Going into education, I plan to teach in high school classrooms. During their high school years students are forming their identity and questioning their purposes or motivations. Much of their work is seen as pointless, tedious, and uninteresting to them. To add something to the monotony of schoolwork, I would love to incorporate lessons on human rights, both pertaining to the curriculum of the class and as its own topic.

This quick clip comes from the website for the Human Rights Watch. This organization and the work they have done would be the tools that I’d use to implement the education of human rights in the classroom. Now one might ask, “What exactly makes this organization a useful tool for a high school class?”

To begin, it is important to make it known what the Human Rights Watch is and what their impact goals are. This is an organization of advocates who do not take government funding, and instead take donations from those who share the same values and collaborate with other organizations that aim to solve global injustices. These advocates investigate, expose, and change these issues to bring everyone closer to having the human rights they deserve. The impact they aim to make in this world is to make it equitable to everyone, regardless of belief, racial, ethnic, or gender differences.

Now, to use this organization’s work as a tool in my classroom, I would make their website and their YouTube channel as my main forms of reference. Their site is such a useful tool as it is easy to navigate to a specific item. The tabs across the top organize articles by country or rights topics as well as easily find their longer research reports, visual media, and more about the organization. The Youtube videos they make are short and to the point, which would not waste a lot of class time and keep student’s attention.

For a smaller assignment such as homework, I would ask my students to pick a topic under the “Topics” tab on the home page and find a recent article that interests them personally. I would ask them to submit a short response on why they picked the article they did and their thoughts and reflections on it. The next day in class, a discussion on their choices would be an interesting and active way to get the class started.

The Youtube account tied to the organization and their website also provides quick, yet informative videos on current events regarding human rights. These videos would be useful in making connections within a larger assignment. For example, a book we examined in school “A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khaled Housseini and it gave a grim reality on the lack of rights of women under the Taliban. While the novel was fiction, it reflected a larger issue in the real world, which was women’s rights, especially in Middle Eastern society. Giving students a real world example in a current video such as the one below, would allow them to better conceptualize the severity of these issues that the author was attempting to do.

Using this organization’s work as a tool in the classroom will benefit my student’s by allowing them to discuss something new. I would like to guide them to find something on this website that makes them passionate learners who want to make a change in this world. Some may be inspired by the stories they read about their home country. Others might connect to the global LGBT+ rallies they see in a Human Rights Watch video. Regardless of their inspiration or motivation, I would be proud if they even just found that. However, the goal would be for students to not only gain interest, but to know there are people making a difference and if they would like, they could too.