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Teaching Human Rights in the Context of Angst

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This blog post includes ideas for conversations at the beginning of the semester. In a subsequent post we will discuss more detailed lesson planning regarding terrorism, migration, and violence in classes that deal with these kind of topics. The thoughts offered here can be integrated as brief conversations and are thus appropriate for a range of classes that do not necessarily address human rights specifically.

In light of this summer’s events both in the U.S. and Europe, our students may return from the summer break with anxieties and feelings of insecurity. Based on the different attacks this summer, students might feel unsafe in general and may also project these fears as biases at specific groups of people. Since these groups can, depending on who is harboring the fears, include African-Americans, Muslim Americans, refugees, migrants, police officers, and white supremacists, we are prone to encounter intersecting and conflicting fears in our classrooms. As most of us teach human rights, our syllabi include instances of discrimination and violence and thereby further contribute to this general angst. So what can we do about it?

It can be helpful to present statistics about terrorism, crime, and immigration, or use the ted talk in the resource section of this post for a general take on the decline rather than the rise of violence. I doubt, however, that facts alone will alleviate the fears. Showing that not all members of a certain group prescribe to an ideology or not all members of a group are violent is too vague to actually help students deal with their anxieties. My goal in this situation is to help students to see perpetrators as individuals rather than collectives (this approach may be more suitable for terrorism fears rather than police brutality and structural discrimination which our next blog post will address in more detail). A faceless group of potential attackers leads to a diffuse and irrational kind of angst. Therefore, I suggest a speak-out. Early in your class, ask your students to talk about their fears and possibly contribute as well. Ask everyone to respect what they hear and to not dismiss it. All fears should be taken seriously. As a next step, allow for conversations. Support different groups to talk to each other rather than about a faceless entity. Making it personal in ways where a fellow student may be a member of the group that other students fear will increase an understanding of diversity and individuality within that group. It also shows how these fears affect the actual members of a religious or ethnic or professional community. If you don’t have diverse classes, bring in people from other parts of campus or the community and allow everyone’s voice to be heard. Speaking alone might be cathartic, but entering conversations can make a long-term difference.

For these conversations to work, we should make sure that our classroom is a safe space. Don’t dismiss any fear for being unwarranted but address the reality of these fears as well (what are students specifically afraid of and why?). Don’t let conversation take the form of accusation and defense. If you have one or more minority students in your class, don’t take them as the representative, as the mouthpiece of their ethnic or religious group. This would play into the homogenization of groups as well. They should also not have to answer broad questions about their group – they are individuals with individual experiences. Present them as exactly that and have them share their feelings as well. Here, the personal contact is the most important element. Eventually, facts need to be introduced into the conversation as well. Depending on the time frame of this intervention in your class, bring in articles, statistics or professionals (for instance, police officers from the city or county, or the Imam of a nearby Mosque, or a scholar from your institution who studies African-American history, Islam, terrorism etc.) for factual information.

If you have the time, let students research the background to some of the attacks. Germany is a good example since four widely different attacks happened within one week. While all four attacks were committed by members of the same religious group and three attackers were refugees, only one (maybe two) were politically motivated. Both the Munich rampage and the Reutlingen murder could have happened elsewhere and with different ethnic backgrounds. That doesn’t make the crimes any better, innocent humans have died in both occasions, but it does help to relativize an assumption of homogeneity that plays into a rhetoric that sees a whole group as potential perpetrators of terrorism. The two refugees in Germany can also contrast the attackers of Brussels and Paris who had lived in Europe for a long time before their attacks. Here separation within a society lies at the heart of the problem, which a politics of fear may exacerbate. Articles can provide additional material to drive one main point home: By homogenizing one group of people and further pushing the group out of our societies, we may help the aims of terrorists.

 

Selected resources:

On violence in general

Steven Pinker, Ted Talk, The surprising decline in violence: https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence?language=en

Steven Pinker and Andrew Mack, “The world is not falling apart,” Slate: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/12/the_world_is_not_falling_apart_the_trend_lines_reveal_an_increasingly_peaceful.html

On anxiety and terrorism

Steven Erlanger, “String of attacks in Europe fuels a summer of anxiety,” New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/world/europe/string-of-attacks-in-europe-fuels-a-summer-of-anxiety.html?ref=world&_r=2

On refugees and immigration

Imran Awan, “Stop Blaming Refugees for Attacks Like Those in Paris,” New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/11/16/should-europe-shun-refugees-after-the-paris-attacks/stop-blaming-refugees-for-attacks-like-those-in-paris

Ben Norton, “Our terrorism double standard: After Paris, let’s stop blaiming Muslims and take a hard look at ourselves,”Salon: http://www.salon.com/2015/11/14/our_terrorism_double_standard_after_paris_lets_stop_blaming_muslims_and_take_a_hard_look_at_ourselves/

Amanda Taub, “Shutting down immigration won’t solve Europe’s terrorism problem,” Vox: http://www.vox.com/2016/3/22/11285962/brussels-attack-refugees-immigration

 

 

By: Nicole Coleman

Can we give them a little more rights? Incorporating a human rights segment into an academic program.

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There is little doubt that human rights is an intriguing topic to folks from all walks of life! From freshman in college to the elderly, people tend to be curious and interested in learning more about their rights, and the diverse landscape of international human rights. Offerings of human rights courses are growing in the academy, yet there are many academics who cannot devote a full semester to teaching rights. If one is willing to think outside the box there are many ways to incorporate rights into various academic programs and/or courses that are not specifically billed as human rights.

Obviously there are many types of academic programs that do not fit squarely into the semester timeframe: afterschool programs, lecture series, exchange programs, conferences, mini-camps, team building excursions, and as discussed in a previous blog post field trips. The range of differing time restraints and/or programs is too broad to address here, but one thing they often share is opportunities to employ a rights based segment into programing but face a limited time constraint to do so. Of course, this depends on the relevant content of the program—there is not much rights discourse analysis presented in your typical “Physics Camp” but maybe there could be J. I have been fortunate enough to be able to incorporate rights based lessons into U.S. State Department funded exchange programs, including President Obama’s new signature academic exchange program Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI), and the long running Study of the U.S. Institute (SUSI) program.

At the University of Connecticut, 20 young African leaders and 40 young Southeast Asian leaders come through our programs run by UConn’s Global Training and Development Institute, where the focus is on social entrepreneurship. Students hail from 10 Southeast Asian countries (YSEALI) and 10 countries in North and West Africa (SUSI) and while participating in these very competitive programs they develop social enterprises, interact with U.S. citizens/instructors, and go on a week-long educational study tour to New York, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. They stay in the U.S. for five weeks, four of them at UConn, and then return home to their countries to begin the difficult work of scaling up their enterprises and creating social change. Our program’s learning objectives focus broadly on social entrepreneurship, the study of U.S. history and culture, and on leadership. I am employed as a postdoctoral fellow with a component of my job being to design the academic curriculum and our broad learning objectives have allowed me significant space to incorporate human rights into the programming. One need not look very far to see the impact of rights in learning outcomes as student projects have ranged from anti-discrimination programs in Algeria, Morocco, and Indonesia, to new recycling programs in Senegal, Cameroon, the Philippians, to bridging the digital divide among the poor, rural Malian population and the urban elites.

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There are four primary ways that I have incorporated human rights that have been particularly effective and might be of use to other faculty or administrators adding rights to an academic program/course: (1) direct academic sessions on human rights; (2) academic sessions that indirectly address components of rights; (3) an online portion that allows for continued engagement with rights after the program concludes; and finally (4) informal simulations and icebreakers focused on creating cross-cultural respect.

We define the “social” part of social entrepreneurship (SE) broadly to include many areas of social change. Human rights fits nicely under this broad umbrella. Thus, as mentioned above (1), I have included traditional academic sessions that directly address rights with titles such as “Introduction to Human Rights,” and “Economic Rights in the U.S. and Beyond.” These hour or so long sessions fit into the program goal to enhance students’ understanding of the “social” in SE and how their social enterprise may employ/or uphold human rights to achieve goals of their local community. Direct knowledge of human rights, especially those related to their particular causes can help our students’ incipient organizations get community and international support for what they are trying to accomplish. Students with little or no human rights background seem to get a lot out of these introduction type sessions—especially if there is a dynamic presenter who mixes up lecture, activities, and powerful use of human rights in multimedia form.

Second, I have included sessions that do not directly address human rights but are indirectly related. These sessions have included: Freedom of the Press in the U.S., African American Leaders and the Civil Rights Movement; Global Environmental Issues; Microfinance; and Social Mobilization which focuses on large scale social movement tactics across different political systems around the world. Elements of human rights are never very far afield from the content and students often make the connections to rights quite easily (especially if they have had the intro to rights sessions beforehand). An added bonus is that these sessions can cover aspects of the program that need to be covered, such as American history/culture in our program.

Third, I include a hybrid online portion of the academic program where students have digital lessons to complete before, during, and after our “on the ground” segment of the program is completed and students have returned home. Thus, they are able to do follow-up readings on rights and continue conversations from the classroom in the online realm. After they complete our full program, including receiving seed funding to start their enterprise, we point them in the direction of the vastly expanding free MOOC options for further learning (see a related post for more info about the potential power of the hybrid model).

Finally, an added bonus of “a rights based component” is that it has fostered strong bonding and the respect of differences among our often disparate groups. Our programs are intentionally diverse, with U.S. Embassies abroad choosing students from different religious, cultural, political, and economic backgrounds (not to mention from 10 different countries). Thus, we have found that the more we can foster mutual respect the smoother the program runs and it leads to closer bonds between the participants. We have included cross-cultural understanding activities, for instance a Peace Corps’ favorite Bafa Bafa (lesson plan for it here from NYU), a business negotiation simulation called Russian Railroad, Circles, Triangles, and Squares which is a simulation about power dynamics among groups, and also many simple icebreaker type games which have helped our students practice the mutual respect that they have been exposed to in the classroom and apply it to real world cross cultural dialog.

Of course, none of these options substitute for the depth of a full semester focused on rights, however they certainly have added a strong rights component to our program without sacrificing overall program goals. In fact, my experience has led me to want to “give them a little more rights” whenever I can J. Giving students “a little more rights” could work in a variety of settings beyond the aforementioned programs. For instance adding a section on rights can really expand the international strength of a traditional course. The icebreaker type activities could be used in almost any classroom, and who knows maybe even at a future “Physics Camp.” A little human rights education can clearly go a long way. Feel free to share your experiences bringing the study of rights into programs/courses and to contact me if you want more detail on any of the activities mentioned above.

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Group Projects in Online Classes

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This is the last of three blog posts on the online class “Introduction to Human Rights.” I have talked about general course design (here) and assessment (here). Today, I will focus on group projects and the specific challenges as well as opportunities that the online environment provides for them.

Students usually do not like group projects. I don’t blame them; I didn’t like them much either when I was a student. I was always convinced that I could have done better and could have worked more efficiently by myself. As an instructor, however, I see benefits in group projects that go beyond a good grade and efficiency; benefits that relate to future jobs in which most of our students will have to collaborate, but also more social skills of negotiation and compromise that will help in all sorts of situations.

Students are even more concerned about online group projects. They assume that all the problems they encounter in the face-to-face class will be multiplied in an online class: figuring out times to meet, communicating goals, submitting parts of the presentation, merging parts into a coherent whole seem more daunting when you have never met your collaborators in person. Here is the good news though: it is not! I have actually found that group projects work better online. I assume that some of the reasons are that the students are already used to working asynchronously and logging on multiple times a day. They are more responsive to emails and have learned to communicate in discussion forums and to submit assignments online. All these skills are needed for successful group projects without the face-to-face problem of finding a time and space to meet in person.

The biggest challenge for online group work, I have found, is to establish clear guidelines as well as due dates for each step of the way. It won’t work to give a group the assignment and expect them to submit the completed project after a week or two. Therefore, I broke down the projects in multiple steps and supported the process with three tools – a discussion forum for asynchronous communication, a chat area for synchronous conversations, and a document exchange for sending documents for revisions back and forth (all available through blackboard).

The projects focused on a specific group of people and their rights: rights of disabled people, rights of children, LGBTQ rights, indigenous rights, rights of migrants and refugees. Students sent me their topic preference (indicating and ranking their top three choices) in the second week of class, and I formed the groups according to interest. The first step in the groups was then to assign roles. Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the class, I asked them to include the history of the rights of their group (including an international convention if it exists), legal cases/proceedings, and cultural representations of the (rights of the) group. Since I had groups of five students, students could not just pick one area, but had to collaborate within those subject fields. Most groups split the history part and assigned one student to merge the different parts in the end. Others split multiple of the parts. They communicated their roles to me by the middle of the third week of class and began their research. During the fourth week, the groups submitted a draft of their presentation. This required collaboration in the form of bringing the different parts together and held each group member accountable to do research for their own part. I gave feedback, based on which the students finalized their prezi or power point presentations. These were due at the beginning of the fifth week. After another round of feedback, the students then added their narration to the visuals. Both power point and prezi have the option to upload recordings which enables the students to record their own part and then add it to the appropriate visuals. This corresponds to an in-class presentation where each student would be speaking about their specific part. Here, they pre-script their narration, record and upload it. Some groups opted to have one students do the narration for all parts. Based on this experience, I would advise against that. This student would not have done research for any of the parts and might not be able to capture all nuances. The presentations of those who split the work into parts and each student did the research, found the visuals and narrated their own part proved to be more in depth and more engaging at the same time. The narrated version of the presentation was due at the end of the fifth week. During the sixth week, everyone watched all the group presentations and asked questions in a discussion forum. The groups had to check into their own presentations to answer these questions and possibly do some more research to be able to answer them.

As I discussed in the blog post on designing the online course, the group projects allowed me to include more groups of people and their specific rights. While I gave up some control about what students would find and communicate to the others, the benefit of not having to choose only one or two groups of people outweighs this challenge. I confronted the challenge also during the multiple rounds of feedback, steering the groups into a certain direction when they seemed to be missing major points. The LGBTQ rights group in 2014 for instance, decided to pick three countries to present different human rights legislation for LGBTQ people. I asked them to consider an additional table that shows how many countries (and which ones) follow similar laws (for instance: where is homosexuality punishable, where can homosexual couples get married). That way, their creative interpretation of the topic was upheld and led to a very interesting/engaging presentation, but an overall picture of the topic could be included as well. The second option if a presentation doesn’t include the information needed is to add questions during the discussion phase of the project to require additional research or point all students to the missing information. Hopefully, this won’t be necessary as students readily incorporate feedback – I have not had to do this so far.

I assess group projects online as well as face-to-face as a combination of my evaluation, a self- or team evaluation, and peer evaluation. Each group evaluates one other group’s presentation using the same rubric that I use. Additionally, the team members evaluate each other as well as themselves and their contributions to the team’s success. The final grade of the presentation consists of three equal parts: the average of the self-/team evaluation, my grade and the peer grade. This takes into account that some team members might contribute more than others (self-/team-grade) and how well the presentation works as a whole – as a coherent product is one of the main factors of a successful presentation. If one part of the presentation is a lot less successful than the others, the grade can be adjusted as the rubric asks for an evaluation of all three parts (history, legal, cultural representation) and the roles have been assigned in the beginning. I have found though that groups regulate themselves very well and will do extra work to make up for a group member’s missing contribution. They might then indicate that this specific group member didn’t do any work on their team evaluation, but the presentation itself has never reflected this and could still receive a good grade.

Overall, online group projects have proven to work well for me, sometimes even better than face-to-face ones as students do not need to find a time and place where to meet, but rather incorporate the group work into their regular online work. In evaluations, students commented that they were quite worried about the group projects beforehand but that they worked surprisingly well. This might be something worth sharing with students before they embark on their projects to alleviate these concerns.

Have you done group projects online? What tools have you used? Have you found other procedures to work well? What challenges have you encountered? We welcome feedback, ideas, comments and reports of experiences! If you are interested in handouts and rubrics, contact us here.

Teaching Human Rights Outside the Classroom

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As college-level instructors, sometimes we get constrained to the classroom. The thought of a “field trip” seems very elementary, but sometimes we need to get out of the classroom to teach human rights.

On April 4, 2016, the International Federation of Social Workers and the International Association of Schools of Social Work co-hosted the 33rd Annual Social Work Day at the United Nations (http://www.monmouth.edu/school-of-social-work/social-work-day-at-the-united-nations.aspx).  This year’s theme was Refugees and Displaced Persons: Ensuring Dignity and Worth.  The event provided social work students, faculty, and practitioners with a glimpse of what it is like to work at the UN, a formal system with its own culture, language, and protocol.  The panel was assembled to replicate UN Briefings with representation from an Ambassador, a high level UN Staff member, a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), and moderator(s).  #SWDUN2016 panelists included:

  • Ninette Kelly, Director, New York Office, UN Office of the High Commission on Refugees
  • His Excellency Deputy Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, Ambassador Nazifullah Salarzai
  • Guglielmo Schinna, International Organization for Migration, Head, Mental Health, Psychosocial Response & Intercultural Communications
  • Patricia Talisse, MSW Student at Fordham University from Aleppo, Syria

From a pedagogical point, taking a trip to the UN makes the learning come alive, so to say.  Students were also able to realize how the United Nations relies on civil society, opening up job possibilities they had never realized were available to them.  And while there are numerous destinations one can imagine for a human rights-oriented fieldtrip, the UN affords a unique opportunity for students to expand their individual professional endeavors and interests—from outside of the classroom to outside of the country.

The focus on refugees and displaced persons was not only relevant and timely—but it demonstrated the connection between individual work and international policy.  The very nature of the panelists’ positions—and thus their discussion—interwove issues on all levels of practice—from individuals and families, to communities, countries, and ultimately, the necessary governmental collaborations and partnerships (and more) needed to address a crisis that is impacting over 60 million people worldwide.

Perhaps most importantly for social work students, and all students for that matter, the experience was an opportunity to experience first hand that political involvement is a prerequisite for upholding human rights—and that they can, and should, be a part of the equation.  For those students who might struggle with the political side of this work, such a trip to the UN can be an awakening.  Sitting in an expansive and high-tech conference hall at the United Nations in the heart of New York City while experts from around the globe all echo the same sentiment—one that undeniably underscores the fact that these problems are the result of political crises—is an extremely powerful tool to bring awareness and interest to an emerging generation of humanitarian workers and activists.

By Christina Chiarelli-Helminiak and Pier Cicerelle

West Chester University (PA)

Bringing Interdisciplinarity into the Classroom: Book Panels

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Human rights is an inherently interdisciplinary subject. The topics, materials, theories, and studies not only branch multiple disciplines, but involve ideas and insights from multiple disciplines interacting all at once. However, so often we, in our various institutions, approach human rights from disciplinary perspectives. We teach classes in our own discipline with discipline-specific literature, and focus on topics germane to our disciplines. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, it does limit what we can say regarding human rights, or the topics that we can cover. This limitation is inherent to how higher education is structured—we all have our discipline, and it is in this one discipline that we are trained and receive our degrees. This limitation is, however, more of a hurdle than a wall when it comes to human rights education, and it is something that we at Teaching Human Rights try to overcome. I am writing here to discuss one tool for jumping this hurdle and offering a more interdisciplinary learning experience that is student-centric and still fits well within a discipline-specific course: book panels.

While this pedagogical tool is by no means specific to human rights, or to interdisciplinary courses or topics, I think it is particularly beneficial in these settings. But, before I can explain why it is beneficial and what it offers, I need to first explain exactly what I mean. By “book panel,” I am borrowing from the academic world of conferences where “panels” have people discussing the same work, or perhaps body of work, integrating their own insights and analysis into this work and sharing these connections with their fellow panelists as well as the audience. It is this idea—a group of people talking about a specific thing with an audience—that I suggest we can bring into our courses.

The setup is remarkably simple:

  1. select a number of texts (I recommend full books) related to the course,
  2. break students into roughly equal groups,
  3. assign one group to each text,
  4. have the students read the books and write a short paper integrating the book into course material, and
  5. have the students sit together in front of the class and discuss their text, largely in response to questions posed by the professor and the non-panel students.

Building on this set up, students are able to integrate additional texts into the class, offer their insights, and share these with their peers in a way that emphasizes the collaborative nature of learning. The professor is de-centered from the course as students take the lead in teaching their peers about the books they read and how they relate to course topics and themes. The ability to draw more connections and to move the class away from traditional lecture or discussion formats makes this an ideal activity to take place towards the end of the semester. This way, students will have more course material to draw upon, and hopefully will be familiar with one another such that they will fully engage with the activity both as panel members and as audience members. Additionally, bringing in extra texts allows for the class to cover more topics without having everyone read five (or however many you use) additional books.

Beyond covering more topics—although this might be enough to recommend this activity for any class—and allowing students to take a more active part in knowledge generation, book panels offer an additional benefit: the chance for introducing multiple different disciplines into the conversation. Even if the bulk of the course is firmly rooted within one discipline, by carefully selecting interdisciplinary (or at least multidisciplinary) texts, the professor can integrate views beyond those offered by the discipline-specific readings. The use of materials from other disciplines also highlights the ways in which topics such as human rights are interdisciplinary, and how greater insights can exist when we push back against disciplinary boundaries.

When I used book panels in my Theory of Human Rights course, students remarked in class, out of class, and on course evaluations about how they loved the project. In these comments students indicated two main benefits they got from the book panels: (1) the book panels made the course material “more real” as the students were able to apply the ideas we had read about and discussed, and (2) it allowed students to see how the ideas from class transferred beyond the walls of the classroom to other topics. That is, both the disciplinary goals of the class and the students’ broader interdisciplinary education were enhanced by the use of book panels in class (at least, that is what the students self-reported).

I will now walk through how I implemented book panels in my Theory of Human Rights course, while also discussing the books I chose and why to give a practical example of the way these can be integrated into a course. For more information on this assignment, you can find the lesson plan I wrote on this site available here. My Theory of Human Rights course (you can also fine the syllabus as part of our database here) was a 50-minute, 3-times-a-week upper-level course with an enrollment of 45 students. To try to balance the size of the groups with the number of additional texts, I settled on 5 books for the book panels. This gave me groups of nine students, which allowed for if any students dropped (I had the books selected before the start of the semester), missed their book panels, were underprepared, or for whatever reason did not speak up during the panel. I thought the size was large enough to allow for these contingencies, without being so large as to not allow everyone to talk during the allotted time.

I had students, in advance, rank the book options in the hopes that everyone would end up with their first or second preference, and, ideally, no one would have to read the book they were least interested in reading. Each book was scheduled for one class day near the end of the semester. Students were to write a two-to-three page paper integrating their text with the material from the course. These papers were due at the start of class on the day of the book panel for that book. Additionally, to emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of the course and assignments, I had peers from different departments who also study and teach human rights serve as moderators for the book panels. This allowed someone with different disciplinary training ask questions of the students, while also emphasizing the need to explain clearly the connections they are making to course material, as the moderator was not someone who necessarily read all of the course readings. In addition to questions from the moderator, students who were not on the panel were encouraged, and given ample opportunity, to ask questions to the students on the panel. This set up was designed to get students on the various panels to be willing to share, and to do so in clear terms. Moreover, it was meant to emphasize the interdisciplinarity of human rights and the importance of bringing multiple perspectives to bear on course material (a theme of the course that ran throughout the semester).

As I mentioned, I selected five additional texts for the book panels. I wanted to have a range of topics beyond what we discussed, that represented different disciplines and types of media or writing to emphasize interdisciplinary connections, while also making sure that the selections had ample room for connections to course material. I am already on record supporting the use of non-traditional text and media in the college classroom, but the selection still took a lot of careful consideration regarding offering a wide range of texts and topics that were still relevant to the course. I decided I wanted a play, a novel, a memoir, something more art-centric (I ended up using a graphic novel), and a work of political theory more in-line with the main course readings but that covered a topic we did not discuss. The texts I chose were:

  • Dorfman, Ariel. 1994. Death and the Maiden. New York: Penguin Books.
  • Hiskes, Richard P. 2009. The Human Right to a Green Future: Environmental Rights and Intergenerational Justice. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  • Levin, Ira. [1970] 2010. This Perfect Day. New York: Pegasus Books.
  • Mathabane, Mark. [1986] 1998. Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa. New York: Free Press.
  • Satrapi, Marjane. 2007. The Complete Persepolis. New York: Pantheon.

I will briefly discuss each and describe why I selected these. In so doing, I hope to lay out the process I used, not to convince others to use these specific books, but rather to show how others can think about what books would be useful for integrating into their courses through book panels.

In his play, Death and the Maiden, Dorfman addresses issues of truth, justice, and reconciliation in the wake of the fall of a dictatorial regime and the human rights abuses it perpetrated. The play addresses the issue of rape as a form of torture, making this play a possible trigger for some, but a valuable tool for discussion for how sexual violence has been a common tool of oppression and human rights abuse in times of war. I selected this text to get at the dramatic portrayal of human rights issues through the play medium, but also because of the inherent ambiguity involved in the play and the major themes of who is guilty or responsible for human rights abuses, and what should be done with these individuals.

 

 

Hiskes presents a work of contemporary political theory that constructs an argument for a universal human right to a clean environment. This text fit well into my course selection because it is a work of political theory, but covers a topic (the environment) we did not cover in our course readings. Hiskes’s argument is provocative, and the text is incredibly well-written, making it assessable for a wider audience. This is well within the mainstream of course readings, and was part of my attempt to include a text for students who might not feel comfortable branching out beyond the core of the class. However, the text itself is interdisciplinary in its reliance on both work of theory and more “empirical” works as well to build a truly unique argument for considerations of environmental rights as human rights.

 

 

Levin’s novel posits a dystopian world where people have all of their basic needs completely cared for by the all-knowing UniComp, but they lack basic free will. The main character comes to realize the control UniComp has over the populace and escapes to a “free” city that has been removed from official maps. However, upon arrival, he finds out that freedom has a price: poverty, suffering, disease, inequality, and discrimination. The novel poses two strong, dystopian worlds without seemingly arguing that one is better than the other, allowing much room for student interpretation and analysis. The novel is engaging, highly readable, and involves a topic of particular interest to me: the influential power of utopian/dystopian fiction as a teaching tool.

 

 

Mathabane’s memoir of his life growing up as a black South African living under apartheid, details the atrocities committed under apartheid and his eventual escape from South Africa. Mathabane’s recollections of living in apartheid South Africa introduce important human rights topics with a somewhat familiar setting (although we did not explicitly talk about South Africa in the course, most students are at least somewhat aware of discrimination and human rights abuses under apartheid). His portrayal of the rampant human rights abuses is powerful and revelatory for students who are typically removed from such situations. The inclusion of this book also highlight the importance of using first-hand accounts in making human rights topics “real” for students (for an assignment about the use of perpetrator narratives, instead of victims, check out this lesson plan on our site).

 

 

Satrapi illustrates her memoir of her childhood growing up in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution, her time abroad for school, as well as her travails as she returns to and again leaves Iran. This work presents a view of Iran at different times that often times varies from what the average American college student is taught about Iran. Moreover, this work again emphasizes the importance of personal narrative, much like Kaffir Boy, while also introducing questions of women’s rights (need a lesson plan on women’s rights and Perspepois? Then look over here!) and the power of images for relating stories. Imagery is often lost in many classes, especially with topics as potentially abstract as the theory of human rights. I wanted to introduce a work that addressed important questions surrounding human rights and did so largely through images.

 

 

These were the five books I selected, which would work for a variety of other classes, but are by no means the only books that could be used for a similar course. In fact, while all address some interdisciplinary aspect of human rights, they all are also works I felt comfortable with integrating into the course given my interests, experiences, and training. For those interested in working a project like this into their courses, I encourage you to think about what you want the different texts to add, and then pick works that offer these benefits, but that are also works you feel comfortable using. It is important to push ourselves and our students, but that does not mean we have to go beyond our abilities to do so, potentially jeopardizing the learning experience of the book panel. If anyone else has done similar projects with their class, I would love to hear about it in the comments.

Teaching about Race, Police Brutality, and the Black Lives Matter Movement

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black-lives-matter-1011597_1280The THR Database is happy to announce the addition of several resources that can be used to teach about race, police brutality, and the Black Lives Matter movement. The 2014 killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, as well as countless other incidents of police brutality and racial discrimination are often topics that come up during discussions in human rights classes. These issues are directly related to the structural nature of discrimination, as well as to questions about the enforceability of human rights law and the role of social movements when law fails to produce results.

To help instructors find resources for teaching about these topics, we have included a link on our Resources page to the Anna Julia Cooper Center. Housed on the campus of Wake Forest University, the AJC Center has a wealth of resources related to the study of the intersections of gender, race, and place.  Among the resources offered by the Center are a collection of syllabi, including one entitled, “POL 210: BLACK LIVES MATTER: PERSPECTIVES ON BLACKNESS, STATE VIOLENCE, AND RESISTANCE” from Professor Melissa Harris-Perry. (With Professor Harris-Perry’s permission, we have also included this syllabus in our syllabi database).

Do you have favorite resources for teaching about these topics? If so, we’d love to hear about them!

Journal Recommendation: Radical Teaching about Human Rights

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Volume 103 of the Radical Teacher is dedicated to the teaching of human rights. Theoretical contemplation as well as practical suggestions on how to teach the UDHR and other human rights documents, on how to address neoliberalism, and on how to encourage critical thinking are at the heart of the issue.

In addition to reviews and teaching notes, the volume includes the following essays:

Nancy Flowers: “The Global Movement for Human Rights Education”

Gillian MacNaughton and Diane Frey: “Teaching the Transformative Agenda of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”

Robyn Linde and Miakila Mariel Lemonik Arthur: “Teaching Progress: A Critique of the Grand Narrative of Human Rights as Pedagogy for Marginalized Students”

Melissa Canlas, Amy Argenal, and Monisha Bajaj: “Teaching Human Rights from Below: Towards Solidarity, Resistance and Social Justice”

Mary Nolan: “Teaching the History of Human Rights and ‘Humanitarian Intervention'”

Shane McCoy: “Reading the ‘Outsider Within’: Counter-Narratives of Human Rights in Black Women’s Fiction”

The Volume is available for free at this link: Radical Teacher Vol 103

Assessing Student Outcomes Online

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When I planned my online class “Introduction to Human Rights” a few years ago, I started like most of us these days with the student outcomes. What did I want students to take from my class and in what way might this differ from a face-to-face class? Then, I thought about how to assess these outcomes and as a third step what material might prepare students to succeed in the assessment. The biggest difference, and at the same time challenge, between an online and a face-to-face class is the way in which we can or cannot test knowledge. How do we make sure that the students do not just use the internet or the reading material to answer test or quiz questions? I don’t think we can, and I also think the more important question is: do we need to? This leads me back to the first thought: what do I actually want my students to take from this class?

I identified five interrelated course objectives. By the end of the semester, students should be able to (1) recognize key terms and major institutions in the Human Rights field, (2) critically interpret news and scholarly articles on Human Rights issues by questioning assumptions and theses, (3) analyze Human Rights issues from different disciplinary perspectives, (4) justify personal Human Rights standpoints with supporting evidence from course readings and materials, and (5) analyze a political situation, or cultural product, in terms of human rights. Only the first objective is a knowledge based one, all others use the information given to train specific skills; skills that will enable the students to succeed in other human rights classes if they choose to continue on.

To test for the first objective, I opted for self-graded quizzes within the course management system (blackboard in my case). Students could take these quizzes twice and needed to achieve a score of 80% or higher to receive full credit. I provided hints on where to find the answer to the question for those that students got wrong the first time and thereby actually encouraged the students to use the material and look up the answers. Instead of creating a test situation based on the assumption that student might or might not “cheat,” I welcomed the use of sources. The modules explicitly stated: “During the quiz, you may refer to your readings.” One reason for this was that I find this approach more authentic: I wanted students to be able to identify relevant information to answer the questions correctly. The second reason was that I actually wanted students to learn about key institutions and issues. By providing hints and second chances, students were more motivated to engage with the reading material and find the correct answers, gaining knowledge in the process.

All other objectives center on grappling with human rights issues as students encounter them in the news, in popular culture and in their daily lives. Associative writing, discussions, as well as short papers addressed these objectives and showed skills and increasingly self-reflection.

Each module began with a blog activity which asked students to write about their initial thoughts regarding the module’s topic. This activity was to be done without referencing outside sources and was meant to activate the students’ previous knowledge as well as their ability to associate. Since I wanted this first activity to be low stakes, it was graded for completion only. Most modules also ended with a blog activity in which students revisited their initial thoughts. Here, they included the module’s material to reflect on what they had learned over the course of the module. These posts were graded on the level of reflection, use of sources and appropriateness of the response. Not everyone had to change their initial thoughts, but they still backed up those first blog posts with quotes from the reading and thereby showed the integration of new information into their original argument.

Some blog posts led to direct discussion within the blog area of blackboard. When I asked for a definition of human rights in the first module for instance, students read blog posts of at least five peers, commented on their takes and integrated what they learned from reading into their own definitions. At the end of the module, we settled on a few course definitions that we revisited at the end of the course.

Discussions were at the heart of the course. They are the closest we get to face-to-face interaction where we can learn from each other, listen to each other’s arguments, formulate an opinion, revise or defend our standpoints and come to deeper understandings of human rights issues. Discussions worked in two stages. Students came up with an initial response to one of the questions asked (I usually provided three to four questions per discussion). These answers should be original and thoughtful, clearly drawing on the module’s readings and possibly outside sources. After this first step, students had two to three days to read the other entries and respond to at least three of them, engaging in a discussion that would enhance or expand the responses. Sometimes, I assigned additional reading after the first response to introduce new arguments that could become part of the expansion of the issue and argument (see lesson plan on torture and previous blog post).

In contrast to the blog activity, discussions only work when students participate. Blog posts can be graded as single items, discussions, however, need discussants to lead to results. This challenge became apparent during the first time I taught the course when I had formed groups of five. If only one or two people posted their initial entries, a limited discussion followed. I, therefore, recommend discussion groups of eight. Even then not all eight will post, but it ensures enough participants to get lively discussions and productive back and forth exchanges. More than eight participants could lead to confusing threads but it is possible to have some questions discussed by the whole class (I do this for group projects only as I will discuss in a future blog post).

The last objective and assessment take students’ different interests and disciplines in account. Often, students in intro classes are freshmen or sophomores who have not settled on a discipline yet. For them, I wanted to offer different disciplinary approaches to explore their options going forward. For those who have already settled on a discipline, I provided challenges to go beyond their disciplinary comfort zones. What this meant in practice is that I asked students to write a more social science oriented paper and a more humanities centered paper. This is a change I have made from first teaching the class, when students chose one or the other. While I still like that students have the choice, I also value experimenting with different genres and wanted to provide this opportunity for all students. Instead of one longer paper in the end, I therefore asked students to write two shorter papers, one for each approach. Additional choice became available since the two papers could refer to any of three modules. Students decided which two of the three modules they were most interested in to write their papers. At the same time, this meant that I didn’t have to grade all 25 papers at once which is a benefit not only in accelerated summer classes.

In their short papers (2-3 pages), students related the module’s content to a popular film, book, or to current events, demonstrating an analysis of a (political) situation or a cultural product in terms of human rights. Students incorporated three secondary sources. When students chose films or books, I encouraged them to think outside of the box and to elect a film that is not already obviously about human rights: Harry Potter instead of Hotel Rwanda, The Lord of the Rings instead of Braveheart, The Hunger Games instead of 1984 for instance. I like when students choose these kind of popular films particularly because they develop a critical eye for underlying ideological stances, parallels to historical events and human rights issues that go beyond what the news discuss. Ideally, students will continue to watch the world around them critically when they leave my class, which I value much more than the concrete, testable knowledge they could ever gain in an online or face-to-face class.

What kind of assessment have you used in online classes? What were your challenges? What worked well? I am interested in hearing about your experiences!

Teaching Human Rights in Political Science

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Two of the THR editors, Jack Barry and Shaznene Hussain, recently participated in the American Political Science Association (APSA) workshop on Teaching Human Rights. During the workshop, two panels of human rights faculty presented a number of pedagogical challenges and opportunities they have encountered in teaching human rights courses. Those participating in the workshop were from a diverse set of institutions, ranging from larger, public research universities to smaller, private Liberal Arts colleges in the United States and Canada.

Many of the topics discussed at the workshop were ones that the THR Working Group debated when thinking about the goals we wanted to accomplish by creating a database of human rights lesson plans, syllabi, and other pedagogical resources. For instance, a number of political science faculty members spoke about the importance and necessity of engaging undergraduate students by incorporating a variety of resources such as cases studies, statistics, service-learning opportunities, guest speakers, documentaries, literature, and film into their human rights courses. Although the workshop was primarily concerned with teaching human rights within the discipline of political science, many of the participants commented on the benefits using of multi- and inter-disciplinary course material to help students better engage with course topics.

The challenges of teaching about human rights to diverse groups of students from varying disciplinary backgrounds was also major topic of discussion during the workshop. As editors and contributors to the THR database, we think these workshop discussions are useful in thinking about the goals and structure of specific lesson plans and in prompting us to take into account the educational and/or social experiences of students in our classes.

Below is a summary of many key pedagogical themes addressed by the panelists and participants at the APSA workshop on Teaching Human Rights:

 

Interrelated challenges in teaching human rights:

  • Challenging the rescue/savior narrative of human rights advocacy
  • Challenging a Western-centric view of where human rights violations occur, i.e. West=human rights culture, non-West=human rights violating culture
  • Adequately taking into account students’ backgrounds and socialization (ex. race, sexuality, nationality, geographical location within the U.S. or Canada, class, urban/rural/suburban, military service, age etc.) in terms of knowledge and ideological perspective when selecting case studies to teach about specific rights.
  • How to motivate students who might appear indifferent to human rights issues, or on the other hand, those who might feel overwhelmed and discouraged by the variety of human rights challenges we encounter.

Strategies for addressing the above challenges:

  • Use case studies to illustrate implementation/functioning of a human right and to demonstrate the importance of a human rights framework to address various types of injustice and violence
  • Caution students that learning about specific human rights abuses can be emotionally difficult and, if necessary, provide students with alternative ways to engage with and complete course requirements
  • Include cases from the U.S. and other Western countries in addition to those from developing countries to highlight human rights issues as global issues

 

Other challenges in teaching human rights:

  • Challenges in teaching interdisciplinary courses, or classes made up of both social science and humanities majors. For example, teaching social science majors about the importance of personal narratives, poetry, literature, art etc. and teaching humanities majors about the importance of institutions, laws, power relations etc.

Strategies for addressing the above challenges:

  • Make use of available experiential or service learning opportunities. For instance, invite people in local human rights (or related) organizations to present their work in class
    • However, in doing so, faculty also need to take care that organizations and individuals we invite into courses are not exploited or made additionally vulnerable as a result of sharing information about their experience and/or work in human rights.
  • Promoting inter- or multi-disciplinary work to advance the teaching of human rights, including bringing human rights into courses in the Sciences, Business, and Engineering

 

Additional suggestions for overcoming challenges teaching human rights in the academy:

  • Sharing pedagogical resources among faculty and instructors is important and desirable
  • Advocate institutional support (including financial support) for teaching human rights, particularly in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
  • Promoting inter- or multi-disciplinary work to advance the teaching of human rights, including bringing human rights into courses in the Sciences, Business, and Engineering

As instructors, or students, of human rights, what are some of the challenges you have encountered in teaching or learning about human rights? Are the challenges or strategies mentioned here familiar to you? Do you have any advice or alternative ideas to the ones discussed at the workshop on how to address common challenges in teaching human rights? We would love to hear from instructors and students about which strategies have worked and which ones have not worked in your classrooms.

Dual Challenges: Introducing Human Rights Online in 6 Weeks

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This summer, I taught “Introduction to Human Rights” online for the third time. I have adjusted the course significantly, changed topics and assignments and moved the content “closer to home”. Today, I will share some of the things that I have learned, thoughts behind organizing the class and in general about teaching online. I will talk about assessment and tools in a future post.

Three years ago, I received a grant to develop the online version of Intro to Human Rights as a summer class. This grant came with the support of an instructional designer who built my class in our course management system (we use Blackboard) – support that was invaluable. The designer did not only make the class look better than I ever could, but also helped me to find the right tools that worked best. I could concentrate on the content and at the same time learned about how to set up the different tools, grade book etc. which now also informs (and I want to say has improved) my face-to-face and hybrid classes.

The most difficult thing that every instructor of summer classes faces is how to break down content that is usually spread out over 15 weeks to be taught in only 6 (I actually opted for an alternative summer session in my first year so that the course ran 8 weeks, but cut it down to 6 weeks in my second year, see syllabi of the first, second and third year). It was clear to me that I wanted to make the class as engaging as possible and, therefore, decided to sacrifice some foundational knowledge to be able to introduce a variety of issues. I wanted to include certain groups of people who are protected by specific human rights legislation and certain groups of rights such as economic and social rights as well as specific rights violations.

Choosing women, indigenous people and refugees as my groups in the first year covered a few groups, but left out others. The biggest change, which also allowed me to cut the class down to six weeks (from previously eight), in the second year was that I moved these groups into projects and only introduced group rights as a general theme. The students picked a group of people to research in a group project, thereby covering those groups that were most interesting to the students and at the same time more groups than I could have with the limited modules at hand (I will talk more about the challenges of online group projects in a future post). Groups of people this past summer, consequently, encompassed disabled people, children, refugees, LGBTQ, and indigenous people (I covered women’s rights within the module to introduce group rights in general). I could influence the content of each presentation less than I could have if I had presented the groups’ rights, but I value the advantages of letting students decide what information to present. Each project found a unique way of presenting information. The rubric made clear that they had to include historical information on their group’s rights, the UN convention (if there was any), legal proceedings as well as representations in film and literature – a set up that mirrors the interdisciplinary nature of the class.

Coming from a political science, history and literature background, I feel most comfortable in those areas. It was challenging to me to teach Economic and Social Rights. In my first year of teaching I borrowed a textbook approach, utilizing the corresponding chapter from Michael Goodhart’s Human Rights: Politics and Practice. I realized, however, that the students were not as engaged and attributed this lack of interest to my own lack of familiarity with the topic. Building more on my strengths in the field of literature, I adopted a “textbook” this time around: Freedom: Stories Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights published by Amnesty International, a collection of short stories that correspond to specific articles of the UDHR. When it came to Economic and Social Rights, I had students read the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as well as four chapters from Freedom that dealt with labor rights, health, education and poverty. The students then wrote blog posts analyzing one or more of those stories in terms of the corresponding rights. In an attempt to relate human rights violations that often “happen in a land far away” to the students’ environment, they also thought about ways in which these stories speak to situations in the US (something that I asked students to do in almost every module, thus moving the content “closer to home”). As in other modules where I used short stories from the book, the responses were outstanding (with some exceptions of course). Students carefully analyzed not only the rights and found more issues than the ones the stories were supposed to tackle, but also applied the stories’ content to a multitude of current events. This allowed us to speak about emergent themes that I could not have thought of when planning the class in Spring and made the class more tangible.

Since the beginning, I teach two concrete areas of violation: genocide and torture. The genocide module gives me the opportunity to talk about intervention, prevention and jurisdiction, and at the same time about responsibility (of a country and of the international community in general). It is a challenging topic to teach, but also a rewarding one as it puts into question some of the notions the students come with and enhances not only critical thinking in general but also a critical attitude towards news media and the ways “we” talk about these topics.

Similarly, the torture module aims to promote a critical attitude, this time towards popular media. In my first two years of teaching the class, I have worked with the tv show 24 (see lesson plan here). It came as a surprise to me in the first year that students defended Jack Bauer’s ease of utilizing torture in “ticking time bomb situations.”  Here, a disadvantage of online classes became clear: when I realized where the discussions were going it was almost too late to intervene. Students had already agreed on the advantages of torture and readily accepted them as a means of fighting terrorism. While I usually try not to force an opinion on students, the usual “try to argue this opinion from a human rights standpoint” did not work and students used utilitarian arguments to show the need for Jack Bauer’s actions. Fortunately, I had one student who adamantly argued against this mainstream class opinion and I asked her to contribute in each discussion forum. This way, I avoided lecturing and ensured this student’s future participation in class. The second time around, I was better prepared and let the students willingly run into this first skewed perspective of defending Bauer’s actions. I, then, asked everyone to read two articles that showed flaws in the arguments and then revise their first standpoints. This worked really well and led to some “wait a minute” realizations that I am convinced will be retained better than lectured content ever would.

A challenge that I still face, even after adjusting the course more and more over the years, is that I have to give up a lot of control and that I cannot always be sure whether the students receive all the information. Do they actually read my announcements at the end of each week that are my only way of wrapping up each module’s content? Do they ever go back to see what others have responded to their discussion posts after they are done with the assigned number of postings? And of course do students actually gain the knowledge that I set out to teach them about human rights? I will talk more about the last point when I talk about assessment (including quizzes, blogs, discussions, papers and projects) in a future post, but I do believe that blog posts and discussions promote a working knowledge of human rights (rather than factual knowledge), that will help students succeed in other human rights classes they choose to take after this introductory one. Can an online class do this better than face-to-face? Probably, as every student has the chance (and actually needs) to engage in conversations, form an opinion, defend it and respond to other arguments. Where in face-to-face classes, we might lose some quiet or shy (or inattentive) students, here they will be included (well some won’t but that is a different story). However, the emphasis on discussions can be realized as well in hybrid classes where there is an added advantage of catching some flawed arguments and more direction of learning. For some more information on hybrid classes, check out Cathy’s blog post here. There is one advantage of an online class that should not be underestimated, however, one that applies to the summer session itself. It is the possibility to earn credit and move towards graduation in a timely manner for students who have to work during the summer or are on internships abroad. For them, online classes are essential, and with this in mind I will continue on improving my summer online classes.

I look forward to thoughts, experiences and exchange in the comment section!