Presentation of the new OSCE ODIHR
Guidelines on Human Rights Education for Secondary School Systems
Lunchtime event: 12 p.m. – 1.30 p.m. Thursday, January 24th Place: HGSE, Eliot Lyman
The event will provide an opportunity to present and discuss a new tool for promoting effective human rights education in secondary schools. The publication offers guidance on developing curricula, enhancing the teaching and learning experience, preparing teachers and trainers, and evaluating the work done. The Guidelines are the result of extensive consultations with human rights educators and trainers, representatives of governmental agencies and inter-governmental organizations, human rights activists and other practitioners.
School systems play a central role in preparing young people to understand, cherish and claim human rights. Teachers need to be educated in human rights and on how they can be taught in schools and human rights values should infuse school environments so that human rights become a “lived” experience through education. The Guidelines on Human Rights Education for Secondary Schools provide benchmarks for planning educational programming so that lessons on human rights resonate in the classroom and motivate learners to respect and apply human rights in their own lives.
The speakers/moderators of the side event are Mr Pavel Chacuk, Human Rights Advisor (OSCE ODIHR) and Ms Felisa Tibbitts of Human Rights Education Associates (HREA) and the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Please find their biographies below.
Mr Pavel Chacuk
Pavel Chacuk is based in Warsaw, Poland at the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE/ODIHR): http://www.osce.org/odihr/
The OSCE, with fifty-six participating States, is the world’s largest inter-governmental regional security organisation. As the specialized institution of the OSCE dealing with human rights, democratization and elections, ODIHR has been actively working to promote quality Human Rights Education (HRE), both through the national level, as well as by developing policy tools for the whole OSCE area.
Among the recent examples are: a joint ODIHR-Council of Europe–UNESCO–OHCHR resource “Human Rights Education in the School Systems of Europe, Central Asia and North America: A Compendium of Good Practice” http://tandis.odihr.pl/documents/hre-compendium/en/index.html. The resource was produced in 2010 and since then has become one of the most world popular reference tools for school – related human rights education practices.
In 2012 ODIHR developed the Guidelines on Human Rights Education for Law Enforcement Officials http://www.osce.org/odihr/93968?download=true and the Guidelines on Human Rights Education for Secondary School Systems http://www.osce.org/odihr/93969?download=true The documents present a comprehensive set of guiding principles which should be the basis for mainstreaming human rights in all spheres of the education sector, both related to schools and to the system of training the law enforcement. ODIHR Is currently finalizing the Guidelines on Human Rights Education for Health Workers and Professionals and Guidelines on Human Rights Education for Human Rights Activists.
Mr. Pavel Chacuk has been a Human Rights Adviser in ODIHR since 2004. He has been responsible for Human Rights Education and Capacity Building Programme in the Human Rights Department. He holds Master’s degree in International Relations (Central European University, Budapest) and a degree in Law (Grodna State University, Belarus). He was working for human rights NGOs in Belarus (Ratusha, VIT), and taught human rights at the university in Grodna. Pavel has also been a trainer in human rights and law-related education since 1998. During his term in ODIHR he has been directly engaged in the development of all the HRE resources. Apart from that work, Pavel has been involved in the monitoring of human rights situation in a number of OSCE participating States, for example in Uzbekistan following the 2005 Andijan events and in Georgia following the armed conflict between Russia and Georgia in 2008.
Felisa Tibbitts is Founder and Senior Advisor of Human Rights Education Associates (HREA), and is also engaged as Adjunct Lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the UN University for Peace where she teaches courses on human rights education. At the Harvard Kennedy School of Government she co-teaches a course with the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy called “Tools for Human Rights Practice”. Ms. Tibbitts has carried out trainings in over 20 countries and provided technical assistance or served as a textbook author in educational initiatives in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, China, Croatia, El Salvador, Estonia, Gaza, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, Morocco, Romania, Ukraine and the United States. Ms. Tibbitts has published numerous articles, manuals and book chapters in the area of human rights education and contributed to the development of resources for the OSCE/ODIHR , OHCHR and other UN agencies.
Last updated by CMEI Jan 16, 2013.