Pupil instruction: Armenian Genocide.

Existing law requires the State Department of Education to incorporate materials relating to civil rights, human rights violations, genocide, slavery, and the Holocaust into publications that provide examples of curriculum resources, consistent with the subject frameworks on history and social science and other requirements. Under existing law, the Legislature encourages the incorporation of survivor, rescuer, liberator, and witness testimony into the teaching of human rights, genocide, and the Holocaust. Existing law establishes the Instructional Quality Commission and requires the commission to, among other things, recommend curriculum frameworks to the State Board of Education. This bill would require the department to incorporate materials related to the Armenian Genocide into those publications, and would require the commission to include the Armenian Genocide in the recommended history-social science curriculum framework when the history-social science framework is revised as required by law. The bill would also specify that the Legislature encourages the incorporation of survivor, rescuer, liberator, and witness oral testimony into the teaching of human rights, the Holocaust, and genocide, including the Armenian, Cambodian, Darfur, and Rwandan genocides. The bill would define oral testimony to mean firsthand accounts of significant historical events presented in a specified format.