While looking up Speak Truth to Power I ran across the Amnesty International (USA) YouTube Channel. There are quite a number of powerful videos posted and the main focus is the campaign for human rights. But human rights issues around the world today are not trivial, and it is a challenge to raise awareness that serious issues exist without demoralizing idealistic adolescents into thinking that they can do nothing about it.
I’m somewhat conflicted about the efficacy of the first two videos posted here. The one above is extremely powerful, but the one below has a simpler, more uplifting story.
I also don’t know how students would react to the music video below. I like the international voices, like that of Emmanuel Jal, that can speak from experience about the challenge facing billions around the world today. But I wonder how much the words and the meaning will register.
The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis has one display about the conspiracy theories surrounding Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Some of them were pretty far-fetched, but I did not have a good answer to one student’s question about why do people come up with all these conspiracy theories. David Aaronovitch has a new book out about why people believe conspiracy theories, and in an interview with Thomas Rogers he has a pretty believable answer to the question, “What makes us susceptible to conspiracy theories?”:
We want to believe theories that contradict the idea that young, iconic people died senselessly. If a story takes away the accidental from their death, it gives them agency. After the JFK assassination, it was unbearable to many people that they could live in a country where a lone gunman could kill a president. In those circumstances, it’s not surprising that an overarching conspiracy theory emerges. It suggests that somebody is in control, rather than that we’re at the mercy of our neighbors and to some extent of ourselves (as was the case with Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana). It’s the urge to make sense of a particularly traumatic moment.
“In a world where there is a common lament that there are no more heroes, too often cynicism and despair are perceived as evidence of the death of moral courage. That perception is wrong. People of great valor and heart, committed to noble purpose, with long records of personal sacrifice, walk among us in every country of the world.”
– Kerry Kennedy
Kerry Kennedy and photographer Eddie Adams are powerful advocates for human rights with their coffee table book “Speak Truth to Power” and Kennedy’s website, PBS documentary and center that emerged out of it. The book and website has a series of stories and interviews from human rights activists from around the world. Some of the subjects and issues are searing, as you can imagine, so use with care.
This was recommended by Sarah __ B.
A colleague gave me a copy of the play “Speak Truth to Power”, a dvd based on a book by Kerry Kennedy about the work and struggle of human rights activists. She got it for her students’ MMUN project. The movie and book are part of a curriculum used in Romania, as they are representing that country.
The movie would make a powerful addition to Cycle 3 (no pun intended) or 5, Year B for MS, or discussion point for HS.
For myself, this book ties in powerfully with our ongoing discussions of the Little Rock Nine and how brave individuals can change the world.
Refugee camp in Dafur, Sudan (See below for image source)
One of the assignments in our discussion of the characteristics of war is to locate wars occurring around the world today. Foreign Policy magazine has a series of photos documenting 33 conflicts raging around the world today (I found the site via the Daily Dish). The focus is on the civilians who typically suffer the most in wars. From pictures of refugee camps in Pakistan to militants in Nigeria to Russian tanks in South Ossetia, the pictures are moving but not too graphic. What’s equally important though, is the brief description of the conflict beneath each picture.
Note: The image above is not from the Foreign Policy but from mknobil
It’s one thing to walk through a place where history was actually made, but having a tour guide who personally experienced part of it is pretty special. The Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site is the only national park with an active, fully functioning high school on site. So when you do the tour, you follow a ranger (wearing the same uniform and hat that they wear on the forest trails) through the halls of a school as scores of students stream past. It’s a little odd to say the least. The Central High students seem to take it in stride, because they’re probably used to it, but our students seemed a bit unsure about how to deal with it.
Jody Morris, born and raised in Little Rock, was our tour guide. She was a child (1st grade I think) when the schools were integrated, and she experienced the ostracism of having parents supportive of integration. Ms. Morris was able to speak with the emotion and authority of someone who lived through troubling times. I’m not sure that we could have had a better tour without having one of the Little Rock Nine there with us.
Much of what we saw is in the history books and the documentaries. On the tour you climb the same front steps in the iconic pictures of the students being escorted up the steps of the school (see above); you sit in the same cafeteria where Minnijean Brown was hazed; you can walk the same long blocks that Elizabeth Eckford did in front of the jeering crowd. The current students walking the halls, immunized to the weight of history by long experience, make it easier to identify with what it might have been.
[googleMap name=”Lake Catherine State Park” description=”Lake Catherine State Park” width=”490″ height=”490″ mapzoom=”12″ directions_to=”false”]1200 Catherine Park Rd, AR 71913-8716[/googleMap]
Just got back from an immersion trip to Arkansas. Every sixth week we get out of the classroom for the week and try to integrate what we’ve learned in the previous five. We’re out there, sometimes visiting somewhere history happened, sometimes hiking in the woods, and I wonder why we don’t spend all of our time outside the classroom. The kids get so much out of just exploring, and there is just so much that sparks the imagination.
Anyway, we hit Central High School, the Clinton Library and stayed and hiked at Lake Catherine State Park (see the map above). We also had a lesson on cameras that tied into our discussion of waves last cycle. I expect to post about each of these, they were all quite good.
Spices in a Moroccan market. Image by Donar Reiskoffer, found on Wikipedia Commons.
Montessori elementary programs approach history from the perspective of the basic needs of human beings. They look at how humans have satisfied the needs for food, shelter, spirituality and so on over time.
A new book by Tom Standage called, “An Edible History of Humanity” looks at human history through food, from how agriculture lead to the beginning of civilization, to the role of spices in the European discovery of the Americas, to how food production shaped the rise and fall of Napoleon, to the effects of the Green Revolution on the world today.
it concentrates specifically on the intersections between food history and world history, to ask a simple question: which foods have done most to shape the modern world, and how?
Spiked Online has a nice review of the book that touches on many of the key points. This book certainly open up a wider discussion of world history. A simplified version would likely be a great addition to the middle school curriculum.
The vivid colors, heart-rending smells and sheer mass of the pyramids of spices in Moroccan markets are a vivid reminder of the importance of the Arab spice trade. The spice mixes I remember in particular, they can consist of over twenty different spices coming from all around the world.
Different parts of the brain mature at different rates. By early adolescence the parts of the brain responsible for social interaction are pretty well developed, but the parts responsible for critical thinking and impulse control (the frontal cortex) are not.
We visited the Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital today. And after a tour, a couple of people from the neurological division gave us a nice little presentation about the human brain. They used Rita Carter’s DVD, “The Human Brain“, which has a great animation of electrical signals pulsing from neuron to neuron through the neural network. I’m considering getting it for the class because the animations and the interactive slicing of the human brain are pretty neat. You can, however, find some, free applications for looking at the whole human body from the Visible Human Project.
Anyway, the fact that impulse control and critical thinking abilities are late to develop did not require fancy brain imaging to discover. Jean Paiget’s research on cognitive developmental stages found evidence that abstract thinking did not develop until the early teens. In fact, he found that abstract thinking (or formal operations as he called it) did not necessarily develop at all. As the frontal cortex matures, the ability to do abstract thinking also develops, but that does not necessarily mean that everyone learns how to do it. (At this point I make an unbiased pitch for the Montessori approach opposed to traditional schooling).
It’s very nice, or perhaps a better word is “elegant”, when very different types of research, using fundamentally different methods come to the same conclusions. In this case, neuroscience (brain imaging), which is ultimately based on physics and biology corroborates the psychological research into cognitive development, which is primarily based on observation and survey.
