Popular Education Bookshelf - 1 - Human Rights

Popular Education Human Rights Training Manuals

I know of three excellent sources of human rights education material: Equitas, the Human Rights Resource Center of the University of Minnesota Human Rights Center and The Council of Europe. Each if these organizations has numerous manuals and education resources and in each case you've gotta dig down into their websites to find things. And the Council of Europe website is a baffling maze. Within these manuals you'll find hundreds of education activities on human rights, of course, but they also include numerous group activities, energizers, games and more. All of this is easily adaptable to other educational contexts. So, here are links directly to a variety of manuals.

EQUITAS:

1. The International Human Rights Training Program 2006 - This is the manual of the annual training program Equitas has done for many years. It's a three-week course and this manual has been designed strongly based on a Freirian education model and with a very good participatory ethic. I've been a facilitator at this event and can vouch for the effectiveness of Equitas' pedagogy. On this page you'll find PDFs of both the facilitator and participant manuals in english and french. This page will no doubt be updated with the 2007 manual once this year's event (in June) has happened.
2. Training for Human Rights Trainers Book 1 (pdf) and Book 2 (pdf): both of these are excellent train-the-trainer resources and are also available in Russian on this page. In December in Nairobi, i facilitated a version of this program.
   
3. Equitas Manuals: Equitas has a good practice of developing and publishing manuals for the many types of trainings and consultations they do. This page has a wide variety of manuals.
   

HUMAN RIGHTS RESOURCE CENTER: There are numerous manuals on this site though they could do with some reorganization. You'll find nine of them (as html pages) here and there's an overview page here which will lead you to yet more resources. Most of these have been developed with primary and secondary school students in mind but all of them are adaptable to adult education situations as well. The Human Rights Education Handbook (#5 below) in particular is an excellent training manual for facilitating both human rights and many other educational processes. Here are direct links to nine of their education manuals:

1. Human Rights Here and Now
2. Economic & Social Justice and as pdf (446K)
   
3. Raising Children withg Roots, Rights & Responsibilities and as pdf (669K)
   
4. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Rights
5. The Human Rights Education Handbook and as pdf (852K)
   
6. Lifting the Spirits: Human Rights & Freedom of Religion or Belief and as pdf (1,874K)
   
7. The Beyond September 11 Project and as pdf (221K)
   
8. The Activist Handbook on Indigenous Peoples Human Rights (working draft)
   
9. Sustainable Economics Curriculum

THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE: I learned of these materials from a Catalyst Centre intern who came to work with us from the Czech Republic. Once again, these manuals contain numerous activities that, though developed for human rights work, are very adaptable to other education contexts. From a quick glance at their website i can see that there are an awful lot of resources here in multiple languages (it looks like the Council of Europe has a lot of money). But their website is byzantine - i found my way to these resources three different ways from Sunday. Here is an index page for something called Learning and Living Democracy - but the links to some of the youth manuals don't seem to be working anymore. And Compass has a number of links to manuals in multiple languages. Here's a link to a couple of their manuals:

1. COMPASS: A Manual on Human Rights Education with Young People and as pdf
   
2. Education Pack: ideas, resources, methods and activities for informal intercultural education with young people and adults and as pdf