Global Kids, Sabienne Brutus and Tene Howard
In this session, a student and staff member from the Global Kids organization presented the work of the High School for Global Citizenship Human Rights Activist Project (HRAP). The HRAP project aims to involve youth in dialogue around human rights issues. Students choose one topic to explore more intensely as a group, and then spend several months learning more about the topic. HRAP trainers work with students to not only understand the topic deeply, but make connections between how the topic affects them and may affect others in other parts of the world. Students are also encouraged to take some sort of action that will have a positive effect on the topic. This year, the students at HSGC chose Education as the focus for their project. They spent time dialoguing about the purpose of education in their own lives, and they learned about issues surrounding education in other parts of the world. They decided to focus on high school drop out rates and wanted to have a positive affect on this issue by working to inform middle school students of what it takes to succeed in high school, in the hopes that early exposure to success in high school would encourage middle school students to stay in school. They created a workshop for middle school students and presented it in several middle schools in the community.
The presentation that Global Kids gave enabled the groups to look at an alternative model of dialogue that can be used when working with teens. This model, focused on making sure that there was some sort of action built into the dialogue model. They acknowledged that when working with teens, it is especially important to have a focus of action so as to make sure that the young people feel that the dialogue has purpose and a positive affect on their lives. It was clear that the young people who participated in this project were able to not only delve deep into the topic of education, but they also learned very important skills through the project and were able to have a positive affect on the issue they chose.
www.globalkids.org
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