HUMAN – handling universal matters and norms in human rights education
17-24 November 2019
Kaunas, Lithuania
Project description
Recently, the understanding and views of the concept of HR have been changing, on the basis of many facts that brought several questions to the mind of our communities, in Europe and beyond. Nowadays, topics such as terrorism, economic crisis and mass immigration, need to be discussed in depth. They have become a common ground for debate and constant evaluation by people who often find difficult to share different perspectives on such controversial topics. Furthermore, the new technologies evolved to a point in which many different issues created by modern instruments have been arising (cyberbullying, online hate speech, etc.) Contingency makes it difficult for young people to understand Human Rights and how they work.
The discussion and struggle for Human Rights once considered a very “fashionable” topic, is not such popular anymore. Information coming from many parts also makes the youngsters more confused. The rising extremism, with an escalation of discrimination and xenophobia, has been a plague all over Europe, at different levels of society, bringing to the creation of popular and political movements that carry out nationalist or, more in general, non-human rights oriented approaches. In 2015, the latest Compass manual for Human Rights Education was released by the Council of Europe, and new versions of other important toolkits on different HRE related topics (such as Gender Matters) have been updated in the latest years, as well as new ones have been published (T-Kits on conflict transformation, etc.). The training course proposed in the frame of this project was based on the Compass, other manuals developed by the EU-COE partnership, and strategies proposed by the European Charter for Education on Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights Education, to provide an ample spectrum of modern approaches to HRE for young people. Many youth workers are still not aware of these latest editions and they manifest curiosity and interest when getting to know about them. The ones who have never heard about it before become easily excited about this opportunity and would like to learn more in order to share its practices with their peers and in their communities.
Project objectives
– to explore new challenges and trends in Human Rights education for youth;
– to equip youth workers with skills necessary to apply different educational approaches to human rights in the groups of young people;
– to provide youth trainers and youth workers a space to get practical working experience on Human Rights Education for youth;
– to share examples, issues and best practices for Human Rights education for youth in different contexts in Europe;
– to widen the network of youth workers and trainers on Human Rights education for youth;
– to foster the use of the Erasmus + programme as a tool for promotion of Human Rights among young people in Europe.
Project activities
The activities of the training course were very interactive based on non-formal education methods. Through the activities, the members of Be You Association who attended the course, have acquired more information about Human Rights history, about scale of rights. They have experienced Human Rights through simulation activity, debates, group discussions, they have find out more about realities of other participating countries, they have discussed about challenges in activities with young people on the topic of human rights, also they have explored human rights education tools sharing good practices with the other youth workers. Also they had the opportunity to apply tools and methods practically conducting workshops with the other youth workers during the project.
As a result, the acquired knowledge, skills, experience, tools and methods will be used in local activities with young people. Also these methods will be exploited in the upcoming Erasmus+ project coordinated by Be You Association called „ReAct Against Hate”. The training course will be implemented in September 2020.
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