Curriculum for Educators
Dear teachers,
We are honored that you have chosen Darfur Diaries (the book and/or the film) as a tool to educate your students about Darfur and the context in which the crisis is taking place. The atrocities occurring in Darfur are interconnected to a much larger, deeply damaged world. With your guidance, we feel confident that the film, book, and discussions and activities surrounding them will provoke your students to ask difficult, thoughtful and thought provoking questions. We hope that together, we will motivate your students to engage meaningfully in challenging the root causes that enable situations such as Darfur to take place. There are many frames through which to examine Darfur, and, though we try to at least touch on many of them in Darfur Diaries, it is the work you will do with your students that will allow deeper explorations of extremely important questions: what is Darfur’s historical, social, geographic, political context? What does the history of genocide teach us about Darfur? What insight into this (and many other) crises is offered by the exploration of power and privilege in the world—who wants it, who has it, and what they are willing to do to maintain or expand it? What complexities are faced by the humanitarian aid community in a conflict zone? And, perhaps most importantly, what does it mean to try and stand in true solidarity with people resisting years of oppression and growing brutality against them? We don’t expect you or your classes to fully answer any of these questions—the three of us are tackling them as a life-long process. But we welcome your students to join us in that process.
In fact, the curriculum on this site was developed by students struggling deeply with many of these questions themselves and wanted to ensure that the discourse they were having grew beyond their classroom. So much respect and appreciation go to Lincoln South West High students Destiny Brown, Christina Fraser, Courtney Lubach, Melissa West and their inspirational teacher, Mark Gudgel. We welcome you to contact us at info@darfurdiaries.org with notes and feedback about this curriculum; as well as hearing your own creative ideas for how you used the book and the film in your classroom and what the responses of your students were.
Perhaps you, like us, have the desire to protect young people from the darker sides of humanity and the world. We believe strongly, however, that protecting youth cannot come from shielding them from such realities, but rather by working in partnership with them to understand, challenge and ultimately change those realities. Fundamentally, this is what Darfur Diaries strives to do, and we are privileged to be engaged in this work with you!
In solidarity,
Aisha Bain, Jen Marlowe, Adam Shapiro
Please contact us at info@darfurdiaries.org for an electronic copy of the curriculum.
