We, the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, are about to launch our alumni e- forum, and I must say I am really impressed by this community site! In my mind, a place to “meet” is crusial for creating and, foremost, maintaing communication between practioners and theorists. We have been neglecting to make use of the many former students in our activities and trainings/ courses, and I believe, and hope, that the forum could change that. Now, a way of creating a tool for incorporating practical experiences in the curriculas in higher educations could be to “recycle” the knowledge gained by the students, who hopefully would have hands on experience of using their theoretical knowledge. But still, this is not a way to actually creating practical experiences for students, but rather of building on the experience of past students. I am curious to know if anyone has ideas on how to best make use of alumni in trainings and academic programmes?

Mikael Ohlsson

Programme Associate

Raoul Wallenberg Institute

Sweden

Students, and alumni, are the human rights activists of the future. And not just those students who take courses that specifically focus on human rights. Human rights are cross/multi discplinary. The course I teach at the University of Minnesota is the capstone course in the undergraduate leadership minor - leadership for global citizenship. The U of M, as many other academic institutions, is investing heavily in the concept that students should spend time studying abroad and that all courses should be taught in the context of a global mindset. The undergraduates on the leadership minor come from across campus, business school, liberal arts, medecine..........and they come to the leadership minor with the specific hope that they can have some exposure to real world experiences. The framework for the minor is social change and the students use a public achievement framework for their work. They work with local high school students on projects such as making their campus more green, installing a public crossing outside the school. They learn how to mentor, lead and advocate. With the advent of a 'community organizer" to the White House, they are excited and engaged at the possibility of "being the change we want to see".

When they reach the global citizenship semester, they are fired up and ready to apply their skills but then frustrated at their inability to implement hands on projects. This is where technology is increasingly coming to the rescue. Enter New Tactics! The NT database has proved a wonderful resource for the students' country leadership development projects. Here they can get a feel for practical, grass roots tactics that have impacted human rights around the world. For instance, the business students can relate to the importance of micro enterprise to impoverished communities that are currently subject to such abuses as child labor and human trafficking and through that prism, address the question of corporate social responsiblity. The NT tactical map affords them a way to help start designing their projects by identifying the relationships at the heart of a problem and mapping their own way to work with others involved locally, nationally and gobally.

Soliya:  http://www.soliya.net/ is another innovative project that was started by a former journalist and conflict resolution expert. It is a moderated dialogue that puts western students in touch with students from the Muslim world to discuss cultural and political issues and work together on putting together videos that document human rights abuses from varying perspectives.  The Girls International Forum: www.gif.org in Minneapolis is a project that works with young girls in developing countries and here in Minnesota to put them in touch with each other to share the issues that concern them and to train them to advocate for their own rights on issues that they identify such as education, economic access and health.

My own background is that of a practitioner turned educator. I used to think that I had done it the 'wrong' way round by doing the practice first and then the theory. But increasingly we are coming to see on the leadership minor that practice (and failure) are the entry points to fire up the students enthusiasm. Once they have carried out some hands on projects and seen the challenges, they are ready to analyze and debrief and discuss lessons learned. So for instance, a reading about the policy change cycle was introduced after their country leadership project and the students were immediately engaged as they realized their projects were an EXAMPLE of  policy change. Previously we had done this same reading before the project and it had very little resonance.

There should not be a disconnect between the classroom and the real world, we do not have time for that. So encourage other human rights activists that you know to become educators and bring that real life experience into the classroom.

I would appreciate any and all ideas of other resources that can help simulate or bring practical experience into the classroom and look forward to the rest of this fascinating dialogue.

Amy Weismann, Deputy Director, University of Iowa Center for Human Rights

For those of us in rural communities and small towns, outside large metropollitan areas where NGOS and service providers engage human rights as a framework for their activities, connecting students to "real life experience" in the human rights field, especially to a diverse array of approaches to human rights work, is sometimes a challenge. We all share the insight that teaching about the practice of human rights requires imaginative, cost-effective strategies as well as a network of support. I've found that vidoeconferencing provides an immediacy of experience that is quite impactful, and that it helps build a network of support for teaching about human rights without the need for practitioners to undertake expensive, time consuming (and carbon emission producing!) travel to reach your students. I've had great recent experiences utilizing videoconferencing technologies to bring practitioners from around the world into my undergraduate classroom in Iowa City. From the feedback my students have provided, I believe it has opened opportuntiies for bridging the theory-practice divide. I'll share the nuts and botls with you here.

I've experimented with the use of vidoeconferencing using two systems supported by the University of Iowa. One system requires site-to-site transmission and allows for very high quality, real time video and audio interaction between a class of students and the practitioner, both of whom , however, must be situated in respective rooms at each location equipped with cameras and microphones. The system is internet-based and is called "H.323/IP". Here is the support website for the H.323/IP program at the University of Iowa: http://at.its.uiowa.edu/digimedia/collabtools/collaborationenvironments.shtml>.

Although not yet universally available, many colleges and Universities with this technology are interested in encourgaing its use as a teaching tool and make it available to faculty and staff for use in classroom teaching, with tech support to boot! And in many cases, the viodeconferecne can be recorded for student review and use in teaching at a later date.

Another resource, one that has the potential for much wider usage, is Ellminate Live!. it is particularly well suited for human rights related classrooms because it can be accessed and used by anyone with a computer, including practitioners in living in communities around the world without access to high speed internet. It provides mutliple channels to run at a time so that practitioners can present together from different locations, allows for powerpoint and video to run simulataneously with the live presentations, has a live chat option so that students can pose questions to the practitioner or if multiple practitioners are on line with the class at once, can pose them to one another for the class to see.

Elluminate Live's training and support web pages: http://www.elluminate.com/support/training/

University of Iowa's Elluminate Live service: http://globalcampus.uiowa.edu

In some cases, the convenience of a videoconference, especially from a home or office computer terminal, has allowed practitioners whose time constraints would have prevented them from attending a class to share their expertise nonetheless from the convenience of their home or office.

Through these two systems, I've been able to connect my class with practitioners from Berkeley, California to Chicago, Illinois, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, to The Hague, The Netherlands.

If your school does not support these or other viodeconferecning systems for teaching use, you may wish to ask why, and request that your technology services unit invest in supporting a system. It has the potential to bring the world to your students!

Mingzhen Ge, Shandong University, Human Rights Center, Law School, China

There are really many kind of resources which I can find in China. But the class hours are limited, so how to select the proper resources is more important. In Shandong University, there have at least three human rights education courses which I teach and participate all. There have two human rights education courses in Law School, one is for undergraduate students, and another is for graduate students. The third human rights courses is for students who are from other departments. These three courses have different motives. Students in different courses also have different knowledge background and have different needs in human rights education.

Another importand thing is that, till now, most of the resoures which is proper to choose for some specific topics human rights teaching are in English, so sometimes it is a bit difficult for students to use such resources.

Mingzhen Ge, Shandong University, Human Rights Center, Law School, China

One of most important experience of teaching non-legal back ground students is that, in the process of teaching, it is necessary for teachers to teach students some basic law knowledge, this will be very helpful for these students to understand human rights issues. For teachers, teaching is also one process of studying. Teacher should give enough chances to students to express their own opinions about human rights in class, teachers will also  learn some new ideas about human rights from their opinions, or some of these opinions will be very helpul for teachers to think about some special human rights topics.

I would like to develop a web resource page for area educators who are interested in incorporating human rights in their classrooms at both the K-12 and university levels.  Do you know of any good websites with engaging, easy-to-use curricular resources that would be helpful for educators that are new to human rights education?  I'd welcome ideas in all areas of human rights education from around the world, including additional web resources that you use to teach about the application of human rights.

Mingzhen Ge, Shandong University, Human Rights Center, Law School, China

It is important to educate human rights educators, especially in developing countries. In China, in the past years, RWI and other Nordic human rights institutions have organized some programmes to educate human rights educators.

Mingzhen Ge, Shandong University, Human Rights Center, Law School, China

it is so nice to participate this dialogue, but for my schedule, I did not have enough time to come to net to discuss. I think different teachers use different resources and teaching methods, .Anyway, as teachers, we should study from each other in order to make human rights education more effective  in different cultures around the world.

Thanks a lot for Nancy's invitation  and other participator's exellent words in the past days.

Mingzhen Ge

Law School, Shandong University

Hongjialou No.5, Jinan , Shandong

China, 250100

Tele: 86-531-86672658

Mobile: 13256788368

Fax: 86-531-88566412

E-mail: gemingzhen [at] sina [dot] com

              gemingzhen [at] yahoo [dot] com

The general understanding of human rights and how they apply in our daily life is very under developed. While gross abuses are usually recognized, for example laws and practices that deny access by asylum seekers to health care, everyday practices that effectively deny access to health care are not usually recognized as abuses of human rights. For example lack of access by people with disabilities living in supported residential facilities to the health care services available in their local community. Given this it is very important to "translate" human rights principles into everyday language and to locate them in everyday experience. When we do this we start to transform the culture of our community into one that values human rights.