A Teacher's Dream Come True

 by Frank Costanzo and Joe Corsetti; New Haven Academy

It's a teacher's dream come true: students arriving to class early and asking for permission to stay longer. Why? What accounts for such enthusiasm? Aren't high school history students supposed to be bored out of their minds? Not when they face history.

And that's exactly what students did throughout the 10th grade Facing History and Ourselves course, "Genocide and Transitional Justice," taught at New Haven Academy this spring, particularly during a comparative unit on the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur, Sudan.

New Haven Academy (located in New Haven Connecticut) opened in 2003 with grade nine and a plan to add a grade each year. Facing History and Ourselves is a defining part of the school, which strives for students to make morally sound choices, and to be well-informed citizens.

In the ninth grade, students are introduced to Facing History by taking Holocaust and Human Behavior which introduces Facing History's approach to the themes of identity, membership, an historical case study, judgment, legacy and choosing to participate.

In the tenth grade, students continue to build on this base in the "Genocide and Transitional Justice" course. In this class, students concentrate on the Armenian Genocide, Apartheid in South Africa, and the Rwandan Genocide, with an emphasis on two important themes throughout: what type of justice prevails in the aftermath of inhumane acts and how should these incidents be remembered?

In the class, after studying Rwanda, we transitioned into several comparative lessons on the current crisis in Darfur, Sudan. Students researched the crisis through articles and websites. They then wrote a minimum of two letters arguing for or against U.S. intervention in the Sudan. Students were required to connect the Rwandan Genocide as a historical case study and were free to write to any person.

The students' enthusiasm really started to manifest during the letter-writing campaign. Students began to see the project more as a responsibility of citizenship than simply an academic assignment. For most students, the activity became a mission to help humanity and quickly spread beyond the FHAO classrooms, reaching advisory classrooms and school town meetings.
The outcome of the student-centered assignment was remarkable. Not only were students actively participating in something of profound importance, they were developing essential skills in reading, writing and critical and moral thinking. As educators, we see the value in teaching Facing History. The past is not a series of unconnected and random dates that exist in another place and time. It's ordinary people making choices that impact everyone in some way. Facing History allows us, and more importantly, our students, to interact with the past, to grapple with the difficult issues in the present, and make responsible informed decisions about the future of our democratic society.

Part of our success in the Facing History classroom is a direct result of our desire to teach the curriculum and belief that moral development is more valuable than acquisition of content. When history is taught with this approach, students aspire to learn why the world is the way it is by examining the past and making sense of the big picture. Teaching and learning must also be based on a student's moral and intellectual development. In an attempt to challenge young people to ponder essential questions, we need fewer content requirements and short-term memory overloads and more theme-based units. This enables them to realize the genuine purpose for learning in general. Assigning creative final projects and exhibitions not only requires students to consider the big questions but also to acquire essential skills. We tried, and accomplished, much of this in 2005.

Good teaching requires getting to know your students, making them believe in what they are learning and doing, and helping them to make sense of the world around them and their place in it. When teachers subscribe to such principles, profound teaching and learning experiences become possible. We think, for all of these reasons, our students were arriving to class early and asking for permission to stay longer.

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