Dear Abraham, Thank you for engaging us with your questions. You are considering, as we are at HREA, what this small school experiment can say about a human rights-based approach in a school setting. I have the following responses. n Tue, 14 Mar 2006, Abraham Magendzo wrote: >1. How do you prepare the students to face their cultural, social, >economical and political context, that shows that human rights are violated? >In other words how do they face the contradiction between what is >happening in the school and what is happening in their near and broad >world and society ? A key goal for the school in terms of formal curriculum is to help students make these connections naturally. Jessamyn has organized weekly lessons that teachers can use in their "Advisory" classes. These use an article or topic from the newspaper and have students engage in open conversation about them. So students learn about a current event but there are strong connections to their life experience. The school also has its own contradictions as many of the "problems" of the neighborhood are also there in the school. It is not utopia yet. >2. Are the teachers prepared? Teachers self-select to teach at the school so they already have a personal interest in social justice and human rights. Jessamyn works full-time at the school, so part of her job is to support teachers in their learning as well as students. There are two weeks of professional development before school begins and part of this is focused on human rights. Then, Jessamyn continues to feed the whole school community information and ideas about human rights, and works with teachers directly in the classroom. So HREA provides a lot of support to the teachers, who get familiar with human rights more and more each year. You can read what the teachers have to say about their experience by looking up the most recent issue of "Article 26". This is a publication published by Amnesty International-USA and it highlighted the school a few months ago. It contains an interview with two teachers: 9th grade Social Studies teacher Latoya Massey ( http://www.amnestyusa.org/education/massey.html ) and English Language Arts teacher Paula Lettiere ( http://www.amnestyusa.org/education/lettiere.html ). >3. Why the experience is developed in a poor setting? Is human rights >only violated in the poor communities? What about the afluent >communities? It is the coincidence of the New Visions/Century 21 Schools grant that is focusing on developing small schools for disadvantaged youth that has given us the opportunity to work this way in the school. I am personally thrilled that this is happening because it allows us to really develop an empowerment model for urban, minority youth in the States. This has been underdeveloped. Warmly, Felisa ------------------------------------- Felisa Tibbitts, Director Human Rights Education Associates (HREA) - US office PO Box 382396, Cambridge, MA 02238 USA Visiting address: 97 Lowell Road, Concord, MA 01742 (tel) +1 978 341 0200 (fax) +1 978 341 0201 (e-mail) < > (Web) http://www.hrea.org ======== Global Human Rights Education listserv ======= Send mail intended for the list to < >. Archives of the list can be found at: http://www.hrea.org/lists/hr-education/ **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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