. "I often show [the students] the
units I have prepared, and it's always one they
say they would like."
Middle School Topic
Ronald Levitsky,
who teaches 8th grade U.S. history at Sunset
Ridge School in Northfield, Ill., spends about a
week on the Holocaust and also takes time to
explore the Armenian genocide and that of the
Pontian Greeks, also committed by the Ottoman
Turks, when his class studies World War I.
If handled right, he said, the subject is
perfect for 8th graders. "You don't want to
horrify them, but you do want to reach their
maturity level, and they can handle the concepts
and the affect," he said, referring to the
emotions stirred up. "That's how you reach
them—the affect."
Sara Cohan, who heads teacher professional
development for the San Francisco-based Genocide
Education Project, said the ongoing situation in
Darfur—in which an estimated 200,000 to 450,000
people have perished as a result of tribal
warfare fueled by the Sudanese government—has
generated demand for genocide studies among
students and teachers. Ms. Cohan's group was
founded to help educators understand the
Armenian genocide after California, which has a
large Armenian-American population, mandated its
teaching in 1987.
"Any workshop I do, I mention about Darfur," she
said.
Ms. Cohan, whose family includes survivors of
both the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide,
said she personally supports the
nonbinding resolution on the Armenian genocide.
It calls on the president to "accurately
characterize the systematic and deliberate
annihilation of 1.5 million Armenians as
genocide," and has been vehemently protested by
the Turkish government. She also approves the
step the California legislature took two decades
ago in directing the state school board to
include the Armenian genocide in its curriculum
framework.
The Genocide Education Project, however, is
careful to steer clear of political positions in
its work, she stressed.
Some education experts, nonetheless, are
concerned about the role of advocacy groups and
lawmakers in shaping curricula.
"I don't think legislators should mandate what
to teach," said Diane Ravitch, an education
historian at New York University and the author
of The
Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict
What Students Learn. Expert opinion
in a discipline should determine what is
embodied in academic standards and taught in the
classroom rather than legislative mandate or
interest-group power, she argued.
At the same time, Ms. Ravitch said, she was not
questioning the historical accuracy of an
Armenian genocide. When she sat on the federal
board that governs the National Assessment of
Educational Progress—a series of tests to
measure student achievement nationally—a Turkish
parent objected, in the end fruitlessly, to a
question about that genocide, according to Ms.
Ravitch.
"The staff did considerable research and
concluded the question [as it stood] was
historically accurate," she said.
'Transformative' Effect
Other experts raise a possible red flag about
history courses that rely heavily on thematic
approaches—employed, for instance, in the
curriculum materials produced by Facing History
and Ourselves. The group, which is based in
Brookline, Mass., but has several regional
offices, was founded 30 years ago to help
precollegiate teachers address the Holocaust in
their classrooms. It is now widely influential
in teaching about genocide around questions of
the role of identity in social life and the need
for moral responsibility and civic engagement.
"It's a question of how it's handled and how
much students bring to the table," said Martin
A. Davis, a senior writer and editor for the
Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Foundation,
which undertakes reviews of state standards and
generally endorses a traditional approach to
teaching history. A chronological framework
should be in place before students launch into
questions that skip through different eras, Mr.
Davis contended.
But the former high school history teacher said
he'd have no particular problem with an elective
for students well along in their study of
history that focused on questions surrounding
genocide.
Adrianne Billingham Bock taught such a course
for five years at Lexington High School in
Lexington, Mass. She used the framework designed
by Facing History and Ourselves.
"I'd begin by talking about identity, asking
students questions about themselves—who was in
their 'universe of obligation,' who they'd stick
their neck out for," she said. "When you talk
about the history in the context of human
behavior, it hits them in a different place, and
they really begin to think about the choices
they make in their everyday life."
Ms. Bock said the course "totally transformed"
some students and brought back to life a student
chapter of Amnesty International, the
human-rights watchdog group. Students raised
money for a "healing center" in Rwanda, the site
in 1994 of the slaughter of perhaps 800,000
Tutsis and moderate Hutus sympathizers, and for
the Save Darfur Coalition, said the educator,
who now works as a teacher-coach for the Facing
History program.
Teachers stress that the availability of
accurate and thoughtful curriculum materials has
helped them strike the right balance between
sophisticated understanding and moral
engagement. "Many students like to think if we
[the United States] could just invade,
everything would be fine," said Sarah C. Kreckel,
who helped write the
Choices for the 21st Century curriculum on
genocide and has taught middle school
history. "One of the things we do successfully
is help the students understand the complexity
of the issues, and in the end, that makes them
better advocates of their position."
The Choices curriculum gives teachers the
equivalent of oven mitts to handle very hot
topics, added Andy Blackadar, the chief author
of the curriculum. "We're not trying to be
overly dramatic. … We're always going to talk
about the other sides of the story."
The Facing History approach in particular gets
high marks from teachers anxious to hold their
student back from a cliff of fatalism and
helplessness as they contemplate mass
atrocities.
"There are tremendous resources to support the
teaching of these really difficult histories,
much more today than when I first started
teaching [about genocide]" seven years ago, said
Wendy Garner, an English teacher at Amador
Valley High School in Pleasanton, Calif., east
of San Francisco Bay. The teacher offers an
elective in social justice that includes a unit
on genocide.
"You can approach it in terms both of deep roots
and small steps that make a difference."
Staff Writer Vaishali Honawar contributed to
this story. |
