Collaboration with OSPI in Engrossed Substitute Senate Bill 5950
In early 2024, the Washington legislature allocated funds to the institute to develop curriculum and teacher training for school teachers in Washington State on Genocide Education.
Two Western faculty members, Prof. Rachel Paul and Prof. Sarah Zarrow, spearheaded the project for the RWI. They have taught courses in the Holocaust & Genocide Studies minor since its inception in 2019.
Read their summary of the project below!
Rachel Paul, Assistant Professor, Political Science
Rachel Paul is a Senior Instructor of Political Science. She teaches courses in Nationalism, Genocide and Global Politics; Comparative Foreign Policy; Democratization and International Relations. Her research areas include nationalism and ethnicity, ethnic groups and foreign policy, mass atrocity prevention, the politics of commemoration, and the role of trauma in political socialization. She is a Charles E. Scheidt Faculty Fellow in Atrocity Prevention at SUNY-Binghamton.
Sarah Zarrow, Associate Professor, History
Sarah Zarrow is an Associate Professor in the History department, where she holds the Endowed Professorship in Jewish History. Her research focuses on Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe, and she teaches courses on European Jewish history, East European history, and the Holocaust.
We began our project by surveying and interviewing teachers regarding their needs for instructional support on genocide education. Surveys were made available to teachers, in part, through the OSPI. Those survey and interview responses indicated the need for support for difficult classroom conversations regarding current global atrocity events. Given that emphasis on difficult classroom conversations, and under consultation with both OSPI and the Holocaust Center for Humanity (HCH), we designed an intensive teaching workshop on the subject and reached out to the administration in every school district in the state of Washington. As a result of that outreach, we are thrilled to report that we drew participants from across the state.
The workshop provided opportunities for case study comparison, including a deep focus on contemporary genocides (Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Rwanda). These study selections were tied to Washington population demographics so that the sensitivity and relevance of these discussions to Middle and High School students were addressed. We included a panel of experts from within Washington and from other U.S. locales to allow for discussion with teachers who have already created and successfully implemented genocide curricula in the classroom.
In this way, teachers were able to learn from others across the country! More than half of teachers expressed a need for further collaboration and more opportunities to learn how to address difficult classroom conversations during this time in history. To conclude our project, we are distributing learning resources on the topic of genocide, to participants this fall.
-Dr. Rachel Anderson Paul (Political Science Dept) & Dr. Sarah Zarrow (History Dept)