San Diego Union Tribune, CA
Dec 1 2007
Educators across the country are increasingly addressing genocide
By Chris Moran
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
December 1, 2007
Freshmen at Rancho Buena Vista High School have four days dedicated
to Rwanda in world history class; some of the students even belong to
an Invisible Children Club, which raises awareness about child
victims of war in Africa.
Last June, the end-of-the-year humanities project for High Tech
High’s 10th-graders involved spending the night on the lawn of the
Point Loma campus in a tent village called Camp Darfur.
Genocide is a hot topic in local classrooms. Educators nationwide are
giving it more attention, as evidenced by the schedule for this
weekend’s annual conference of the National Council for the Social
Studies in downtown San Diego.
The 4,000 teachers expected to attend can choose from workshops such
as `Teaching Genocide and Human Rights for the 21st Century’ and
`Despair, Death, and Denial: The Armenian and Pontian Greek
Genocides.’
The prevalence of teaching about ghastly episodes in Germany, Bosnia,
Sudan and other places reflects an increasingly global outlook in the
teaching of social studies, educators say.
Growing awareness about the conflict in Darfur and the recent
congressional debate about an Armenian genocide resolution bring
relevancy to the topic in the classroom.
`How to teach about genocide is still a very new concept,’ said Sara
Cohan, education director for the San Francisco-based Genocide
Education Project. The organization specializes in the Armenian
genocide, which the state Board of Education has said all
10th-graders should learn about in social studies.
The development of training seminars and instructional materials by
human rights groups has given teachers guidance on how to talk with
teenagers about mass killings.
`It’s sometimes hard to come out of class smiling when I’m teaching
because it seems like we’ve had evil empire after evil empire,’ said
Ellen Bergan, a history teacher at Morse High School in San Diego’s
Bay Terraces neighborhood.
Bergan and other educators say they work through it by taking a
solution-oriented approach to teaching genocide.
`I see it as kind of the whole purpose of education,’ Bergan said.
`This is your world. These people are living in your world, and what
are you going to do about it?’
San Diego Jewish Academy students Jennifer Popp and Michael Shoemaker
formed a Darfur Action Committee on their La Jolla campus after
learning about that conflict in their Judaic studies class. Morse
student Jon Yturralde visited Uganda last summer and organized a
schoolwide `Week of Consciousness’ last month to raise awareness of
international crises.
AdvertisementStudents in the extended program at the Centers of
Learning by the Sea in Otay Mesa will present a Holocaust play for
hundreds of South County students next week.
Jazmine Damian, 15, a sophomore performing in the play, said it’s
important to learn about the Holocaust because genocide can occur
again.
`I feel like in certain places it could because people aren’t
informed,’ Jazmine said.
A visit to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., in the
late 1990s inspired drama teacher Sam Teres to have his
seventh-through 12th-grade students tackle the difficult material. He
said part of the lesson for his students is that in contrast to the
comedies and fantasies they have performed, they have the
responsibility of portraying real people.
Last spring at Southwest High School in Nestor, history teacher Joel
Rodriguez assigned his students to research and give a presentation
on a genocidal event.
Rodriguez decided on the lesson after attending a seminar by Facing
History and Ourselves, a Boston-based teacher-training group.
Marty Sleeper, Facing History’s associate director, said genocide
resonates with teenagers because collective violence has to do with
identity, stereotyping and group membership – issues that teens are
grappling with.
Sleeper hopes to teach students that they don’t have to be a
president or a hero to prevent violence.
`We give kids a sense of what it means to make a difference,’ Sleeper
said.
Photo: EARNIE GRAFTON / Union-Tribune
Jazmine Damian (left) and Stephanie Smith rehearsed for the play "And
Then They Came For Me" at the Centers of Learning by the Sea. The
play, which is about the Holocaust, will run next week.
An after-school theater program brings the Holocaust to the stage in
Otay Mesa next week after years of performing lighter fare.
Photo: EARNIE GRAFTON / Union-Tribune
Christine Nathanson portrays Anne Frank in the play "And Then They
Came For Me." The drama teacher behind the performance was inspired
to take on the material after visiting a Holocaust museum in
Washington, D.C.
71201-9999-1m1genocide.html
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress