The important applied nature of students’ work in the classroom

An experiential education in human rights is essential to ensure that human rights defenders are knowledgeable on the issues they engage in, the people they interact with, and the instruments they use. Being able to apply that knowledge remains the main goal of human rights students. The Human Rights Program offers courses that ensure students have a chance to work on real-world issues with the education they have acquired. 

Visiting human rights practitioner and engaged scholar Professor Diana Quintero offered her students the chance to engage with real world human rights issues through her workshops and directed research projects this past Spring. The outcomes of these opportunities highlight the important applied nature of the work that students complete in the classroom, both in advancing their own human rights education and the larger human rights agenda.

An experiential education in human rights is essential to ensure that human rights defenders are knowledgeable on the issues they engage in, the people they interact with, and the instruments they use. Being able to apply that knowledge remains the main goal of human rights students. The Human Rights Program offers courses that ensure students have a chance to work on real-world issues with the education they have acquired. 

Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) Submission on Indigenous Children and Youth’s Special Needs in Guatemala: Recommendation for Preventing Gang’s Recruitment for Recognizing Intersectionality in Defending the Rights of Indigenous and Ethnic Groups workshop

Later this year, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR or OAS) Rapporteurship on the Rights of the Child plans to present a report on northern- Central American children and youth in the context of organized crime. Groups of concerned individuals and organizations have the opportunity to offer submissions to the IACHR for review in the process of drafting the report. The submission produced by the students in Professor Quintero’s workshop will ultimately play a fundamental role in helping to expand the rights of indigenous youth in Guatemala.

At the beginning of her workshop, Professor Quintero allowed her students to choose between focusing on a local human rights issue or taking on a more unfamiliar international issue; according to her, they readily accepted the challenge of exploring an international human rights issue. Working on this topic  showed the students the many ways in which international human rights issues are not restricted to one country, but appear throughout the world. Quintero explains that “As a human rights practitioner, you will be exposed to global issues, not only to local ones. When [the students] came to the class, they had a lot of previous knowledge and experience because they had been doing internships and work, but there was room to expand their sense of how the world is connected in regards to human rights. Every time I was presenting something on Colombia, for instance, an example of my work there, they had a chance to connect… [and] see the difference and the similarities between the two worlds.”

Furthermore, many students began this workshop with the impression that human rights treaties existed as formal bodies that have little impact on ordinary peoples’ lives. When students participate as part of the process of these formal bodies, advocating for greater development of the rights of ordinary citizens, they gain a sense of the true scale and influence of these human rights instruments. Additionally, it’s through entities like the IACHR and submissions from groups like Professor Quintero’s class that indigenous communities push their governments to do more for their rights; once communities know these instruments exist, they are more inclined to use them to hold their governments accountable. As Professor Quintero puts it, “Communities are incorporating those materials into their own agenda, into their own needs, and framing their needs and goals within those instruments.”

Not only do students learn how to use human rights instruments–in conjunction with their educational knowledge–to take on human rights issues, but they are also playing an essential role in encouraging those at risk to hold their governments accountable.

Directed Research Project: Online Education Training for Gender-Based Violence Awareness in Universities

At Universidad Icesi in Cali, Colombia, Paola Pereira, a LLM student, has been working with a group of faculty to implement a Gender-Based Violence Awareness training into the University. Currently, the University lacks adequate pedagogical materials on this subject or gender equality as a whole, both for students and faculty. Having compiled a significant amount of jurisprudence, legal and pedagogical documents, the team  sought to develop a visual component to aid in the facilitation of the training for the entire Community. 

During the Spring semester, two MHR students, Isabel Huot-Link and Joy Musyimi, participated in a directed research project led by Professor Quintero to create this visual component. The students and faculty met over Zoom once or twice a month to get a sense of how the training would be conducted, what materials needed to be included, and the functionality of the training. Isabel and Joy ultimately decided to create a story map, which presents all of the relevant information on one website, accessible by scrolling through pages, watching videos, and an autoplay feature. 

Professor Quintero noted that “Here [at the University of Minnesota], you have this wonderful [anti]harassment course that everyone has to do once they get into the University. [Universidad Icesi] doesn’t have something like that. It’s not like we don’t have the technology, of course, we have the technology and the capacity, but we are behind in terms of making our entire community committed to the gender agenda with the equal respect of women and men.” Currently, the trainning content will be displayed on one University’s websites, and it  is set to conclude in December of 2022. Thus far, the research team is planning to use the materials for a consultancy hired by another University on the challenges of implementing protocols on sexual-based violence. 

Having prior knowledge of how their university was trying to tackle this human rights issue, Isabel and Joy could see that attention to it was lacking at Icesi University. Nonetheless, equipped with tools of their own, they had ideas of how they might be able to help Paola. “When you see other countries that lack these things, you can be more aware of how you can use certain instruments more,” Professor Quintero explains.

Student Observations

Students have commented that the applied nature of the projects they completed in both the workshop and directed research project have allowed them to better contextualize real-life cases within both legal frameworks and educational ones. Through this kind of in-class work, human rights students can use their knowledge to build an intricate understanding of the human rights issues affecting other people and how they can assist these issues. While an education in human rights is important to these students, so is the opportunity to apply that education to a real-world situation–something that Professor Quintero strives to do for her students.