1) Please share one of your human rights teaching experiences that you have found to be successful. How did you adapt your teaching to the particular age group? What kind of methods did you employ?
I have found that it is vital to know who your audience is at the time of preparing your material for teaching. It is essential that whatever you are going to teach must be placed on the hanging pegs of their experience. If it is not, it will be reduced to a lecture, which also has its place as a teaching methodology. The learning experience will be less engaging for that audience, however.
In my experience the participative approach is very effective. For example, on the right to education if you can get the audience to reflect and speak on a positive and a negative personal experience of school, that can be a useful platform to build on the content of the right. I have also used what appears to be unrelated topic to approach another. "Who are you willing to share your house with?" was used to determine prejudices on which anti-racism training was based. A short clip from a popular situation comedy or a video has been a successful platform for launching a human rights discussion.
The skill in this method is drawing the information necessary from the audience. The use of a flip chart to note comments would make the audience believe that the knowledge has been within their grasp and all you have done is provoke their thinking for it to be exposed.
2) What aspect of teaching human rights have you found the most challenging? Are there, for instance, certain topics that elicited strong reactions from students? If so, how did you deal with them?
I have found communicating human rights information to children challenging because the lexicon for legal writing makes one so comfortable. I have been engaged with Amnesty International on a project to devise a time-line on the history of human rights for 10-12 year olds. In my research on the universality of human rights, after the 9/11 New York bombings, the equality of faith issue had to be addressed in the current multi-cultural Ireland. I then found material from the Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu histories that illustrated universality of human rights. The result of this has been a board game in which the history of human rights is alluded to in a context of equal treatment of all faiths. (I have included a picture of the game. Let me know if you want a hard copy mailed to you).
3) Based on your own experience, do you have any tips for other teachers to look out for? What material have you used and would you recommend?
Key to all teaching is good preparation. Apart from the expert books on human rights of which there are very many excellent ones, the internet resources are numerous and include documents, video clips, reports, blogs, maps and current human rights issues. If you wish to write to an expert for information, you might be surprised at how many are very helpful.
Dr Vinodh Jaichand, Deputy Director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights