The November New Tactics on-line dialogue features “Human Rights in Higher Education: Incorporating practical experience”. This dialogue specifically features ideas, experiences and methods from human rights higher education programs for incorporating practical experience into human rights curriculums to better prepare human rights advocates for doing “on the ground” and “in the trenches” human rights work.
The featured resource practitioners (biographical information) include:
- Abigail Booth, Programme Manager, Head of Nairobi Office, Raoul Wallenberg Institute, Kenya
- Alice Nderitu, Fahamu (Kenya) in coordination with the University of Pretoria, South Africa
- Jadwiga Maczynska, Project Manager, Jagiellonian University Human Rights Centre, Krakow, Poland
- Mingzhen Ge, Shandong University, Human Rights Center, Law School, China
- Diane Sisely, Director, Australian Centre for Human Rights Education at RMIT University
- Barbara Frey, Director, Human Rights Program, University of Minnesota, USA
- Robin Kirk, Director, Duke University Human Rights Center, North Carolina, USA
- Nicole Palasz, Center for International Education, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
- Amy Weismann, Deputy Director, University of Iowa Center for Human Rights
- Susan Atwood, Instructor, University of Minnesota’s Leadership : Leadership for Global Citizenship.
| Be sure to take a look at our new collection of articles, guides, and classroom modules for your curriculum: New Tactics Resources for Educators! |
Main themes of this dialogue:
- Stories of Practice: examples of how practical experience is being incorporated in human rights education programs
- Challenges: ethical issues with incorporating practical experience in human rights education programs
- Curriculum Resources: creating and simulating practical experience
Please help us to keep this dialogue organized by 'replying' to these main themes, or 'replying' to other comments, instead of creating NEW comments. Thanks!
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Re: Why it is important to include practical experience
Dear Diane,
thank you for making this valuable point. It is also my direct experience that people (and in our dialogue context students and pupils) need to be confronted directly with a certain problem, to make them realize its scale and the impact it has on the other's life.
An example to illustrate it : in my refugee law class, at the beginning of the course, we used to hand out to students a made-up personal information form and asked them to fill it in, as an asylum seeker would be requested to do it. The form was made obsure by using several techniques: including some Latin-based words, which people would barely recognise and associate with their meaning, putting some script in reverse directions (to ilustrate problems a person used to left-to-right script might experience with Western script), providing only very limited space to questions demanding lengtht decsriptions and vive versa etc..
The aim of this example was to make student's experience confusion and lack of orientation that asylum seekers (and other groups confronted with an official requirement) may feel and how thisis the very first infrigment of their rights, often bearing large scale consequences even for the outcome of the proceedings in their case
Jadwiga Maczynska