SCORES of teachers from across Guyana have benefited from lectures on slavery and reparatory justice, information they will now take back to their classrooms to be inculcated within their new history syllabus.

The event allowing for this was, an inaugural one-day luncheon and workshop organised by the International Decade for People of African Descent Assembly of Guyana (IDPADA-G), in collaboration with the Guyana Teachers Association (GTA) and the National Library.
With the help of the GTU, primary and secondary school teachers from Region Two, (Pomeroon-Supenaam); Santa Mission in Region Three (Essequibo Islands-West Demerara); West Bank Berbice, and several other known places, such as Linden and Georgetown attended the workshop.

They were lectured by Verene Shepherd, a Jamaican academic and professor of Social History at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona Campus, Jamaica. Shepherd was a part of the team that put together the new Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) history syllabus, which has a theme on reparations.

During her presentation, the facilitator detailed the rational for the movement for reparations, how it evolved and how the Caribbean Reparations Commission and other governments of the region are working to take the matter forward.

Speaking to the Guyana Chronicle after her presentation, Shepherd said: “Teachers from across the region, and in our country, have been calling for workshops and more detailed content on reparations, so my task today was to try to help teachers with content building on the issue of reparatory justice.”

Meanwhile, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of IDPADA-G Olive Sampson, also spoke extensively to the newspaper on the organisation and the importance of the event.
She said IDPADA-G is a mechanism created to respond to the United Nation’s (UN) resolution calling for a decade to address challenges faced by people of African descent across the globe. It aims towards the recognition, justice and development of people of African descent.

President David Granger, in his feature address at the Cuffy 250 Committee’s Fifth Annual State of the African Guyanese Forum in 2017, has called on the organisation to recommit to fulfilling its objectives.

These come in the form of a plan of action which focuses on the areas of employment, education, economics/entrepreneurship, equity and expiation.
“He called all African Guyanese organisations to come together and to create a mechanism to respond to the United Nations and out of that the organisations came together and created a secretariat which is a mechanism to respond. So what we’re doing today is addressing one of the five key areas he identified…education because it is fundamental to everything,” Sampson said.

This education, she said, entails history often left out of teachings in the classroom which details the hard labour of African-Guyanese to build their post-Emancipation nation.
“Some of us African-Guyanese are hurt by that history that has never really addressed the fact that we were so cruelly treated… teachers already know that education is empowerment, but education about one’s true history is even greater empowerment,” she said.

She added: “When we teach children about their history, it empowers them, it gives them a sense of pride, they look around and they see the works of their ancestors and they are empowered to do more.”

During the session, the teachers broke off into small groups where they developed lesson plans based on the information they garnered to take back to their students.

The National Library took the opportunity to set up a display of all the books and resources that both teachers and students can use to access additional information.