GENOCIDE CLAIMING A LARGER PLACE IN MIDDLE AND HIGH SCHOOL LESSONS
By Bess Keller and Kathleen Kennedy Manzo

Education Week News, MD
armenian.h27.html
Oct 23 2007

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

Photo: Survivors of the 1915-1923 mass murders of Armenians listen
to speeches from members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on
a measure that would characterize the killings as a genocide. U.S.

lessons on the atrocity are often intertwined with teaching about
the Holocaust.