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"Hotel Rwanda" was a critically acclaimed and commercially successful film, but not necessarily the best way to teach high school students about a topic as fraught as genocide. Yet, without guidance on how to approach genocide throughout history, showing the movie in class may be what teachers default to in covering difficult and uncomfortable subjects.

An increasing number of states have passed legislative mandates requiring schools to teach about the history of genocide. However, new research from the University of Kansas has found that states requiring genocide education rarely offer guidance on the standards for how to teach it, often focus solely on the Holocaust, and may leave it up to social studies teachers what other historical genocides they teach about and how. That lack of guidance differs very little from states without such mandates, researchers argue, and fails to give students an understanding of the causes of genocide and how to prevent them in the future.

Anna Yonas, assistant professor of curriculum & teaching in KU's School of Education & Human Sciences, is co-author on a study analyzing the mandates of 11 U.S. states to include genocide education. The standards on what and how to teach genocide were compared to those of states without mandates.

The study, co-written with Stephanie van Hover of the University of Virginia, was published in the Journal of Social Studies Research.

"We found that across the board, states are not guiding teachers on what acts of genocide they must teach. So, there may be a feeling that an improvement to education has been made, but in effect, no real change has been made," Yonas said. "There's not really a difference between them, and it suggests such mandates are not achieving their intended aim."

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