Students in this unit analyze the novel The Reader for its standpoints on human rights and the concept of coming to terms with the past. They reflect on the concept of guilt and justice after human rights violations/crimes against humanity and relate the German past to a more personal present.
The Bystanders
This lesson plan wishes to facilitate participants to become aware of the role of bystanders during critical times of history, and explore the circumstances that encourage or discourage bystanders’ active participation or passivity. It specifically draws on an interview with Albertos Beraha, a Jewish man living in Greece, as he discusses his history, including his experiences during WWII.
Assessing Student Outcomes Online
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
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
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!
Bringing Art Back In: Incorporating a Humanities Assignment Into a Social Science Oriented Human Rights Course
While our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.
Ray Bradbury, preface, Zen in the Art of Writing
Like many instructors trying to navigate the choppy waters of interdisciplinary pedagogy, I tend to fall back on my disciplinary strengths – in my case a Ph.D. in political science. Not surprisingly the focus of my “Introduction to Human Rights” course, especially the lectures, tends to be rooted in the social sciences. Yet I wanted the humanities to be more present in my course as a counterweight to my own ‘social sciency’ tendencies so I incorporated an assignment asking students to investigate the intersection of art and human rights through a detailed focus on a work of art (or an artist’s body of work). The primary learning objective of the assignment was for students to draw on the key concepts of the course and to apply them in analyzing a work of art that addresses or engages human rights. In a blog post/paper assignment—posted online and shared with the class—students were given free reign to find and select a work that somehow related to the theory, history, or practice of human rights. The choice of artwork was not limited to fiction, non-fictional art, or historical fiction. The prompt asked students to keep the following in mind when writing their responses: What aspects of human rights does your chosen work of art relate to? Are you the first to find this connection? What do critics say about the art? In crafting their blog posts, students were encouraged to incorporate photographs, images, video, or music into their entries, and to provide live links where appropriate. The blogs were posted on a private course website where students were required to comment on at least two of their fellow classmates’ posts, thereby the goal was that this would facilitate student-led collaborative learning and exchange of ideas in an organic, low-pressure environment.
The blog posts ranged greatly in terms of artistic genre and content. Some students investigated paintings, photography, and even cartoons, while others explored human rights in film. A few found extensive human rights references in song lyrics, some from mainstream pop songs, although most of the music-based analysis was derived from singer-songwriters devoted to social causes. In fact pop music provided a rather surprisingly successful medium, for instance two students, working independently, wrote blog posts on Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” and its message of acceptance of gay, lesbian, and transgender people. Another strong post focused on the human rights implications of Francisco Goya’s work, specifically the paintings The Second of May 1808, and The Third of May 1808. Furthermore, allowing students to find artwork that appeals to them led the class, and often this instructor, to discover more obscure artwork with human rights ramifications, such as The Wavy Gravy Movie: Saint Misbehavin, a documentary about an activist for peace, who is a native to the Connecticut area near where the class was taught.
Despite many contenders, my favorite student blog post took up Top of Form Dylan Garity’s poem “Rigged Game,” a spoken word piece addressing the difficulties faced by ESL students in the U.S. education system. Garity’s powerful performance of the poem – as part of the 2013 National Poetry Slam – inspired the student writer to purport that the performance of the poem was “very moving to hear” and connected the poem to the broader theme of human rights, including Article 26 of the UDHR, noting “Although ESL students in the U.S. are not technically being deprived of an education, in practice they are deprived; they are not getting the same quality of education as other students for whom English is their native language.” The power of the spoken word, and the topic, engaged the students, as many responded online to the post, including a student who revealed that they struggled personally in English language only ESL classes.
From my experience with this assignment, I found that students learn best when they are allowed to research topics that interest them; especially in human rights. Students, including underperforming ones, produced high quality work, and I was impressed by the depth, breadth, and quality not only of their selections of art but of their analysis. I would recommend using this type of assignment later in the semester—at least in an introductory class—after concepts, theory, and practice of human rights have been widely discussed. This assignment proved to be a useful way to evaluate how students apply what they learned about the abstract ideas of human rights to real world examples beyond the classroom. It also is a good way to allow students the opportunity to explore the utility of art for opening new viewpoints about the world and sharpen their powers of ‘critical interpretation’ of a piece of art and exposure to varied types of cultural criticism. I still need to work through a few pitfalls with the assignment including: How to help students, especially those who have no idea of which piece of art to analyze, find one without dictating my choices/opinions on them? How to encourage more critical responses, as students proved to be more cheerleaders of one another on this assignment (especially compared to debates in class)? Finally, some students were shy to share their posts in-class, despite producing some of the best online posts. I would be curious to hear about other teachers’ experience with similar types of assignments, how to avoid these pitfalls, and how to effectively bring more humanities into a social science oriented course without giving art criticism the short shrift.
Prompt available: Bringing Art Back In-Assignment prompt.