Teaching about Genocide

Secondary level teachers and professors from various disciplines present their best advice and insights into teaching about various facets of genocide and/or delineate actual lessons they have taught that have been particularly successful with their students.  

A much-needed and extraordinarily useful resource, Teaching about Genocide: Insights and Advice from Secondary Teachers and Professors, Volume 1, will provide educators with well-reasoned and experienced based information on teaching about genocide. Drawing upon the expertise of both secondary and college and university professors, this impressive work examines rationales for teaching about genocide and offers practical pedagogical strategies from a variety of academic disciplines and geographical locations. The importance of this issue demands a timely and powerful resource such as this book.  , As public awareness of and interest in genocide and its disastrous effects continues to grow, the need for fresh, up-to-date approaches to its teaching is greater than ever. Totten is an experienced, professional educator, as well as a distinguished genocide scholar, who has assembled here a collection of original, insightful, theoretical, and practical studies on a wide variety of case studies and themes, useful for both secondary and post-secondary educators on genocide. Highly recommended., Teaching about genocide is vital but challenging. By compiling the insights and advice of leading educators in the field, this book serves as an invaluable guide for those who would teach future generations to understand and combat this scourge of humanity., Thirty-plus years ago, educator Ted Sizer noted that students learn best when “less is more.” While Sam Totten’s latest edited book on Teaching About Genocide… seemingly offers a voluminous opposite, educators, at varying levels, will find extensive, rich, and varied resources from which to choose, to meet Sizer’s “in-depth” standards. Volume One of Two Volumes provides insights and advice from secondary teachers (9) and professors (13), many with decades of teaching experience, not to mention writings (including 46 annotated works) touching on every major identified genocide. Key is the volume’s interdisciplinary, as well as multinational approach. The time-deprived educator (Is there any other kind?) will find abundant strategies, caveats, and electronic resource possibilities. Significantly, “political will” is contrasted with “political won’t,” as students are encouraged to become “constructive activists” in an age of genocides.

Samuel Totten a longtime scholar of genocide studies and retired professor (University of Arkansas, Fayetteville), is the author of Teaching About Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide: Fundamental Issues and Approaches (Information Age Publishing, 2018). Over the past fourteen years he has conducted field work into crimes against humanity and genocide in the refugee camps along the Chad/Darfur, Sudan border, and in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan.