After several years of thinking about the best way to bring Speak Truth to Power into pre-service training, the Pädagogische Hochschule Luzern and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Switzerland started their pilot project last week. Together with the Zürich International School, they were able to offer the students a very special program.
The Specialization Program in Human Rights Education (SPMB) at the PH Luzern consists of four modules for all levels of education. The SPMB aims to let students of the PH Luzern experience learning about, through and for human rights. During this course, the students learn about human rights and children rights and even take a study trip - last year it was to Berlin. There they studied what happened during World War II and the holocaust. They learned about personal stories as to understand why human rights are so important.
For the students that were finishing up their SPMB program this year, a special new project was developed by Thomas Kirchschläger of the PH Luzern and Stephanie Eger of RFK Human Rights, with the help of Alysha Heller and Kristie Lear of Zürich International School (ZIS). During a whole week, the students would learn about human rights education theory and pedagogy in the morning and work on their own human rights education lessons in the afternoon. However, these would not only be theoretical lesson plans, but will actually be used by ZIS.
During the kick off on Monday, both ZIS and RFK Human Rights gave a short presentation on what it is they do and their expectations from the students for the final assignment.
Thomas Kirchschläger presented the students on a daily basis with what it means to teach about and through human rights. During those mornings, the students also had to take part in different interactive activities.
On Thursday, Stephanie Eger took over to talk about teaching for human rights. Fitting, since RFK Human Rights is very active on this front and believes in the power of the life stories of human rights activists to inspire young people to engage in and for human rights.
During the afternoons, both Mr Kirchschläger and Ms Eger were present to assist the students with developing their own lessons.
On Friday morning, it was finally time for the students to present their work. There was a total of six teams: two teams created lessons for kindergarten, two teams worked on lessons at the primary school level and two took on the challenge to create lesson plans for grade 11 (secondary level).
As it turned out, the hard labor the students had put into their work this pas week, payed off. Both Mr Kirchschläger and Ms Eger were well impressed with the concepts they presented. The morning consisted of a wide range of ideas, from making empowerment balloons to an actual human rights village. All lessons entailed aspects of the Speak Truth to Power concept, like story telling and using real life people and human rights defenders as an example.
The students will now have time to refine their lessons with the recommendations that were made, before they will present their work to ZIS.
When the students were asked if they could imagine teaching human rights education in their own future classes after they became certified teachers, each of the answered with an assured: YES!
