Teachers, novice or veteran, agree that teaching students how to engage in reasoned, informed debates across society’s sensitive issues, like genocide, is a challenge. However traumatising and challenging, it would do our youths a sore injustice to avoid talking about genocide history, its denial and ideology in class.

Even though Rwanda’s Ministry of Education has gone to great lengths to break it down into smaller understandable chunks within general and social studies, it is still an aspect teachers will never get enough training on how to handle. How we manage such discussions can greatly impact exactly how useful the conversations are to our instructional goals, and what sort of impact they have on the dynamics of the class and the students at large.

One of the ways to do this is to emphasise the lessons and values rather than a fixation on emotions. This may sound ridiculous given that the most outstanding relationship between sensitive topics and emotions is that they are mutually inclusive. However, if you spend a greater chunk of your lesson describing the gory images of death and the striking force of the machetes, as opposed to what caused it or even how it started, you will end up with a very teary class and no lesson taught or learnt. We must, ourselves, work on our emotions and clearly define the objective we want to achieve in class before we teach a sensitive topic. This calls for proper preparation.

Similarly, teachers must be careful about their personal feelings and opinions when teaching such topics. Whether or not you know it, your voice carries with it authority and power of sacred magnitude to your learners. Your students read into what you say or do not say; they look at your body language, read your facial expression and listen attentively to your tone. Unless you are articulating core values and concepts that must sink in the learners, try as much as possible not to take sides when discussions get intense. Also, do not encourage debates on such issues; otherwise, the learners may want to engage in the argument for the sake of it. Such debates usually have no inclination to learning, plus tempers may flare and daggers may be drawn.

Finally, set your class up with pre-reads and guiding questions to ponder upon before class. Discussions that simply erupt in class without a planned framework tend to mislead and may lead to uncontrolled ending, especially if they are as sensitive as the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. If students are clearly made aware of the parameters of the discussions, the teacher does not run the risk of students turning it to what they want. While at it, the teacher should be keen to discourage any impolite utterances or arguments targeting other students in class.

In an environment that’s increasingly focused on delivering instruction with real-world implications, there occurs an inevitable intersection between what we study in school and the potentially sensitive areas of discussion like genocide. Nevertheless, if teachers can be trained through intorero and enough resources are provided, perhaps it would be easier to do. In the meantime, teachers can prepare adequately for such topics, guide discussions carefully and emphasise lessons and values from the experience of genocide, the task can be manageable

editor@newtimesrwanda.com