Raychelle, Justice, Yennhi and Sandy go to Washington!
A primary initiative of TWAICB is a high school curriculum geared to social studies and language arts classes, one that utilizes the creative arts and a culminating presentation to deepen learning of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
The Future Leaders of Social Change Academy, a small learning community of Arroyo High School, has been using our curriculum since 2008. Here is a link to the description of the most recent December Town Hall put on by the students of one class in the Future Leaders Academy. With this link, you can see poems created by two members of the class that were part of the Town Hall presentation.
This past December, while in Washington, DC to present a workshop on our curriculum at the National Council for Social Studies Conference, I met with Jean-Louis Peta Ikambana, Director of the Peace and Economic Justice Program of the American Friends Service Committee. With our common work in presenting curriculum about the UDHR, we sought ways to collaborate.
At the invitation of Jean-Louis, we brought three students from the Future Leaders Academy class to this year’s AFSC Human Rights Summit. Yennhi Le, one of the poets in the 2nd link above, Justice Wurnitsch-Hogan, and Raychelle Castillo participated in the summit, and made presentations to to their classmates about how they have used the creative arts to deepen learning about and inspire action to further the principles of the UDHR.
