LA high school teachers attend Genocide teaching workshop

Published: Tuesday February 14, 2012

Suzanne Douzmanian, GenEd's Southern California Regional Coordinator.

Los Angeles - Teachers at Grant High School in Los Angeles learned how to teach about the Armenian Genocide at a workshop provided by The Genocide Education Project on their campus on January, 17.

Suzanne Douzmanian, GenEd's Southern California Regional Coordinator led the workshop for Grant's social studies teachers, which is part of a series of teacher-training events provided in coordination with the Los Angeles Unified School District, which has purchased GenEd's lesson plans and teaching materials for all its high school history teachers.

"Suzanne gave an enthralling and thought provoking workshop," said Kevin Kruska, Grant's social studies department chair. "I felt like everybody came away from the workshop with a greater understanding of genocide and specifically, the Armenian Genocide."

Grant High School has a substantial Armenian student population that has experienced tensions with the school's Latino students. In the weeks leading up to the workshop, Kruska and GenEd's education director, Sara Cohan, discussed ways of integrating the study of Armenian issues into the curriculum, as a means of building understanding and mutual respect within the diverse student body, as well as between the teachers and students.

The workshop theme was "The Eight Stages of Genocide," a valuable teaching tool developed by Dr. Gregory Stanton, a past president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. "By using Stanton's work, teachers and students can better comprehend the intentional and methodical nature of the Armenian Genocide, as well as all genocides, and can analyze ways of preventing genocide in the future," said Raffi Momjian, GenEd's Executive Director.

Teachers received a full set of resources on the Armenian Genocide produced by GenEd and provided by the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The LAUSD is the second largest school district in the country and has been collaborating with GenEd over the past eight years to help fulfill the California state mandate to teach about the Armenian Genocide.

The Genocide Education Project is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) educational organization that assists educators in teaching about human rights and genocide, particularly the Armenian Genocide, by developing and distributing instructional materials, providing access to teaching resources and organizing educational workshops. For more information about The Genocide Education Project, go to  www.GenocideEducation.org.