Trading in “a Summer Off” to Learn about Human Rights
This summer—like every summer—the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba fills its classrooms with teachers. Teachers and principals return to school to engage in coursework and push their understanding a little deeper. This year one of those sites for learning was in a brand new course that was developed and delivered in collaboration with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR). This Summer Institute, Teaching and Leading for Human Rights Education offered teachers an opportunity to take an in-depth and critical look at human rights and human rights education. The Summer Institute examined the theories, topics and issues in relation to human rights education, particularly within the context of the establishment of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Teachers and administrators were pushed to consider notions of story and narrative in relation to human rights in order to ask questions, such as: What and whose stories get told, and told by whom and for what purpose(s)?
Because of the collaborative nature of the course, the 25 teachers who took part were given a unique opportunity to understand the ideas behind the bricks and mortar of the CMHR and be exposed to the expertise of its staff as well as scholars and authors who work in the field of human rights. For example, the teachers were fortunate to learn from Allan Sibley about how the architectural design of the CMHR “speaks” and how the building is much more than a container of exhibits. Clint Curle, Head of Stakeholder Relations for the CMHR outlined some of the tensions embedded within the design and creation of exhibits related to human rights. Emily Grafton, Research Curator of Indigenous Content, conveyed to teachers the traditional and colonial histories of museums, particularly in relation to Indigenous peoples.
Besides spending a day in the new Manitoba Teachers Society sponsored classroom at the CMHR, teachers also spent two days at the Murdo Scribe Centre on Selkirk Avenue, home to Manitoba Education’s Aboriginal Education Directorate, working with Helen Robinson-Settee and Myra Laramee to consider more deeply the histories and rights of First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples and how these issues can—and must be—examined more deeply within our classrooms.
The course was an intense 10-day event. The teachers who came from across Manitoba and worked in grade levels that varied from early years to adult education engaged in questions about history and narrative in order to critically reflect on their own practices as teachers and educational leaders, to consider the stories that our education system, our schools, and we as educators tell, via curriculum, material and resource decisions, and portrayals of oppression. In doing so, we invited scholars from across our campus and from other disciplines to bring a broader perspective of human rights through lenses of law, history, art, storytelling, and child psychology.
In our work throughout this course, Teaching and Leading for Human Rights Education teachers were pushed to consider their places of privilege and power and were asked: how might we, individually and collectively, think within a human rights framework and consider actions that will make the world more just. As far as “summers off” for teachers, it’s our hope that this one will be hard to beat.