With the help of an Ohio Humanities Educator Enrichment grant, CSEES will expand its outreach mission to teachers participating in the 2017 Global Teacher Seminar “Human Rights in a Global Perspective: Mass Atrocity and State-Sponsored Violence.” The institute will be held at The Ohio State University from June 5-9, 2017 and is open to pre-service and in-service Ohio middle and high school teachers. It aims to deepen teachers’ understanding of human rights norms and ideals by examining cases of mass atrocity and state-sponsored violence at the global and local levels.

The grant will allow CSEES to offer six months of follow up consultations with the 20-25 Ohio teachers who will participate in the summer institute. The consultations will provide teachers with additional curriculum resources, content and lesson plan assistance in order to successfully incorporate the human rights related information delivered in the workshop into their classrooms.

The summer institute is organized by CSEES in partnership with four other area studies centers in Ohio State's Office of International Affairs, which include: the Center for African Studies, the Center for Latin American Studies, the East Asian Studies Center and the Middle East Studies Center. The content of the summer institute includes case studies from each region, including: the Somali Civil War and Diaspora, the Colombian Civil War and FARC peace agreement, North Korean state repression and prison camps and the Armenian genocide. Prominent scholars from Ohio State and beyond will deliver the lectures on the case studies, such as Jibril Mohamed (OSU), Laura Fernandez (OSU), Dr. Mitchell Lerner (OSU) and Dr. Khatchig Mourdian (Columbia University). Representatives from local organizations, such as Community Refugee and Immigration Services (CRIS) and the Human Trafficking Task Force will address local human rights initiatives, connecting global issues to the local level.  

Dr. Jennifer Suchland, the lead humanities scholar and facilitator of the institute, will oversee the integration of all content. She will deliver lectures on the history of human rights as a legal concept, the Western norm of human rights and notions of genocide and diaspora. She will also discuss human trafficking from the international perspective. Dr. Tami Augustine is the Master Teacher and lead pedagogy expert. She will assist the teachers to incorporate the content from the institute into their curriculum through the development of individual lesson plans, which each teacher will present on the last day of the institute. Kathryn Metz is the second Master Teacher and will serve as the humanities professional for human rights and pedagogy.

Following the institute, there will be a six month Lesson Plan Implementation Program, which aims to provide the teachers with the critical resources and support necessary to take the unit plan developed during the institute from an idea into the classroom as an implemented lesson. The grant will allow Metz to provide six individual consultations with each teacher, providing them with additional curriculum resources and lesson plan review. In the fall of 2017, Metz will visit the teachers’ classroom to co-teach the lesson to ensure proper implementation.

The institute and follow up consultations are made possible through the Ohio Humanities grant and Title VI National Resource Center funds from the International and Foreign Language Education division of the U.S. Department of Education.