This text is adapted from the teaching guide titled Enseigner l’Holocauste, Guide de soutien aux enseignants, designed and developed by Sabrina Moisan and Sivane Hirsch, with the collaboration of Cornélia Strickler, Education Coordinator at the Montreal Holocaust Museum.
1 - Engage students emotionally
Although emotional engagement is key in sparking students’ interest, it is important to do so by personalizing the event through the use of
written or verbal testimonies of those who witnessed the events.
Pitfall:
Using shock pedagogy. Photographs of piles of bodies or brutality can trouble students. Heightened emotions prevent students from thinking and learning.
2 - Encourage students to draw their own lessons
Learning about genocide allows students to draw various lessons about the human condition, life in a pluralistic society and justice systems. Studying these mechanisms and ethical issues will help students
understand how and why the event took place. They will draw their own lessons.
Pitfall:
Taking a moralistic approach or repeating slogans (Never again!).
Ready-made morality lessons should be avoided.
3 - Democracy does not protect people from everything
While some genocides took place under nondemocratic regimes (e.g. the Ottoman Empire, the Soviet regime, Germany before World War I), others, such as the Holocaust or the genocide in Bosnia, took place in democratic (albeit fragile) societies.
Pitfall:
Presenting genocide as the antithesis of our current moral and political reality. The possibility of genocide in contemporary democracies is still present.
4 - Think about the scope of the event today
Focusing on remembrance allows students to develop a critical view of the memories people have of the events and to answer the following questions: Why are people still talking about this event today? Who is talking about it and why? There are many possible answers to these questions depending on the context and the case.
Pitfall:
Focusing on the duty to remember rather than remembrance. Slogans such as “Never again!”, although laudable, are insufficient in education. Students must understand the historical event, as well as its meaning and complexity.
5 - Present the system underlying the genocide
An entire system and thousands of people helped organize and perpetrate the genocide, not just the political or military authorities.
Pitfall:
Focusing solely on the role of a political leader to explain the genocide. Although these leaders always play a key role in hate mongering, it is not true that the genocide lies solely on their shoulders.
6 - Explain the genocidal ideology
It is important to focus on an explanation of the racist ideology, the ways in which it was applied and the impact it had on victims and witnesses in terms of life in society.
Pitfall:
Focusing on statistics and the technical means of the genocide. Giving the number of victims or the percentage of deaths by country and presenting the “practical” aspects of the genocide are ineffective in helping students understand the event. These figures on their own explain nothing and can even generate indifference in the students, who may have difficulty imagining what these large numbers of deaths mean. This approach can also result in a dubious comparison between genocides based on the number of deaths or the cruelty of the perpetrators.
7 - Give voices to the various actors
There are thousands of written and oral accounts by perpetrators, victims and witnesses. Survivors of more recent genocides sometimes visit schools to tell their story. These accounts can also be recreated by analyzing iconographic and written documents. If students are engaged in a story about the effects of the genocide on the lives of ordinary people, they are
more likely to understand the upheaval caused by the loss of civic rights and what it must have been like for victims trying to survive and before they were killed.
Pitfall:
Presenting “both sides of the story.” Although there are several actors involved, teaching about genocide cannot legitimize every side of the story. It is important to avoid presenting the “benefits” or positive aspects of a genocide for some of the groups involved.
8 - Genocide can be explained, just like its various manifestations
The various genocides, despite their specificities, can be explained as a more general phenomenon. Comparison can be made, but it is important to take into account the characteristics and context of each of the events. There is nothing to be gained, for example, by comparing levels of suffering. Every lost human life is a tragedy.
Pitfall:
Making the genocide sacred. Refusing to compare a genocide with other, similar events under the pretext that it is unique does not help students understand the phenomenon, which, unfortunately, is not unique in history.
9 - Compare different genocides
Comparing genocides must help students understand the process, as well as the similarities and differences between the events compared.
Pitfall:
Trivializing the event. Not all violations of human rights constitute genocide, and the use of the word to describe any tragic event is inappropriate. Bullying in school has very little to do with genocide. Similarly, comparing genocides, which could be a particularly useful pedagogical tool, is ineffective if the aim is merely to compare the genocidal measures taken and the number of victims.
10 - Simplify while retaining the essential
Historical events must be simplified before they are taught. The teaching guide illustrates a key process:
- defining the genocide
- describing the context at the time and the ideology that made the genocide possible
- studying the six stages of the genocidal process and equipping students with a chart they can use on a daily basis
- focusing on the issues of racism, prevention and justice to enhance students’ knowledge and allow them to take part in social deliberation in an informed and critical manner
Pitfall:
Oversimplifying.