Human Rights in Higher Education: Incorporating practical experience
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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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engaging former students

Abigail Booth, Programme Manager, Head of Nairobi Office, Raoul Wallenberg Institute, Kenya

RWI has also arranged follow-up seminars for alumni of our Master programmes. As our alumni come from all over the world these have been done on a regional basis. While this has not brought alumni into contact with present students it has allowed alumni from different years to meet and network. It has also given us the opportunity to hear directly from them what use their education at RWI has been in their practical work and how we can make it even more relevant. 

These events are, however, rather costly as they often entail long distance travel to get everyone together. Unfortunately our donors are less and less willing to fund academic education and we are being pushed more towards practical training for specific target groups. I hope that the e-forum can provide some sort of alternative for alumni networking as well as a channel for feed-back on our programmes.