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.