From Fall 2011 through to December 2012, the John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights will implement the Children’s Right to Participate Project which focuses on transforming our schools and communities through fostering of rights and responsibilities.
How are we going to do this?
- Create lesson plans and educational resources stemming from the youth experiences in the project. These will be the key resources utilized for future engagement and citizenship programming in schools. These resources will involve short videos on social action, citizenship and HR issues as well as educational curriculum linked lesson plans to accompany them. A teacher professional development workshop will be created to disseminate the resources but also to build the capacity in child HR education.
- Work with two schools (one urban and one rural) to implement a sustained engagement/citizenship program for children focused on fostering rights and responsibilities. The schools will represent a pilot model for sustaining meaningful engagement on rights, responsibilities and diversity. A minimum of 4 programs will be delivered at each school throughout the year. A key focus area will be environmental stewardship in the pilot program.
- Host a teacher professional development day will be planned where 50 teachers will have enhanced capacity as well as access to resources to support meaningful human rights and diversity education in their classrooms. The educational resources developed in the project will be distributed here and the teacher PD workshops piloted and evaluated.
- A youth engagement forum will be hosted in early 2012 bringing together students from the pilot schools as well as other schools at an event hosted in partnership with the Telus World of Science on the theme of water and stewardship. The event, intended to model the Global Youth Assembly, will be a sharing and learning experience for up to 300 young leaders.
Most programming on diversity and human rights tends to focus on high school youth with a real gap left for the younger ages. Children are much more susceptible and open to ideas of understanding difference and it is critical, before habits of prejudice and discrimination set it, to engage and allow our young children to experience inclusion, dignity, respect and responsibility through citizenship. These foundations will create the longer term change in communities that we need to foster a society that embraces diversity and realizes human rights.
