PhD Candidate
University of New Brunswick
(Fredericton)
For educators interested in human rights, consider the recently opened Canadian Museum of Human Rights as your go-to source for lesson plans and teaching ideas. As someone who has been watching the museum develop from afar, I look forward to the day when I can visit in person. Yet, for those of us restricted by distance, the museum’s web site provides an effective outreach service that is equally beneficial.
As Mireille Lamontagne has noted in her recent blog
post, the museum’s Canadian Human Rights Toolkit provides a convenient hub for
lesson plans geared towards grades K-12, which can be filtered by province,
language, grade level, and subject area. The hub currently boasts more than 200
teacher-reviewed resources, including lesson plans, teacher’s guides, manuals,
handbooks, and study guides. What makes this tool kit most promising, however,
is that it is a work-in-progress. As such, it represents an evolving database
of teaching resources, useful for Canadian classrooms, and intended to grow
over time with user-generated content. In this way the Canadian Human Rights Toolkit promotes an on-going exchange on human rights education
in Canada. As educators, the more we contribute to this exchange, the more we
can add to the national conversation.
Criteria for
submissions to the toolkit are based upon four basic points:
- Related to human rights;
- Available in English and/or French;
- Intended for the Canadian classroom;
- Aimed at students aged 5 to 18;
