Curriculum Meeting Updates 2/20 & 2/22

Cait, Sondi, Alex, and I met on Wednesday and created a basic outline for our next classroom visit on Friday, Feb. 29. It shall unfold as follows:

• Screen Refugees International's On Our Watch: A Documentary about Genocide in Darfur (11 minutes) or Save Darfur's Voices from Darfur (14 min- I just received it in the mail, pretty graphic but probably the best film out of our choices)
• Divide class up into 4 or 5 small groups and assign each group a different genocide definition to discuss. We will provide them with a series of questions such as: What words stand out to you? What is missing from the definition? Is the definition too inclusive? etc.
• Divide the class into two teams and hold a debate about an ambiguous genocide. One team will have to site reasons why it is a genocide and one team will have to argue why it is not.
• Make a genocide web/cluster map as a class or in small groups.
• Announce our blog's website and ask them to post on it as part of homework assignments.

Today, Alex, Cait, Sondi, Emily, Gitsy, and I met to discuss the next lesson plan for Mrs. Bailey's class, which will focus on the causes of the genocide in Darfur. Alex had extracted common causes from three case studies: Chechnya, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe.

• Weak political society with rigidly entrenched identities
• regime declining in power (nationalist rhetoric)
• competition for scarce resources
• exogenous factors (Cold War, colonial powers)
• disillusionment of civil society
• post-conflict instability

The fact sheets for Cambodia , Darfur (Kaitlyn), Armenia (Gitsy), and Bangladesh (Emily) will be turned in by Sunday to Sondi who will assemble them into a packet to be distributed to the classes we work with (maps will be included with each piece). As for the lesson plan on causes, the most recent plan is to present the causes leading up to the genocide in Darfur and then assign each student a cause. The student's homework assignment will be to think of a specific intervention tactic that would have offered an alternative to the violence and destruction that ensued.

The next curriculum meeting will be: Sunday, Feb. 24 @ 6pm in the CSS Lounge (4th floor PAC)--anyone interested is welcome!