What is Ten Stages of Change?
Ten Stages of Change is a genocide education project built over three years by Joshua Bicknell, a former classroom teacher and curriculum developer who specializes in Holocaust and genocide education.
Each stage of Gregory Stanton’s framework is told through one case study and the people who lived it: eyewitnesses, survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators. Each one is drawn from testimony, letters, and historical records.
Every stage comes in three forms:
- A literary nonfiction article
- A narrated audio episode with archival media clips
- A classroom unit, available now for Stages 1–3 with 4–5 in development, for ELA, World History, Humanities, and Geography: standards-aligned, differentiated, and ready to teach with little prep
The units build media literacy, historical reasoning, and critical thinking. The pages shown here come straight from them.
Listen
Every case study, narrated.
All episodes, 29 to 49 minutes each, built around unedited testimony, transcripts, and speeches. Free, on Apple Podcasts and Audible.
Teach
Classroom-ready units.
Downloadable lesson plans, discussion guides, and age-appropriate anchor texts, with teacher support for emotionally difficult material.
Getting Started
1
Read
Each case study unpacks one stage, combining literary nonfiction with scholarly rigor.
2
Listen
Articles are paired with narrated audio, built around unedited testimony and speeches.
3
Teach
Downloadable units, discussion guides, and age-appropriate anchor texts. Three published so far.
4
Act
Every piece ends with specific steps — civic, personal, and possible right now.
“Genocide is a process that develops in ten stages that are predictable but not inexorable. At each stage, preventive measures can stop it. The process is not linear. Stages occur simultaneously. Each stage is itself a process.”
Gregory Stanton · Ten Stages of Genocide
The Series
All ten stages, in order. Start anywhere.
-
From ‘Us’ to ‘Them’: Classification in Darfur
Three witnesses (a fighter in the Jebel Marra, a poet on the TEDMED stage, a…
-
Threads of Resistance: Symbolization in the Cambodian Genocide
How the Khmer Rouge turned the krama into a marker for death, and how Cambodians…
-
In Darkness and Separation: Women, the Hazara, and Discrimination in Afghanistan
The Hazara face relentless, systematic attacks under Taliban rule. Women’s rights regress to repression and…
-
“Like Moths to a Flame”: Dehumanization in the Rwandan Genocide
How propaganda and radio taught neighbors to see Tutsi as less than human, told through…
-
The Architecture of Annihilation: Organized Genocide in Myanmar
The fifth stage, organization, seen through the machinery of the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. Eyewitness…
-
Splintered Lines: Polarization and Division in the Bosnian Genocide
‘My youngest boy… those little hands. I imagine them picking strawberries, holding books, going to…
-
Before Dawn, By Design: Preparation and Process in the Holocaust
The seventh stage of genocide, preparation, is explored through the lens of the Holocaust, and…
-
Human Quotas: Persecution and Consumption in the Genocide of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs
Persecution of the Uyghurs, from camp survivors’ testimony to the forced-labor supply chains that end…
-
“It Ends Like This”: Extermination and Denial in Armenia and Beyond
The final Ten Stages installment: extermination and denial, from the 1921 Tehlirian trial to Artsakh,…
Denial starts with belief.
Students grew up with every answer a click away, and without much training in telling good information from bad. Over the same period, antisemitism, conspiracy theories, Holocaust distortion, and denial have all risen — along with false equivalence and the trivialization of genocide.
