After a long hiatus that spanned over two chaotic sessions with different batches of students each and a summer break, we returned to Akshar, having streamlined the motley crowd of class 9-11 students down to students of class 10 only. I asked the students to pick a concern they would like to start…
We went into our first class unsure of what to expect, but the response we got was more positive than our most optimistic predictions. Our class comprised of students from class nine, ten and eleven. Having students who were actually, genuinely interested made our work a lot easier, and the aims we had gone in…
For our final session at Chowringhee High, we brought the discussion to India, and specifically to the Gujarat riots of 2002. We referred to an article by the The New York Times, along with the Wikipedia page about the riots to give the students an idea about what happened and the subsequent controversies. We then…
For this session, we decided to speak on the Armenian genocide. An event that is sometimes considered to be the first genocide of the 20th century, has been systematically erased from memory. Our first challenge was to make the students familiar with Armenia: a country they did not know exists. After a brief introduction to…
On the 5th of March, as part of our ongoing discussion about genocides in the African continent, we focused our attention on Rwanda and Sudan. After shedding some light on the history of the relationship between the Hutus and Tutsis, we played a video by Step Back History, a popular history channel on YouTube, on…
