[hr-education-na] Relation between HRE and civics

[***Moderator's note: This message was originally posted on the Global HRE
List.***]

Dear Human Rights Educators,

The discussion on human rights and citizenship education leads me to share
how my organization, Street Law Inc., has been trying to incorporate human
rights into U.S. curriculum materials and teaching in the schools. With
almost no human rights education courses (K-12) presently in U.S. schools,
it became clear that one way to make it a reality here was to integrate
human rights content into the curriculum materials for certain courses and
then train teachers in how to teach human rights.

We did this by taking our very popular high school law textbook, "Street
Law: A course in Practical Law", and in the introduction unit included a
new chapter on human rights, and then in each subsequent unit: Criminal,
Consumer and Housing, Torts, and Individual Rights, we added a Human
Rights USA activity so the students could see that human rights applies in
our own country and not just overseas.

Incidentally, in the U.S. the term citizenship is now rarely used on the
high school level.  The terms for these courses where human rights may be
most likely successfully infused are "civics" "law" and "government". In
my view, a campaign is needed on the national, state and local levels to
make sure the language of human rights is infused in the state standards,
curriculum guides and textbooks for these courses. I would be interested
in hearing from anyone who has done or is trying to do this.

Any teacher who is interested in seeing how we incorporated human rights
in our Street Law text can request a complimentary copy from the
publisher: Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 1-800-334-7344
http://www.streetlaw.org/content.asp?ContentId=181


Ed O'Brien
Exeutive Director
Street Law Inc.
1010 Wayne Avenue, Suite 870
Silver Spring, MD. 20910
(301) 589-1130 ext 235
(301)589-1131 (fax)
www.streetlaw.org



======== North American Human Rights Education listserv ========
Send mail intended for the list to <hr-education-na@hrea.org>.
Archives of the list can be found at:
http://www.hrea.org/lists/hr-education-na/markup/maillist.php
If you have problems (un)subscribing, contact
<owner-hr-education-na@hrea.org>.
**You are welcome to reprint, copy, archive, quote or re-post this item,
but please retain the original and listserv source.