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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Amy,
Your use of technology to bring practitioners to your class and practical experiences to your students is great! It makes me think that there could be a wide variety of applications of this kind of technology for opening dialogue and building collaborations between human rights practitioners on the ground (from many points at one time) and academic institutions with their students (also from many points at one time) to further human rights efforts.
For example, in two of our previous on-line dialogues the topics covering "Unarmed Accompaniment" and "Training for Nonviolent Action", the practitioners were saying how helpful the on-line dialogue was for bringing people together to discuss common issues and for sharing ideas they could borrow from each other - and yet they also wished there could be more direct face-to-face exchange.
Your teleconferencing tool sounds like it can incorporate more of the "face-to-face" feel of the exchange that certainly creates greater student interest and involvement. I could imagine that a partnership between NGOs and universities that have the technology conferencing capability that you are talking about could host some powerful exchanges among NGOs from different regions of the world to "gather" and address different human rights issues while at the same time directly engage the students at the educational institutions to become invested and involved in the issues.
I would be interested to know how many of you in educational institutions utilize on-line dialogue tools (or web forums) as part of your courses. If so, do you think it has been an effective tool for student exchange?
New Tactics launched this interactive website to assist human rights practitioners (from students to seasoned advocates) to find community and support for the important work they are doing. We are very interested in buidling more direct ways for New Tactics thinking, tools, resources and especially the broad community of human rights advocates to provide practical experience opportunities to students as they seek to build their human rights awareness and skills within their educational institutions but also with the New Tactics on-line community.
Nancy Pearson, New Tactics in Human Rights Program Manager