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

Thanks for the Street Law refresher, Ed.  I think you are right and
particularly on two scores.

This morning I read an op ed about the sexually-explicit teasing and
torture used at Abu Ghraib by female guards which was shocking but
provides a wide open door for us human rights/law educators to enter and
engage high school and college students in debate and discussion.  Ted
Koppell once chided Amnesty International for wanting better media
coverage of "our" issues but not being prompt and nimble in seizing on
issues in the nation and wider world, that have human rights implications.
Abu Ghraib brutality it seems to me is such an event/moment, and fits in
well with your Street Law materials (which I have and cherish, and direct
teachers to, regularly).

The second perfect teaching moment (human rights education-wise) is the
current brouhaha at University of Colorado-Boulder about the three year
old comments/essay by Ethnic Studies Professor Ward Churchill about 9/11.
Interestingly enough, nothing about Abu Ghraib/Guantanamo/several civilian
murders by police in the Denver Metro area has raised as much dust and
fuss as Churchill's somewhat clumsy, tasteless "class" analysis of the
underlying causes of 9/11.  We teachers in the neighborhood certainly
ought to be discussing and debating torture.

And, yes.  We educators should perhaps be working on two levels.  Doing
HRE, as well as encouraging our teacher friends to do HRE, would be level
one, and investigating niches for HRE in state standards and proposing
language and curricula to willing state lawmakers is level two.  These
activities ought to happen simultaneously and "agencies" like HREA and
Amnesty and Street Law ought to continue to be scorekeepers as to what is
going on nationally and internationally in HRE for current teachers and
for teacher-in-training.

Ellen

PS  I cannot close without adding that hearteningly AIUSA's Children's
Edition Urgent Action Network includes hundreds of parents and teachers
who are doing human rights education regularly by running letter-writing
sessions with students, scouts, Sunday schoolers, and daughters and sons.
I feel convinced that every letter brings the writers one step closer to
the compassion we all seek to develop in students, and to a lifelong
commitment to equality and justice.

  _______________________________________________
Ellen V. Moore <emoore@aiusa.org>

Amnesty International USA Urgent Action Program
POB 1270,  96 Tejas Lane,  Nederland CO 80466-1270,  USA
Tel: (303) 258-1170;  Fax: (303) 258-7881

ASK ME ABOUT FIRST APPEAL PLEDGE PROGRAM
    AND CHILDREN'S EDITION URGENT ACTIONS.
http://www.amnestyusa.org/aikids/guide.pdf
http://www.amnestyusa.org/amnestynow/fapp.html

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about
things that matter."                       Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
_____________________________________



Ed O'Brien wrote:

>
>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.
>




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