In 2013, Saint John's College embraced the teaching of Maya and African History – and today the Jesuit High School launched a fully developed curriculum for those programs. It may sound arcane, but it's a singular accomplishment for a history programme in Belize; to build it from the ground up– complete with textbooks, syllabus documents and a website in two years. Today, the head of the history department officially handed it over to the school administration, and, in fact, to the world – since everything can be accessed online. Here's how the crafters of the programme explained it:…

Yasser Musa - Head of History Department, SJC

"Formally presents the first form curriculum, African and Mayan history and the second form curriculum, Belizean history. To our principal of St. John's College, Ms. Yolonda Gongora; in addition to the curricula, we will also present the accompanying e-readers or books; of course these elements of education are connected to our online Belize history sjc.com website, our online classroom. These documents come from a space of burning, today we present paper but as contributions to the hard work of education, culture and history."

Delmer Tzib - History Teacher, SJC

"The main theme behind it is basically to have the students learn history from the perspective of the oppressed. We try to empower the students in the class for them to question. In other words there is a lot more Socratic methods of teaching whereby the students have the power to question whatever they want to question. In doing so, they begin to question or they begin to internalize what the colonial masters use to teach us and how that has created mental slavery in our society"

Nicholas Staines - Student, SJC History Club

"I think history is important, I love it because it is the fuel that drives us to empower more. It is the reason why people keep repeating their mistakes and why people keep going better in the future."

Delmer Tzib - History Teacher, SJC

"In our classrooms, they no longer see history as a pain but they see it a way or an hour and 50 minutes that is different from the other 50 from the other 6 periods that they will be receiving and that to me, regardless of scores in tests and exams, just the idea that they love it is the biggest pay."

"If you look at education, primarily today we need to adapt to the generation that we have and the generation that we have is not primarily looking at printed text and that sort of thing. They are looking at technology and we are trying to adapt technology into the programme so that they enjoy it. It is not simply about dates and memorising dates and that sort of thing, it is more about them internalising themes and understanding ideas of how society functions and how they can change society as well. So when we look at creating books, we decided that electronic books would be quite feasible to be used in terms of our school."

You can find all the resources – including the full textbooks - and background at belizehistorysjc.com.