Stages of Genocide: A Toolkit for Educators

April is Genocide Awareness Month
Join us as we explore this new instructional unit: Stages of Genocide: A Toolkit for Educators with the The Genocide Education Project and Woven Teaching.

The Genocide Education Project, in partnership with Woven Teaching, offers a new resource for high school social studies educators: Stages of Genocide: A Toolkit for Educators – an instructional guide and lesson plans for teaching about genocide and its common stages, using the histories of six case studies:

• Armenian
• Cambodian
• Guatemalan
• Holocaust
• Native American
• Rwandan

Studying genocide is a critical part of a student’s understanding of both history and of current events. Based on the “Ten Stages of Genocide” framework describing how societies engage in genocide, this interactive lesson plan provides an opportunity to explore multiple instances of mass atrocity, while recognizing their commonalities and differences, and encouraging reflection and discussion of personal and institutional responsibility, connecting these historical events to current events and to students’ lives.

Stages of Genocide: A Toolkit for Educators guides educators in setting up student groups to carry out team projects related to comparative evaluations of the six genocide case studies. The toolkit includes the readings on genocide and the historical summaries as well as student handouts, project instructions, group norms, roles, evaluations, key terms and graphic organizer.

Sara Cohan, The Genocide Education Project’s Education Director, will facilitate the workshop. Cohan’s background combines research, study, curriculum development and teaching. She has a Master’s degree in Social Science Education and was a high school social studies teacher in Florida. She was a teacher fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and has received multiple other fellowships and awards, including those from Fulbright-Hays and the National Endowment of the Humanities. She received the George Washington Medal of Honor from the Freedoms Foundation and served as a research fellow for Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. She has written articles and educational materials for scholarly journals, magazines and multiple nonprofits.

Nina Simone Grotch, Executive Director of Woven Teaching is a longtime educator and advocate for social justice, a public speaker with over 20 years of experience teaching children, youth, adults, law enforcement officers, and government officials. Her experience includes working with diverse audiences locally, nationally, and internationally on examining and interrupting prejudice and discrimination. Ms. Grotch served as the Education Director for the Anti-Defamation League in Northern California where she directed the Holocaust education and anti-bias programs for students, educators and community members. Ms. Grotch has a bachelor’s degree in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz and master’s degree in English Literature from San Francisco State University.

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