Genocide Claiming a Larger Place in Middle and High School Lessons

By Bess Keller and Kathleen Kennedy Manzo

The debate in the U.S. House of Representatives over whether the mass killings of Armenians that began in 1915 should be declared “genocide” has been resolved in practice in many American classrooms. That era has become intertwined with lessons on the Holocaust in the history curriculum.

With an array of new curriculum resources, and spurred in some cases by advocates’ public-awareness campaigns, teachers are finding ways to give their students a more comprehensive look at genocide historically and in current events.

Human rights is one of the themes being highlighted in the annual conference of the National Council for the Social Studies next month, and more than a dozen sessions—the most in recent years—will take up teaching about genocide, according to the council’s president, Gayle Y. Thieman, a professor of history education at Portland State University in Oregon. The council has also crafted sample lessons for teachers on a variety of...