June 8, 2009, Students Want to Make Impact
Posted on 6/19/2009
Reporting from Rwanda
Dispatch #6
June 8, 2009
By Samuel Totten
With the Internet down for the third day in a row at our office at the Commission for the Fight Against Genocide, Rafiki, my assistant, and I repaired to a local hotel, Chez Lando, which has free Wi-Fi. While we were mapping out our upcoming meeting with the staff of the Centre for Conflict Management (National University of Rwanda) about the master’s degree in genocide studies and prevention, a student from my course (“The History of Genocide in the 19th, 20th and 21st Centuries”) contacted us via cell phone and asked if we could meet with her.
The student is a counselor who specializes in working with women who continue to suffer severe trauma as a result of what they witnessed and experienced during the 1994 genocide, and she is also the national coordinator of The Child and Family Support Organization. She stated that she had an idea she wanted to share with us. We said we’d be pleased to meet her and asked her to join us at the Chez Lando.
Radio Show Proposed
Upon her arrival, she stated that a major hope of hers in pursuing the master’s degree in genocide studies and prevention was to use her new knowledge to impact Rwandan society in a positive way. She said she had been thinking about an idea that I broached in class about how students with a legal background could undertake a project to pressure the United Nations to make the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG) more inclusive in regard to who benefited from protection under its auspices.
Earlier in the week, I had noted that only certain groups – national, racial, ethnical and religious – are protected under the UNCG, whereas political, social, gender and economic groups are not. More specifically, I suggested that those students in the class who are experts in law-related matters (e.g., the attorneys, the Supreme Court Justice, the Member of Parliament, the former Minister of Justice) could contact survivors – particularly those with similar professional backgrounds and qualifications – in other nations that experienced genocide in the relatively recent past such as Bangladesh, Bosnia Cambodia, Guatemala. The idea was that they form a committee to formally present a petition along the aforementioned lines to the U.N. General Assembly.
She said she appreciated my suggestion because it provided a concrete way in which certain students in the master’s degree program could try to have a positive impact on the world.
She then said that her idea was to develop, along with some of her fellow students in class, a radio show on genocide. She said that each show might feature a special topic – a topic that they (the producers of the show) knew would be of special interest to the citizens of Rwanda, or, conversely, topics actually suggested by listeners. She also said she thought it would be a good idea to use a call-in format, whereby listeners could call in with questions and concerns about all aspects of genocide, including those dealing with the pre-genocide period in Rwanda, the history of the 1994 genocide, and the plethora of post-genocide issues faced by those living in Rwanda today.
“In order to make the show as valuable as possible,” she continued, “it should be broadcast in Kinyarwanda. This is important because those who lived here prior to the genocide know French but possibly not English, while those who lived in exile up until after the end of the genocide may know English but not French. Many others only know Kinyarwanda. So Kinyarwanda is the language that must be used.”
Rafiki and I both told her we thought her idea was absolutely wonderful, and that we would like to share it with the class. She was pleased with our response and readily agreed to let us share her idea.
Students Show Passion, Initiative
The next evening the class responded enthusiastically to the idea. Indeed, numerous students said they would be quite interested in working on such a project.
To say that I was pleased with both the young woman’s idea and the response by the class to her idea would be a gross understatement. In fact, I was absolutely ebullient. I loved the passion, the initiative, and the keen desire displayed by the young woman and her colleagues – and this was particularly true in relation to their desire to reach out beyond the confines of the individual course and the overall master’s degree program. Indeed, it’s a professor’s dream – at least this professor’s – to have students with such passion, initiative and drive.
That same evening, part of the class session dealt with various categories, types and classifications of genocide developed by different scholars. After discussing the rationale behind the development of such categories, types and classifications, I asked the students to form small groups to discuss whether the titles made sense and whether the descriptions and examples provided for each were apt, according to their thinking and perspective. In those cases where the students thought that the titles and/or descriptions were not as clear as they could be or simply misleading, I asked them to come up with their own titles and/or descriptions. The students found this learning activity extremely engaging, and I was very pleased that the subsequent discussion proved lively and thought provoking.
Dictionary in Kinyarwanda
Immediately after class, a student, Mr. Jean de Dieu Muyco, the Secretary General of the Commission for the Fight Against Genocide (who also served not that long ago as the Attorney General of Rwanda), approached me and said he had come up with an idea during the class session.
“In light of how significant language is in studying genocide – and knowing that various issues and topics related to the Rwandan genocide are dense with meaning as Kinyarwanda is naturally multilayered in what it conveys – I think it might be a good idea to develop a dictionary of genocide in the Kinyarwanda language,” he said.
He stated that his idea was sparked not only by the focus of the discussion that evening but by earlier class sessions in which we had discussed the wording of the UNCG, the slurs used by perpetrators against target victims, and the various euphemisms perpetrators often used to mask the reality of their actions.
Rafiki, who was standing next to me and who is a deep and good thinker (which is not surprising since he was educated by the Jesuits), said, “That is a GREAT IDEA! And, of course, many who wish to study genocide in Rwanda were either educated in Francophone schools or Anglophone schools, and thus the one language they have in common is Kinyarwanda.”
I added, “This is another powerful and significant idea that would be ideal as a group project and one that would not only benefit Rwandans but scholars across the globe – particularly if the dictionary were in Rwanda, English and French. It’s also a work that could be professionally published and placed in libraries in Rwanda, Europe, the States … everywhere!”
Muyco, a naturally kind and unassuming man, glowed at the thought of the ramifications of his idea/project, and thanked us for our enthusiastic response. We asked him if we could share his idea with the class during the next session and he said, “Yes, that would be fine.”
Rethinking Thesis Requirement
The two ideas presented by the students (the radio show and the dictionary) prodded me to reconsider the thesis requirement for the master’s degree program in genocide studies and prevention. Traditionally, students earning a master’s degree at the National University of Rwanda write a thesis, and for that reason when I wrote the curriculum I automatically included the thesis as the capstone requirement.
However, as I pondered the two students’ interesting suggestions for potential projects, I began to rethink the sagacity of requiring a traditional thesis. I did so for numerous reasons:
Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that it was incumbent upon me to propose that students in the master’s degree in genocide studies and prevention be allowed to either write a thesis or develop and implement a major project as their capstone activity. In this way, I thought, we would be providing students with an option to either pursue a traditional or a more innovative, progressive, route as they completed their degree program. Likewise, I thought, it would avail those students who desired to pursue the project as a capstone option to be as creative as possible in an effort to possibly create something of lasting value to society.
During the next class session, I shared my thoughts about the thesis/project option with the students and found that many liked the idea. I then shared the idea with the director of the Centre for Conflict Management, the coordinator of the master’s degree program, and the junior researcher from CCM who is enrolled in the master’s degree in genocide studies program. The director was nervous that the powers that be at the National University of Rwanda might not be in favor of such an approach. I said that we would never know, though, if we did not approach them with the idea. He agreed.
The junior researcher said that he was against the idea because, from his perspective, an academic program had to have a thesis to be legitimate. I noted that many master’s degree programs do not require a thesis. I also shared with him that many individuals enrolled in the master’s degree are not planning to pursue a career in academia, but rather plan to serve civil society in some capacity, and thus creating a project that required deep thought and originality might be of more interest and value to them than writing a thesis. He seemed unconvinced. The coordinator of the program, Ms. Justine Mbabazi, said she was captivated by the idea of including the option of a project in lieu of a thesis and “definitely supported such a progressive approach.”
It was left to me to come up with a proposal for offering such an option, and it was agreed by all at that the meeting that I should present the idea to the rector and vice rector of academic affairs at the National University of Rwanda. Thus, I am now working on that task.
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