A guest blog by Beacon School Quality Mark Lead Teacher, Andy Lawrence MBE, Hampton School.
April sees the 30th anniversary of the start of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. What followed was a hundred days in which a million innocent men, women and children were killed simply because of who they were.
Our school has been teaching about the Genocide against the Tutsi, in addition to the Holocaust, for many years. Why? Because it strengthens our pupils’ understanding of the phenomena of Genocide, it helps to illustrate how the world has approached the cry of ‘Never Again’ issued after the Holocaust…and, most importantly, because of the remarkable Rwandan survivors who we have been privileged to welcome to speak to our Year 9 classes.
There is relatively little (if any) substantive guidance available to schools on how to teach about the Genocide against the Tutsi. No definitive textbook, no full suite of resources and little in the way of crucial testimony that is suitable for secondary school students to utilise. So, as a Quality Mark school we have used the pedagogic approach instilled in us from the Centre for Holocaust Education as a lens through which to approach the teaching of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. So, we try to adopt principles that use an inquiry led approach, seeking to re-humanise the Genocide by showing that victims and survivors were real people…and by moving from the particular to the general and back again. The pupils are used to such practice having been taught sessions earlier in Year 9 on the Holocaust that include the examination of specific artefacts and life stories of the Greenman family in the ‘Authentic Encounters’ lesson and also the overview timelines contained in the ‘Understanding the Holocaust’ textbook. There are also, of course, distinctive elements of the way that we teach about the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. Not only is the global context of the event being a post-Holocaust Genocide foregrounded but also questions of the impact of colonialism also pervade. Even more importantly is the privilege that we have to be in touch with a remarkable survivor who is central to the way that our pupils learn about the Genocide and seek to raise awareness about it.
Indeed, even more specifically, over the past few months some of our Year 9 pupils have been working on a project that aims to raise awareness of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. The group has been collaborating with a survivor of the Genocide, Sophie Masereka, helping her to compile her experiences of before, during and after 1994 into a memoir. To prepare for the endeavour the pupils research life in Rwanda before the Genocide, understanding the rich history of the country, the impact that colonial rulers had in creating conditions for division and the post-independence discrimination and persecution that Tutsi faced too. Similarly, the pupils interviewed Sophie to fully understand her life story, the joys of her family life and her hopes for the future before April 1994, the devastating impact of the Genocide and her life with her husband and three daughters in London today.
The Senior Leadership Team at our school has been very supportive of the pupils’ project. The team met with their Headmaster to discuss their research, reflect on their meeting with Sophie and the importance of the endeavour. Similarly, senior leaders read through and commented on the drafts of the memoir that the pupils had been involved in writing. Just before the end of term members of the project team gave a talk to the whole school about why it was important for everyone to know about Sophie’s story in particular and the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in general.
Sophie and the pupils launched the memoir at the Rwandan High Commission towards the end of the last term. There was Rwandan dancing and music at the event, as well as speeches from the pupils, Sophie, her family and friends too. It was a poignant reminder of the power of a survivor’s testimony about Genocide and also the meaning of survival.
