Promotion and Local Achievement of the Human Rights

Rua sem asfalto
Publicado em 17 Mar. 2016. Última atualização em 24 May. 2018
DESCRIÇÃO DA ATIVIDADE

Summary: 

The activity stimulates the students to research a human rights problem and find a solution to realize them at the specific question. To make that, they made extra class activities that involve the contact with one institution and the planning with the execution of these solutions. 

Objective: 

- GENERAL GOALS: The Human rights and Latin America class has several objectives that seek the whole development of the student skills, according to the attachment 1, which corresponding to the Academic Activity Characterization. In these objectives, it can be highlighted the importance of the elaboration of public policies to defend the Human Rights, as well as the importance to defend the intern legal systems and international of these rights; the understanding of the historical mechanisms of production of social inclusion-exclusion in Latin America, taking the rights as privileged locus for the analysis of these process; also, the conscience of political, social, cultural, and economical phenomena that impact the Human Rights, generating a compromise with the effectiveness of these rights. On this context, the activities developed during the first semester of 2014 sought to accomplish these skills. Mainly, the focus fell at the promotion of actions focused to the concretion of the Human rights at the local context from the student leadership in relation to the conception and execution of these actions, instigating the student integration to different social realities and to the same goal;

- SPECIFIC GOALS: According to attachment 2 (Class’ Plan), it had worked several contents in expositive and dialogued classes, right at the beginning of the semester, constituting an important base for the construction of the student previous and common knowledge. In addition, it was fundamental to work the extension notion and practices in class, the ethical cares during the social interventions, as well as the stages that composed the progress of the activity realization.

In the student developed seminars (that result in events and other types of social intervention), they worked the following contents, according attachments 3 (DHs Seminars).

- Human Rights – HR and children;

- HR and student movement;

- HR and special needs;

- HR and the elderly;

- HR and prison system.

- DEVELOPED ABILITIES: It was intended to develop:

1) The programmatic content domination, as the main ability necessary to do the other stages:

2) The ability to communicate the rights for the legal people who several times have difficulty of comprehension;

3) The execution of truly work group with a defined date (delivering partial and final products);

4) The capacity to articulate your personal and professional contact network to make it easy for the organization and enhance the impacts of the social intervention;

5) The capacity of systemizing with a clear manner the peoples’ right and its forms of access making a Rights’ manual, presentation or another virtual base;

6) The ability to make contact with professionals, authorities and institutions to present and propose the project realization in partnership.

Dynamics: 

- LEARNING METHOD: extension practices, aiming at the simultaneous concentration of learning activity, research and extension, with the help of dialogued-expositive classes and bibliography. Thus, it was aimed at the student integral capacitation as well as the exposed competences, promotion and human rights concretion. Some extension actions that were achieved during the activity development are lectures, rights’ manual, informative videos and other things.

- REQUIREMENTS: in relation to the students, every class they were informed and remembered about the ideas and principles that guide the activities. During the beginning of the class, the students participated of dialogued-expositive classes, which were fundamental for the development of the activity. In addition, students were encouraged to read scientific articles and other texts related to the thematic, as well as search information and content about the theme that they want to discuss, not only during the project idealization and execution, but also before the start. In a view of a proposal that was about the realization of extension actions, the students should go deep in the content that would be worked, even before the contact with the institutions – showing they already knew about the worked theme right at the beginning of the social intervention. Additionally, the activity demanded from the students a great extra-class reading and research quantity as a form of preparation to the proposal activities. After, they were instigated to map the institutions to stablish an action plan. Moreover, a student effort was the access to their personal contact network and the development of abilities and communication, what can be considered a preparation for the activity.

In relation to the professor, it consisted on the preparation of dialogued-expositive classes and of the faculty accompaniment in every class, evaluating and guiding the project progress.

- DEVELOPMENT OF THE DYMANICS: The Human Right and Latin America class has 60 hour duration and is divided in 19 meetings. From these, 9 are used for elaboration, discussion, progress and presentation of the developed projects made by the students, accounting approximately 28 hours and 42 minutes necessary to the realization of the activity inside classroom.

Additionally, the students read the texts, researched, had meetings with institutes and possible partners of their projects, organized events and made promotion material. All of these were made in extra-classes activities, resulting in a total time that is not easy to estimate, but certainly it was more than 60 hours.

Since the first day of class, there was a continuous, crescent and progressive accompaniment. The beginning of the semester had more expositive classes, but after that it was given a bigger space for the extension previses activities. This gradualness was fundamental to not cause a huge impact. In fact, this is a challenge for the Law Course students to find in and outside the classroom social intervention forms – reason why this activity is so important in the development of the undergraduate students, not only teaching previous classes, but also given them the knowledge of what is research and the university extension.

It is important to mention all the alerts given about the ethical care that students should have when they make a social intervention. Usually, they could be interpreted as those who have the legal knowledge and can solve a lot of problems presented in their routine from law protective institutions – as the case of CRMs, police stations, elderly houses, and other places worked by the class’ students. It is important to not cause bigger expectations on involved people, as well as law staff members.

At the beginning, students showed an impression that they were making those actions as a way of teaching, much more than just learning. It was important to break this idea, not at the start, but during the class semester. First, it was necessary that they had the confidence that they know something to teach, and after that they could understand they have much more to learn.

One group worked the social movements question and of the 50 years of military coup. The event organized by them, in partnership with the Instituto Humanitas Unisinos (IHU), brought relevant guests who dominate the subject to speak at the university, bringing not only Law colleagues to debate the theme, but also students from other courses (for more information about the event, you can see attachments 4 and 5). Another group developed activities linked to the Reference Center at the treatment to Women – RCW from Canoas – Rio Grande do Sul. They went to the institution, searched what were the main needs and created, at the end, a video to be displayed at the reception – The video shows to the women what are their rights and how to access them, all of these in an interactive and available way (check the video in attachment 6). Another group worked with the Padre Cacique Elderly Home, which is located in Porto Alegre and is well known in the region. Even with a reputation, the students saw they did not have basic material of hygiene to the elderly that live there, although there was no lack of remedies, for example. The human rights question at the prison was worked by a lecture at Unisinos. The project developed by Carmela Grunne, Prison Director, was given to the university. Also, several event registers could be seen in attachments 7 and 8. One group of students – people who live far away from the university – developed an activity in the APAE of their city, in the Rio Grande do Sul Mountain range. They programmed a lecture about basic rights – as an example the access to the Bolsa Família program. They worked on the elaboration of Rights’ manual, which was delivered at the event that had a great attendance for surprise of all presents.

- ATTENTION IN THE CLASSROOM: The biggest challenge was to think how to arise awareness and convince, since the first day of classes, in a charismatic way and not use the faculty’s authority, to make an activity really uncommon that required “getting out of the comfort zone” from the “school banks” and work their abilities which generally are not worked at a Law University courses. The question was: how to convince them that this proposal was right and that was not an obstacle made by the professor, or that was not a way of “do not teach classes”, once the good classes are strongly associated to expositive classes which are centered on the professor.

The strategy used was presented in a written paper at the fundaments of the following manner: 1) to present naturally and not as it was an exceptional or really hard activity, 2) to explain the University” tripod, which is constituted necessarily the learning, research, and extension, explaining each one of the categories and how they are connected, not only for Graduate students, 3) to show that it was an innovative proposal that the result would be better for the academic patrimony and of their professional lives, 4) to show the work flexibility and adherence to their personal and professional interests, since they could choose the thematic of interest and the institutions that they would work, 5) establish a trust relation with them, explaining them that the most important thing was not the result impact, but the traveled path used to not discourage them, and lastly, 6) to present a short video available at internet about what were the human rights, and its international formulation and also about how its concretion occur really close of their local network. All these discursive strategies convince the class to truly involve themselves with the activity.

Since the beginning of the activity’s development, it was clear that it would be needed to stablish a trust relation between students-professors, considering that the way of evaluation would be different. In fact, students should be convinced to accept the proposal evaluation methods. At the moment that every deep plan of the evaluative methods were clear to the students, it stayed sharply noticeable the students’ tranquility. They were aware that they would evaluate, and did not only present the positive results of their projects, but also all the things that did not work. 

Evaluation: 

- FEEDBACK: the activity gradually routing had a fundamental paper at the students’ evaluation. This happened because the intention was not to evaluate the final impacts of the realized intervention, but it served as a plaining and execution of the extension and research activities.

- GRADE EVALUATION: the constantly evaluation through the delivery of partial developed activities since the meetings, make it more valuable for the development of the activity than the final result. It is important to say that several happenings not linked to their desire could damage the students, as an institution that gives up at the end of the semester to help their own students in their activities. 

Observation: 

The testimonials demonstrate that students realized in their own knowledge an academic, professional, and even personal growth. (see attachment 9). In addition, the initiative got highlighted by the University. At the attachment, you can find the article made the Law web blog (n.10).

Activity Details

Name: 

Promotion and local achievement of the human rights

Institution: 

Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (UNISINOS)

Concentration area: 

  • Human Rights
  • Constitutional Law

Discipline : 

Human Rights and Latin America – 7th period

Course: 

  • Undergraduate

Key words: 

  • Law Achievement
  • Human Rights
  • Extension
  • Undergraduate
  • Student leadership

Number of students: 

40

Time of application: 

From 28 to 29 hours

Edition: 

Guilherme Forma Klafke

Copyright

Licença Creative Commons
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Atribuição-NãoComercial-CompartilhaIgual 4.0 Internacional

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