The Jordan Times (Educational leadership program in Jordan created in partnership with UCAPP)
Advancing Human Rights Education in Connecticut 70 Years After UDHR
Seventy years ago this week, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris. This milestone document, on Dec. 10, 1948, established a common standard of fundamental human rights for all peoples and nations in response to the atrocities committed during World War II, and sought to protect and safeguard those rights for future generations.
“All anniversaries provide a moment to reflect and take stock,” says Glenn Mitoma, an assistant professor of curriculum and instruction in the Neag School. “The UDHR was written in the aftermath of World War II, a catastrophic moment in history that has important lessons for us today. We can use this anniversary as an opportunity to reflect on and rededicate ourselves to the goal of a more just, equitable, and inclusive world.”
“The explosion of hateful rhetoric and associated acts of violence has demonstrated the U.S. needs to work on developing a culture of human rights.”
— Glenn Mitoma, Assistant Professor,
Human Rights and Education
Mitoma, who has a joint appointment with UConn’s Human Rights Institute, wrote his first book on the history of the UDHR, citing human rights education as a framework for pursuing justice and building a more equitable society. In conducting his research, Mitoma says he saw the importance of intertwining human rights and human rights education.
“The current political and social climate has made the necessity of human rights education clearer,” he says. “The explosion of hateful rhetoric and associated acts of violence has demonstrated the U.S. needs to work on developing a culture of human rights.”
Human Rights Education Efforts at UConn
Also serving as the director of the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at UConn, Mitoma has been leading a wealth of ongoing initiatives focused on promoting human rights education throughout Connecticut’s K-12 public schools. While his efforts have reached students and teachers in schools across the state, preservice teachers studying in the Neag School, as well as the wider community, Mitoma says he believes UConn, the state of Connecticut, and the country as a whole can do more to expand their human rights initiatives.
Most recently, the Dodd Center hosted the 2018 Children’s Literature and Human Rights Workshop this past month to provide free instruction for Connecticut educators on how to include human rights education in the classroom using children’s literature. Participants were introduced to the Dodd Center’s newly developed Human Rights Reading Tool, a tool educators can use to evaluate children’s books for teaching challenging human rights matters.
Additionally, workshop participants learned how to create space in their classrooms to teach human rights, how to defend their decision to bring up sensitive topics, and how best to teach related content for specific age groups. Teachers, Mitoma says, can occasionally face opposition from parents or even school administrators when introducing human rights issues in the classroom because such topics are frequently sensitive and may be viewed as being political, despite being valuable sources of learning.
“Human rights education allows kids to explore what their rights are, so that they’re aware of them and they can defend them in any circumstance, but they can also respect other children’s rights and the rights of other adults,” says Ellen Agnello, one of the workshop facilitators and currently a Neag School Ph.D. student studying reading education.
“When students understand what their rights are, they’re able to see where violations are, and so they’re more willing to act to make sure people’s rights are ensured,” adds fellow workshop facilitator Joan Weir, a Neag School Ph.D. student studying writing instruction for deaf/hard of hearing students.
Mitoma also coordinates Upstander Academy, another professional development opportunity that encourages education professionals to focus on human rights violations in order to address historical and current issues in the classroom. The six-day workshop provides time for participants to develop new skills for student engagement, learn how to foster a value-based classroom, and reflect on their personal and professional experiences.
In 2017, the Dodd Center inaugurated the Malka Penn Award for Human Rights in Children’s Literature, named in honor of Michele Palmer, an oral historian at UConn’s Center for Oral History and founder of the Malka Penn Collection of Children’s Books on Human Rights, which is housed at the Dodd Center. The annual award is presented to an author who explores human rights issues or themes through stories about individuals who navigate violations of their rights and make a difference in the lives of others and their own.
Veera Hiranandani was the 2018 recipient for her historical fiction work The Night Diary,which follows 12-year-old Nisha and her family’s treacherous journey to the new border of India during the 1947 Partition of India.
Mitoma has also led the coordination of the Dodd Center’s Exhibition of Human Rights in Children’s Literature, an art and children’s literature exhibit that highlights and conceptualizes themes from children’s books and the lasting effects they have on populations, in order to remind educators, parents, lawmakers, and other stakeholders of the importance of protecting children’s rights. Inspired by the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, the exhibition focuses on core principles within the U.N. Declaration of the Rights of the Child, such as the right to education, food, health, participation, safety, and shelter.
The exhibit is featured at the Dodd Center and made possible through collaboration between the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection, UConn’s School of Fine Arts, and the Neag School.
Connecting Across Classrooms in Connecticut
Mitoma has helped bring human rights education directly into schools across the state as well, by introducing human rights education into the curriculum, including that of Manchester High School, one of the Neag School’s partner schools where aspiring teachers receive firsthand teaching experience.
For the 2017-18 academic year, junior and senior students at Manchester High School were required to take human rights coursework to graduate. There are two levels of coursework — one is an Early College Experience (ECE) course in human rights, where students receive college credit and attend a youth summit, and the other is a college preparation course through which students receive high school credit in order to fulfill their graduation requirements.
“Having this class has exposed students to new lines of thinking, challenging their belief systems around certain issues and topics, and has been an inquiry-driven class,” says Neag School alum Jacob Skrzypiec ’13 (ED), ’14 MA, who teaches social studies as well as the ECE human rights course at Manchester High. “I’ve seen kids who have found their voice in trying to make the smallest of changes around them. Students are willing the engage their community in a different way.”
Skrzypeic also worked with Mitoma and Abigail Esposito ’14 (ED), ’15 MA, another Neag School alum and now a social studies teacher at Conard High School in West Hartford, to coordinate the annual Connecticut Human Rights Youth Action Summit. The summit provides high school students with the opportunity to explore human rights issues in their communities and around the world. It also allows them to build connections, collaborate, and network with their peers statewide.
“Having this class has exposed students to new lines of thinking, challenging their belief systems … I’ve seen kids who have found their voice in trying to make the smallest of changes around them.”
— Jacob Skrzypiec ’13 (ED), ’14 MA,
Teacher, Manchester High School
“There’s a number of schools in Connecticut working on human rights education, and we believed we needed to start working outside of schools and getting kids interested in collaborating and doing meaningful work together,” says Skrzypiec.
For the 2018-19 iteration, two summits were held in November — one at the UConn Storrs campus and the other at the Stamford campus. High school students from Manchester, West Hartford, Storrs, Darien, and Stamford explored the theme “Human Rights in our Backyard.”
“We wanted kids to focus on what are Connecticut-based and localized examples of human rights violations, rather than looking at them on a global scale,” says Skrzypeic. “We wanted to draw human rights down to the local level.”
Asmaller summit will be held in March for students to reconvene and share their projects’ challenges and successes, and learn skills they can directly apply to foster social change in their community.
‘A Responsibility and an Obligation’
Moving into the future, Mitoma says he would like to see UConn become a leader of Connecticut’s human rights initiatives and education, and to use its resources and prestige to promote positive change.
“UConn, as a university, and higher education in general, has a responsibility and obligation to use our influence as a prestigious and powerful institution to foster positive change in our communities. Our focus will continue to be on teaching and research, but we have an obligation to do more direct outreach and engagement. We need to work harder,” says Mitoma.
Mitoma says he hopes that going forward, UConn will become a model for other academic institutions and use its expertise to engage with the community around it to serve the public.
“We need remember that we are a public institution that serves the public, and work directly with communities on issues they have identified as critical,” says Mitoma. “Our efforts with schools, particularly those that would otherwise not have access to resources and expertise of the University, are aimed at building that culture of human rights from the ground up.”
Learn more about the 70th Anniversary Celebration of UDHR.
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Taking Beautiful Risks in Education
Educational Leadership (Neag School’s Ronald Beghetto writes commentary about supporting students’ creativity)
Lingering Questions Remain About School Desegregation in Connecticut
CT Mirror (Study published by Professor Casey Cobb referenced)
Same-Race Teachers Have Big Effect on Black Children
WSHU (A study on the effect of same-race teachers on black children by Neag School’s, Joshua Hyman, who has a co-appointment with UConn’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, is featured)
New JRA Executive Director Excited for Future
Jewish Exponent (Neag School alumna, Jodi Roth-Saks, was appointed executive director of the Jewish Relief Agency)
Op-ed: Just Passing Tests Won’t Make Teachers Good
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Black Students With One Black Teacher Are More Likely To Go To College
Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared on UConn Today.
The influence of having a black teacher can make a monumental difference in a black student’s life, and the effect begins early in an education.
Having just one black teacher in elementary school not only makes children more like to graduate high school – it also makes them significantly more likely to enroll in college.
Black students who’d had just one black teacher by third grade were 13 percent more likely to enroll in college – and those who’d had two were 32 percent more likely. The findings, from researchers at UConn, Johns Hopkins University, American University, and the University of California-Davis, were published recently in a working paper titled “The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers” from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Another, related working paper by the same team titled “Teacher Expectations Matter,” also published today by NBER, found teachers’ beliefs about a student’s college potential can become self-fulfilling prophecies. Every 20 percent increase in a teacher’s expectations raised the actual chance of finishing college for white students by about 6 percent and 10 percent for black students. However, because black students had the strongest endorsements from black teachers, and black teachers are scarce, they have less chance to reap the benefit of high expectations than their white peers.
Both papers underscore mounting evidence that same race teachers benefit students, and demonstrate that for black students in particular, positive outcomes sparked by the so-called role model effect can last into adulthood and potentially shrink the educational attainment gap.
“All it takes is one black teacher to influence a student.”
Joshua Hyman
“Black student students often don’t have parents or other black adults in their lives who have gone to college and gotten professional jobs,” says Joshua Hyman, an assistant professor of public policy at UConn, who has a joint appointment in the Department of Educational Leadership in the Neag School of Education. Hyman co-authored the papers along with researchers from the three other universities.
“All it takes is one black teacher to influence a student,” he adds. “They see someone like them in their classroom and start to believe they can go to college too, and get a good job.”
The paper appears to be the first to document the long-term reach of the role model effect. The researchers previously found that having at least one black teacher in elementary school reduced their probability of dropping out by 29 percent for low-income black students – and 39 percent for very low-income black boys.
The latest findings are based on data from the Tennessee STAR class size reduction experiment that started in 1986 and randomly assigned disadvantaged kindergarten students to various sizes of classroom.
The researchers replicated the findings with similar data for North Carolina students.
The study found that black students who’d had a black teacher in kindergarten were as much as 18 percent more likely than their peers to enroll in college. Getting a black teacher in their first STAR year, any year up to third grade, increased a black student’s likelihood of enrolling in college by 13 percent.
Black children who had two black teachers during the program were 32 percent more likely to go to college than their peers who didn’t have black teachers at all.
“What’s very interesting about this paper is that it looks later in a student’s life,” says Hyman. “It’s impressive that the impression of having a black elementary school teacher last that long. It helps reduce the race gap.”
Additionally, students who had at least one black teacher in grades K-3 were about 10 percent more likely to be described by their 4th grade teachers as “persistent” or kids who “made an effort” and “tried to finish difficult work,” the researchers found. These students were also marginally more likely to ask questions and talk about school subjects out of class.
Although enrolling in college is a positive outcome, one concern, according to the researchers, is that the main enrollment effect is driven by students choosing community college, where degrees aren’t as lucrative as those from four-year colleges. It’s also unclear because of incomplete data how many of the students from the study who enrolled in college eventually graduated.
Despite clear benefits for black students from same-race teachers, diversifying the education workforce so that every black student in the United States could have one would mean doubling the current number of black teachers, the researchers say. To put this into context, that would require 8 percent of all black college graduates to become teachers. Given low teacher pay, if that many black college graduates went into education, it would cut roughly one billion dollars from the already languishing cumulative black income.
Regarding teacher expectations, the authors previously found that when evaluating the same black student, white teachers expected significantly less academic success than black teachers. Now the researchers show compelling evidence that these biases affect whether students make it to college, graduate, and begin their adult life focused on a career.
“One of the lingering issues of this paper is that we have to entice black people to enter the teaching areas,” says Hyman. “In schools where there is a large black population, that has to be addressed.”
