In accordance with Genocide Awareness Month, Facing History offers nine classroom resources educators can utilize to help their students think critically about the specific historical and contemporary conditions under which genocides occurred to effectively unite head, heart, and conscience.

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Genocide is one of the tragic repeating features of history. It elicits feelings of horror and revulsion throughout the world. Yet both the international community and the United States have struggled to respond to this recurring problem. Confronting Genocide: Never Again? allows students to wrestle with the reasons why local actors, the international community, and the United States responded as they have to various cases of genocide over the past century. The unit is divided into two parts. Each part includes:

Student readings
Accompanying study guides, graphic organizers, and key terms
Lessons aligned with the readings that develop analytical skills and can be completed in one or more periods
Videos that feature leading experts

This unit also includes an Options Role Play as the key lesson and additional synthesis lessons that allow students to synthesize new knowledge for assessment. You do not need to use the entire unit; feel free to select what suits your classroom needs.

The goal of this seminar is to have open discussions of controversial political and social issues and raise awareness of current world events in an informal setting. Discussions for the first part of each class will focus on current events from that week, while in the second part of class students will discuss a scheduled issue in greater detail. Scheduled issues include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the regulation of marijuana, how our society should punish criminals, genocide in Rwanda and Sudan, discrimination in our society today, the future of social security, whether pornography is sexist, and where we can go from here in the Arab/Israeli Conflict. Discussions will be supplemented by readings, films, and public speakers. Students will also be encouraged to read news media from around the world.

Following World War II, the international community declared ‘never again’ would we allow atrocities targeted against a group of people. They worked together to define genocide and agreed to intervene and stop any future such atrocities. In this lesson students research a case study and discuss with other groups which events qualify as genocide and decide what the appropriate international response should be.

Genocide is a process that develops in ten stages that are predictable but not inexorable. At each stage, preventive measures can stop it. The process is not linear. Stages occur simultaneously. Each stage is itself a process. Their logic is similar to a nested Russian matryoshka doll. Classification is at the center. Without it the processes around it could not occur. As societies develop more and more genocidal processes, they get nearer to genocide. But all stages continue to operate throughout the process.

This course examines systematically, and comparatively, great and middle power military interventions, and candidate military interventions, into civil wars from the 1990s to the present. These civil wars did not easily fit into the traditional category of vital interest. These interventions may therefore tell us something about broad trends in international politics including the nature of unipolarity, the erosion of sovereignty, the security implications of globalization, and the nature of modern western military power.

Best practices and guidelines for teaching about genocide from the Holocaust Center for Humanity. These are guidelines for educators, not lesson plans.

In this project-based learning lesson plan, students will explore the historical narratives surrounding the Holocaust and the significance of its impact on the world. Through a variety of activities and assessments, students will develop their critical thinking and analytical skills, as well as their knowledge of the Holocaust and its implications. In this lesson, they will be exploring Heroes of the Holocaust.

This comprehensive teacher’s manual focuses on the Armenian Genocide of 1915 during which 1.5 million Armenians, half of the Armenian population, were systematically annihilated. It includes a 1-day, 2-day, and 10-day unit with all the materials teachers will need, including more than two dozen overheads, interactive classroom exercises and more.
Discussions include a wide range of topics related to the Armenian Genocide: the history of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, primary source documents, witness and survivor memoirs, maps and political-economic timelines, and the problem of denial.

The lessons also consider the links between the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, and capture other major human rights violations such as the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the Rape of Nanking, and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides.

Comprehensive 1-Day, 2-Day, and 10-Day Lesson Plans for 10th Grade Public School Teachers.
Includes all supporting material – 209 pages
Fulfills mandated requirements in the History-Social Science Framework for California Public Schools.
Sponsored by the San Francisco Unified School District Office of Curriculum Improvement and Professional Development.

Field trips offer opportunities to explore our exhibitions that address the history of the Holocaust, genocide, human and civil rights, as well as local and global social justice issues.

Student Leadership Days (SLD) offer opportunities to share the universal lessons of the Holocaust and are integral to the Museum’s ability to connect directly with students who are ready to take on a positive leadership role in their communities. The SLD program engages students in a variety of age-appropriate activities that inspire them to build leadership skills, explore their roles as citizens, and develop a deeper awareness and understanding of the Holocaust, genocide, and other human rights issues.

In a full-day session that includes guest speakers, group activities, presentations and discussions about perspectives other than their own, SLD offers participants an opportunity to engage with diverse peers, increasing their self-efficacy, and potential for learning. Participants return to their communities equipped to promote greater acceptance and understanding. Students leave with increased knowledge and tools and resources to stand up against injustice and bigotry.

Illinois Holocaust Museum’s literature-based teaching trunk program provides K–12 educators with a wide array of resources for classrooms with units on character education, human rights, the Holocaust, and/or genocide. Each trunk allows educators to create meaningful age/grade-appropriate lessons employing award–winning fiction and nonfiction, historical references, and other educational materials. Each trunk has been carefully developed to address State and National Learning Standards, including Common Core State Standards. Teaching Trunks are provided free of charge.

VIRTUAL TEACHING TRUNKS

Virtual trunks offer Holocaust and genocide curricula in a 100% digital format, providing flexibility for those who are teaching remotely, in person, or in a hybrid model. Virtual teaching trunks include:

E-books and digital texts
Illinois Holocaust Museum developed films
Online lessons and activities
Digital “artefacts” to help students explore the stories of local Holocaust Survivors

"The Rohingya, a religious and ethnic minority in Burma, went from being citizens to outsiders and became the targets of a sustained campaign of genocide. By exploring the online exhibition Burma’s Path to Genocide, students learn how government policies and the proliferation of hate speech led to genocide of the Rohingya. Rohingya are still at risk of genocide today."

"This lesson plan will be submitted for inclusion into an on-line database of curricular projects for the NEH program 'Teaching Native American Histories'." The essential questions explored include the following:

- What were the goals of Native American boarding schools?
- How were students at boarding schools separated from their culture?
- What are the most effective means of cultural reclamation?

"Students will examine primary source photos before and after learning about Native American boarding schools in the U.S. and the long-term effects of such policies. Students will then examine the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the “Definition of Genocide” and “Elements of the Crime” from The United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. Students will use these resources to determine if the ways in which the United States government treated Indigenous peoples in the creation and implementation of Native American boarding schools upheld or violated children’s rights and if this treatment fits the definition of genocide."

This video from Wide Angle profiles Rwanda's new economy through the small business of Epiphanie Mukashyaka, a woman widowed by recent genocide.

Learn about the role local churches played in bringing Hutus and Tutsis together in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide in this Wide Angle video segment.

"This document is a one-week lesson plan consisting of five one-hour lessons on the
history of Uyghurs and East Turkistan, and on the modern-day repression campaign being
perpetrated against Uyghurs in China by the government of China and the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP). Through teaching about Uyghurs, these lessons teach skills such as reading
comprehension, source analysis, argument analysis and synthesis, research, summary and
verbal presentation, and argumentative writing. These lessons are designed for 11th and 12th
grade social science and history students but could be taught in other grade levels. The
activities in the lessons are ideally suited to classroom learning. However, acknowledging that
many schools have transitioned to distance learning due to the Covid-19 pandemic, each lesson
contains a note on how to adapt the lesson for distance learning. "

This is a lesson/unit plan on Holodomor, including historical background information, maps, and primary source documents.