Dear Colleagues, I have been quietly and silently watching this series of communications go from many of us to each other on the aspect of the evaluation of our HRE initiatives. I have thought over it carefully and now decided that I shall present below what we have been up to in our case. Please do find enclosed however a brochure which should explain to each of our readers who we are. However, since it is always known that people who read our mails are unwilling in the first place to even open an attachment !!! I am presenting in brief who we actually are. This special human rights education program for children in schools is being experimented by People's Watch - Tamil Nadu for the past 6 years, ever since 1997. ____________________________________________________________________________ ________ Phase I II III IV V VI Period 97-98 98-00 99-00 20-02 02-05 02-05 District 1 10 29 29 10 11 No.of Schools 9 122 238 258 134 33 Schools private priv/gov/corp TNCRI ADW/GTR Diocese CSI Class/Std. 9 8, 9 7, 8, 9 6 6 6 Students 1756 21,320 33,785 25,819 14,330 5,000 Teachers 90 315 730 492 251 80 ____________________________________________________________________________ ________ The table above indicates that we have covered a variety of schools from 1997 till now, increased the number of students and teachers over the years engaged in the program, covered different regions of the state Tamilnadu (India) in the past few years of our intervention. Similarly, we started our experiment in the 9th standard and gradually, we have come down to the 6th standard in the current program. Phase IV of our human rights education program is currently being carried out in the government Adi-Dravidar Welfare & Government Tribal Residential schools run by the Department of Adi-Dravidar Welfare of the government of Tamilnadu. This program is the first of its kind in the government schools in the whole of South Asia. The Hon'ble Chairperson (Former) of the National Human Rights Commission of India, Mr. Justice J. S. Verma appreciated this experimental human rights education program for children in schools through his letter to the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu last year in November 2002. We also have constituted a State Level Advisory Committee on Human Rights Education in Schools comprising of administrators, teachers and other educators, academics and government officials. We are a group who are known as Peoples' Watch - Tamilnadu, based in the state of Tamilnadu in South India. We are engaged in the process of human rights monitoring and intervention nationally and internationally and have over the years also strayed into the arena of human rights education. Our focus has of course been concentrating on the promotion of several experiments in human rights education in schools in South India. In short, we have so far carried out experiments in over 1000 schools involving over 100,000 students and over 1250 teachers in all - this is from the year 1997 onwards. We are now at a stage when this experiment is being carried out in many a schools run by the government of Tamilnadu and we have also received the special appreciation of the National Human Rights Commission of India in this effort of ours. However, let me hasten to add that we have never suffered from initiatives on our part but really suffered in the quality executions of our programs for the lack of resources. Now only has the government never come forward to support us financially, within India or the state of Tamilnadu (the resource crunch for the same being the official reason) but even funding agencies have not found such programs for initiating the teaching of human rights education in schools covering such a large section of students even during the UN Decade for Human Rights Education not sufficiently useful to them to come forward and fund. We have not lost hope and we continue our efforts in this direction. I am not aware of any other experiment involving such a large number of schools, teachers and students so far in Asia dealing with a program of human rights education in schools. The positive side of the issue is that the government of Tamilnadu is now seriously considering at the level of the Secretary Schools Education to see that we are entrusted a further experiment covering all government, government aided, corporation and Matriculations schools in the district of Dharmapuri and Sivagangai and the Corporations of Salem, Chennai and Madurai.This would entail the following figures in terms of our present engagement: 4000 schools, 5000 teachers and 150,000 students of the age group 11 or 12. However, the catch really is that I also have to find the resources for this program that is to be supported by the government!! If we are serious about the government taking over from us, we then have to initiate the first step - and finding resources for this important but huge steps is also our concern. Is there anyone who is interested in assisting ?? Now coming to evaluation, we have a lot of material available with us but which require to be processed and I am sure this would be extremely valuable to anyone who is interested in pursuing the agenda of HRE in schools during the Decade. The first material that we possess is also the details of almost all the children who have passed through these years of HRE in their schools and this data base would permit us access to at least some of them who have completed their secondary education in school now to find out from them and also compare these results from those students whose students who did not have an opportunity of going through such a human rights education program. Similarly the volume of data that we have would also provide us the childrens' assessment of each of the teaching modules that we have administered to them. We also have the reactions of almost all the teachers to the carrying out of this experiment as well as an assessment of the teachers engaged in this program by the teachers. The data that is available would also be specially useful since it would as well indicate what would be the reaction of the boys and girls separately as well to the many questions that were posed to them at the end of their course. I am therefore participating in this long discussion that has been going on for so long now on the evaluation of the impact of HRE only to state that we have raw data and would look forward to at least some of you to either come forward yourselves or come forward with willingness to make available interns/volunteers to process large volume of data that is available for so many years (1997-2003) now. Any volunteers coming forward ??? - institutions, researchers, resource providing agencies ??? kindly let me know. For those of you who are interested therefore in hard work but dealing with experiments of human rights education in schools, here is a concrete example. Regards and best wishes to all of you who read this, Henri Tiphagne, Executive Director, Institute of Human Rights Education, People's Watch - Tamilnadu. ======== Global Human Rights Education listserv ======== Send mail intended for the list to <hr-education@hrea.org>. Archives of the list can be found at: http://www.hrea.org/lists/hr-education/markup/maillist.php If you have problems (un)subscribing, contact <owner-hr-education@hrea.org>. **You are welcome to reprint, copy, archive, quote or re-post this item, but please retain the original and listserv source.
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