[tsl/leadership] Fireside Workshop: Know Your Rights!
I'd been looking for an excuse to use this great video on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for a while now, and yesterday I finally got a chance to. It was in a fireside workshop I did in Teen Second Life I titled "Know Your Rights!" which was kind of a 101 on human and civil rights, what the difference is between the two, and the struggles to defend them historically as well as up to this day. (The workshop, as is the case of many of the firesides we do, is actually a riff off of a classic GK face to face workshop on the same issue called "Youth, Understanding Rights and Civic Participation").
Conducting it in SL allowed me to more easily add the video as a nice appetizer to the subject, and I knew that SL teens, being more design oriented than average, would enjoy its clean aesthetics. It led into a substantive discussion on the differences between civil and human rights (civil are granted by the state, human are implicit in being, well, human), and I was impressed by the number of teens that participated that were able to articulate the difference between the two.
Our main activity was called "The Prioritization of Rights", and in it teams had order the US Bill of Rights in terms of importance. One of the things that I found most interesting in hearing the teams present their opinions was how much variance there was between the groups about which rights they felt were most importance. Freedom of speech and religion were often towards the top, while I think I only heard freedom from cruel and unusual punishment in the top five once. It really highlighted how hard it is to rank rights that are so basic, which is, of course, the point of the activity.
We closed off with a more broad based discussion about the nature of rights and how they're valued (or not) in different parts of the world, and whether certain ones are given more attention or priority than others. Inevitably, one of the teens brought up the recently passed Proposition 8 (which bans gay marriage in the state of California), and talked about how in his opinion that was a violation of basic human rights, and others from the group chimed in about whether they felt it should even have been on the ballot considering it takes away rights (most felt it should not have been). It was really heartening to see teens looking at the world through this lens of basic human rights and evaluating what they saw on that basis. We'd live in a better world if everyone did the same.
Comments
This sounds like a great discussion. Thanks for sharing the video. How many teens participated? And, how do you manage the small group task in TSL? Do the students use IM for small group discussion and local chat for whole-group discussion?
This prioritizing task reminded me of something similar in one of the curriculum units posted on our website. It's a unit on Venezuela. Students are asked to prioritize Quality of Life Indicators from the UNDP. So, they do it first from a US perspective. Then, they learn a little about Venezuelan history and try to speculate how Venezuelans might rank order the indicators. So, something like "freedom from arbitrary arrest" might come out pretty low on the list for Americans, but for a Venezuelan it might be very high. I like this activity because it encourages kids to consider what Quality of Life is all about, and it also highlights the importance of trying to see things from another perspective and understand why someone else might have such a different view. You can download the Venezuela unit, along with a bunch of others on the World Affairs Council website at http://www.world-affairs.org/globalclassroom/CBA.htm
Posted by: Laura Adriance | November 14, 2008 3:27 PM
Hi Laura,
Yeah, the workshop activity of having to prioritize things that inherently shouldn't have to be prioritized is a classic device found across many curricula, especially those dealing with civic or international issues.
In terms of the discussion in TSL, we had about a dozen teens involved. For the small groups some went off to their own area to brainstorm and discuss and others used group IM. We used the main chat for group discussion, I facilitated the workshop over voice, and each group had a representative that presented their work either via group chat or voice.
Posted by: Rafi Santo | November 17, 2008 10:28 AM