human rights in the curriculum

For anyone who is interested, the UTLA Human Rights Committee has a web site which is www.militaryfreeschools.org. They are looking for curriculum on justice and human rights issues. If anyone is interested in posting their unit or any other lesson plans, please send them to me or the contact on the website.

There's a recent human rights event that took place in Singapore last month. Singapore executed 25-year old Nguyen Tuong Van for trying to smuggle heroin out of the country. Van was an Australian citizen and admitted to the crime, but insited that the motive was to help his twin brother out of gangster-controlled debt. The follwong site has some great background information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguyen_Tuong_Van

This case is excellent for class discussion of the death penalty, Asia and the legaliztion of drugs. My students found this to be an interesting human rights case.

Here is a site I used with my students last year. It touched the students in ways that surprised me. They were angry, confused, and some were worried this could happen to them. It is a photography site where some photojournalists went around the world documenting child labor. The countries closest to what we are covering are India, Nepal, and Cambodia. None of the shots have inappropriate material for the class.
I am getting ready to use it this year, so I wanted to pass it along.

Julia Dean - Child Labor Project

If you are doing anything on the Rape of Nanjing, I suggest you go to www.gendercide.org. Look under "case studies" and you will find several examples of genocide in depth. I happen to have used this site for my lesson plan on "Nanjing 1937". What I liked about it, was that it gave a good general overview of the topic. One of the pictures was a little "rough" for 10th graders, but that could be taken out.

Fo more information on human rights to use in your lesson plans, go to www.unitedhumanrights.org. This also has an over view on the "Nanjing Massacre". It has one picture that could be used on a website you are designing. The site also deals with other human rights violations, depending what your topic is on.

This web site is the "other side of the coin": www.jiyuu-shikan.org. This web site is interesting in that it is a compliation of many diferent articles, photos, etc. that refute the "Rape of Nanjing". Most strongly it is an attack on the author Iris Chang, who wrote a book entitled "The Rape of Nanking". It is interesting to read the Japanese perspective of the incidents. Most importantly, since my lesson plan is on this topic, I wanted to give the students access to different views, and based on what they have learned, let them come to their own conclusion.

I realize that this web site: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/nanjing_massacre is an encyclopedia, but it is a most comprehensive compliation on the "Nanjing Massacre". It inclued views of both the Chinese and Japanese, as well as refutations of the issues. It also includes discussions of current day issues such as reparations and the content of Japanese textbooks. For an overview of the subject, this is a good place to start.

I recommend the January issue of National Geographic, there's a fascinating article on genocide, the forensic science involved, and the cultural and political consequences of identifying it, in the context of the last century being the most full of murder in history.

Here's the web version, but if you can get a copy of the magazine, there's a great graphic that compares relative body counts in all nations.

http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0601/feature2/index.html

m@x

The LA times had this great article about Li Zhensheng. It turns out he took some awsome pictures of 1966's Cultural Revolution. He was denounced and sent to "May 7 School" for two years. Here's the cool part. He hid the negatives under a floorboard in his house and recovered them in 1971. He has an exhibition coming to Los Angeles next year and is the author of "Red Color News Soldier.

The May 3 workshop was lively and interesting. Participants can go to the "human rights workshops" forum to download copies of the presentations.

For those who were unable to attend, here's a link to the program:
http://china.usc.edu/ShowEvent.aspx?EventID=455

Is this topic out of place in a forum on human rights in Asia. But did you know that a Chinese artist, Lei Yixin, has been commissioned to design the official US memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Lei's selection upset some who oppose him because he's done Mao statues and Mao represents the repression of human rights, not their promotion. Others were upset simply because they believe the commission should go to an American and hopefully an African American artist.

Now the commission overseeing the project has insisted on a redesign. Go to http://uschina.usc.edu/DailyUpdates.aspx?Date=5/9/2008 for photos and a link the Washington Post story on the subject.

This story could stimulate interesting discussions about how we represent the past.

wow, a day late and a dollar short. I'm just wrapping up a an activism poster lesson with my students and some of these topics would have been great to provide as highlighted topics of interest. I did provide a number but the range of topics chosen (from a huge list provided and freedom to choose otherwise) were depressing slim for the most part. This is a reflection of their overall lack of knoweldge in regards to current local, national, and international affairs. Their topics tended to focus around topics of importance in their family or subculture.

Next time I think I'm going to try to synchronize and coordinate this lesson with the Social Studies department's unit on the 60's and social activism. At the very least I might get some posters on the Vietnam war, or comparing Vietnam to the Iraq War.

I've seen similar work done for other classes and I'm not opposed to students utilizing work for two different classes if it is with the understanding of both teachers. Especially since these social studies projects are expected to be done outside of class hours.

While teaching American History last year I decided that I really sucked at American History and that I did not find my lessons engaging, so I tossed out the traditional curriculum and restructured my entire class. I decided to cover the mandated curriculum thematically versus chronologically. My themes centered around the history of mass movements in the United States so I did spend a lot of time on human rights and when I covered the Bill of Rights and the Social Contract - my kids really got into the idea that rules were not there to simply be broken but that they are a trade off. We give up things to have our human rights protected. It is imperative that teachers focus on human rights, especially in the inner-city where so many of the populations rights are violated right here in America.

I think one of the darkest hours in American Hisotry was when our government during World War II took the Japanese citizens, and American citizens who were of Japanese Ancestry, even though they were born in The United States to internment camps in the deserts of California. Today those internment camps are a ghostly reminder of our violation of the rights of the Japanese People here in the United States. We think of ourselves as such liberators of the human spirit, but this is one time that we really failed, and failed big time. It sure took a long time for us to make concessions to those Japanese families. When I was in another business, I had a Japanese client that was interred in those camps as a little child, and she told me stories of abuse and neglect, even on the lands of our precious United States of America. It makes you glad that we have the American Civil Liberties Union, doesn't it ?

The violent suppression of the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 left a deep impression on those involved and those who followed it in the news. Every year there are large demonstrations in Hong Kong to mark the event. Here are pictures from Flickr of this year's demonstrations:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/21045856@N02/4671665616/in/photostream/

One of this year's surprises was the posting on June 2 in the Southern Metropolis Daily 南方都市报 website of the attached cartoon. The paper is published in Guangzhou. The cartoon features a schoolyard blackboard (blackboard newspapers remain common in China). Three tanks are lined up on the blackboard and a boy is busy drawing in a person in front of the tanks. This is clearly a reminder of the famous Tank Man image.

Here's an LA Times article about the 2010 cartoon:
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jun/04/world/la-fg-china-tiananmen-20100604

The Guardian had the story earlier, focusing on the cartoon's removal (the page features a photo of the "Tank Man"):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/02/tiananmen-square-cartoon

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo passed away last week. Below are some questions and resources that might be useful in teaching about Liu, his decades devoted to promoting democracy in China, and how the Chinese state responded to those efforts.

Possible organizing questions:

1. What did Liu Xiaobo advocate as a cultural critic and as a political activist?
2. What did Liu Xiaobo do to make his views heard and to mobilize others to his side?
3. What laws did the Chinese state decide Liu Xiaobo had violated? How did it punish those violations?
4. At the time of his last conviction, Liu argued he was merely using every Chinese citizen’s right to free speech. What rights does the Chinese constitution promise it citizens?
5. Liu Xiaobo was detained for the last time in December 2008. He was convicted in 2009. They next year he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Liu remained in jail and his essays supporting democracy are easily circulated within China today. Still, the Chinese state sought to limit discussion about his passing on social media. His incarceration and his passing, however, were widely noted outside of China. What do you think the case of Liu Xiaobo teaches?

Possible readings:

Obituaries
Clayton Dube, Liu Xiaobo, 1955-2017, July 13, 2017
Obituaries
Clayton Dube, Liu Xiaobo, 1955-2017, July 13, 2017
http://www.china.usc.edu/liu-xiaobo-1955-2017
(includes links to his writings, to the 2009 court verdict against him, to the 2010 Nobel decision and the award speeches)
Chris Buckley, “Liu Xiaobo, Chinese Dissident Who Won Nobel While Jailed, Dies at 61,” New York Times, July 13, 2017.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/world/asia/liu-xiaobo-dead.html
Remembrance
Perry Link, “The Passion of Liu Xiaobo,” New York Review of Books, July 13, 2017.
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/07/13/the-passion-of-liu-xiaobo/
Criticism
Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong, “Do supporters of Nobel winner Liu Xiaobo really know what he stands for?” The Guardian, December 15, 2010.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/dec/15/nobel-winner-liu-xiaobo-chinese-dissident
and a longer piece in Positions, (2011)19:2, 581-613.
http://positions.dukejournals.org/content/19/2/581.full.pdf+html
“Who is Liu Xiaobo?” China Daily, October 27, 2010.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-10/27/content_11465957.htm
Xinhua, “Some foreign media misunderstand Liu Xiaobo’s case: criminal law expert,” PRC Embassy in Washington, November 5, 2010.
http://www.china-embassy.org/eng/gdxw/t766972.htm
Coverage of how his death was handled
Jonathan Kaiman, “Chinese Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo's death sparked an outpouring of grief online. Then came the censors,” July, 14, 2017.
http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-liu-xiaobo-censors-20170714-story.html
Associated Press, “How Beijing controls the Liu Xiaobo story,” July 13, 2017.

https://yp.scmp.com/news/international/article/106769/how-beijing-controls-liu-xiaobo-story
Supplementary materials
Chinese constitution
http://china.usc.edu/constitution-peoples-republic-china-1982
Dualing human rights reports

US looking at China
http://china.usc.edu/us-department-state-2015-human-rights-china-april-13-2016
China looking at the US
http://china.usc.edu/prc-state-council-human-rights-record-united-states-2015-april-14-2016