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Human Rights Defenders and Social Justice Warriors: An Advocacy Club for Tweens

The Advocacy Club for Tweens is the place where young people who care about human rights and social justice can learn about how they can engage to make the world a better place for everyone.
Kirsten Bowman JD
Average rating:
4.9
Number of reviews:
(768)
Popular
Class

What's included

1 live meeting
30 mins in-class hours per week
Homework
Most weeks the club meetings will end with an action students can take to work toward change. Completing the action is optional, though encouraged.

Class Experience

This Advocacy for Change club is specifically designed for young tweens who are interested in knowing more about social change, and developing a greater understanding of global human rights. The goal is to meet and engage with other social justice peers and to begin to critically think on how to act to help ensure human rights are respected around the world. 

Each week we’ll look at a different focus or issue pertaining to social justice and human rights. Weekly topics will be selected based on learner interest and current events.  Learners will learn about the issue, critically engage in the topic and decide if our club should take action for change. During the course of critical engagement, reflections on high quality, relevant and trusted sources will be considered. Topics of perspective, bias, primary sources, close reading and corroboration will be considered.   We’ll learn about different ways of making decisions as we decide as a club about whether we should take action on a particular issue. We’ll explore various ways in which the group could take collective action or other individual ways to take action. 

Examples of potential topics could include the right to healthy air and water, the rights of Indigenous Peoples or the challenges of global rights to education.  The decisions on topic areas will be student driven, allowing the club to explore consensus building and other group decision-making strategies. 

Examples of actions the club might decide to engage in could be sending an email to a government official asking that he or she make a particular policy decision that will help the human rights issue, or a letter writing campaign to build awareness for the rights of children to access equal education or a direct action the group could take such as deciding not to buy a product that is harmful to the social justice issue that the group is working on.

Some weeks, the club may host a guest speaker who is a particular expert or has particular experience with the issue the group has decided to address such as refugee resettlement etc. 

The teacher will use occasional video or lecture but the class will remain dominantly discussion driven with the teacher acting to facilitate respectful conversation and debate as she guides students through different decision-making processes.
Learning Goals
Students will learn: 
— about issues affecting humans around the globe
— about different ways of making decisions as a group
— about how government works and how they can be involved citizens
—about many ways they can work for change they want to see and how to act constructively when they feel passionately about injustice
— about using technology such as email and social media for communication
learning goal

Other Details

Parental Guidance
The conversations will be facilitated to remain age appropriate. However, parents should consider that social injustice and inequality can, at its core, be unsettling for young people. If your learner is particularly sensitive to these issues, parents should consider whether weekly exposure will be healthy for them.
External Resources
Learners will not need to use any apps or websites beyond the standard Outschool tools.
Joined May, 2018
4.9
768reviews
Popular
Profile
Teacher expertise and credentials
I am a human rights lawyer who has been working on issues of human rights and social justice for more than a decade with the United Nations and living on four different continents in my human rights work with the UN. Further I am a human rights educator who has taught human rights law for 10 years and has been teaching issues of human right to middle and high school students for over three years. I care deeply about social justice issues and feel passionately about sharing this experience with young people who can engage  in creating a more just world for us all. 

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Live Group Class
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$7

weekly
1x per week
30 min

Completed by 4 learners
Live video meetings
Ages: 10-13
4-15 learners per class

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