State mandates requiring genocide education lack standards to guide teachers, study finds

“Hotel Rwanda” was a critically acclaimed and commercially successful film, but not necessarily the best way to teach high school students about a topic as fraught as genocide. Yet, without guidance on how to approach genocide throughout history, showing the movie in class may be what teachers default to in covering difficult and uncomfortable subjects.

An increasing number of states have passed legislative mandates requiring schools to teach about the history of genocide. However, new research from the University of Kansas has found that states requiring genocide education rarely offer guidance on the standards for how to teach it, often focus solely on the Holocaust, and may leave it up to social studies teachers what other historical genocides they teach about and how. That lack of guidance differs very little from states without such mandates, researchers argue, and fails to give students an understanding of the causes of genocide and how to prevent them in the future.

Anna Yonas, assistant professor of curriculum & teaching in KU’s School of Education & Human Sciences, is co-author on a study analyzing the mandates of 11 U.S. states to include genocide education. The standards on what and how to teach genocide were compared to those of states without mandates.

The study, co-written with Stephanie van Hover of the University of Virginia, was published in the Journal of Social Studies Research.

“We found that across the board, states are not guiding teachers on what acts of genocide they must teach. So, there may be a feeling that an improvement to education has been made, but in effect, no real change has been made,” Yonas said. “There’s not really a difference between them, and it suggests such mandates are not achieving their intended aim.”

Yonas and van Hover explore the mandates and standards through the theory of null curriculum, which holds that material not taught can be as important as what is taught. By telling schools and teachers that genocide must be taught, but not which acts of genocide or how it should be taught, the result is that teachers do not have guidance on what genocide is, how genocides start, where they happened, who were the victims, and how society can prevent or confront ongoing genocides. That all misses stated claims of helping prevent such atrocities by educating young people about the topic, the researchers write.

In their analysis, Yonas and van Hover found that states with mandates often have a narrow focus:

• Three of the 11 states include one or fewer genocides in curriculum standards of what must be taught.
• Similarly, only three states with mandates include more genocides than they exclude, while only two of 11 states without mandates analyzed included more than they excluded in their standards.
• Standards across the board also frequently use terms such as “conflict” or “atrocity” instead of genocide.
• Four states with mandates do not use the term genocide once.
• The Holocaust is the most frequently included event in standards and is the most frequently referred to as genocide. However, it is explicitly referred to as such in less than half of the instances in which it is included.
• Four of the 11 states with mandates use “Holocaust” as a standalone term and do not use the term “genocide.”
• Other historical genocides such as the Armenian, Rwandan, Darfur and Cambodian genocides are rarely referred to as such.
• Victims are also mentioned less frequently than perpetrators.

“In this study, I found the only victims who are explicitly named are Jewish victims of the Holocaust,” Yonas said, “even though the perpetrators are regularly named. If we’re learning about genocide as one particular event and in one frame, we’re missing the bigger picture.”

In some cases, states with and without mandates provide a list of possible genocides teachers can address, but leave it to each teacher’s choice. Previous research has shown that teachers tend to avoid topics that are personally difficult to discuss due to their own discomfort or for fear of upsetting students.

States are increasingly adopting legislative mandates that require genocide education in social studies and history classes; however, Yonas and van Hover cite previous research that shows students in states with mandates are not necessarily learning about the topic or demonstrating a deeper understanding of it than peers in states without. They argue that is because standards across the board guide teachers’ decision making and rarely provide guidance on what genocides to address and how. That is resulting in a null curriculum in which what is not taught is often more influential than what is.

Yonas’s larger body of research focuses on how to help secondary teachers effectively address difficult topics. She also recently published a personal study on place-based education in which she traveled to Poland to examine the legacy of the Holocaust and how it is remembered, as well as her own experiences as someone whose great-grandparents were victims of the genocide. The work aims to provide guidance to policymakers and teacher preparation programs to support educators, especially novice teachers, in how to effectively cover fraught yet important topics, such as genocide.

Standards, robust teacher preparation and continuing professional development can help ensure teachers confidently address the topic and provide students with a better understanding of the events and their place in world history.

“I argue in this piece that standards are not the only component. States should also invest in teacher training and other ways to help them engage with these topics,” Yonas said. “I want to call attention to what we can do to both improve standards and find ways to help ensure teachers are able and willing to teach these difficult topics.”