Activity 03: Nationality and Global Citizens
Poster and Presentation
Once the students have found all the information they need to answer the questions listed below and gather the images that they would like to use, the participants will prepare one or more posters. These posters should cover all the information that they have found in the best way possible so that anyone who is looking at it will be able to easily understand what the students have found.
The students will find the information they need in this Edukit and on the Internet with a web quest.
Focus
If human rights have been defined by the global community through institutions like the United Nations and European Union and there is an international consensus that there should be intervention when these rights are violated, does this suggest that people are citizen of the global community or a single nation?
Download the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from the Teacher’s section of this Edukit and make it available to the students with explanation so that they know exactly what human rights are. Emphasis that human rights relate to the way people can live their daily lives and they are not abstractions. Using this framework, students will be able to identify and discuss issues of human rights violations with clarity.
It has been argued that citizenship in a nation dictates that the government has the authority to decide how its citizens are treated regardless of whether the treatment is considered to violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
• What is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
• Is there a point at which a national government no longer has the right to act against the human rights of its people?
• What rights does the international community have in cases where citizens in a nation are experiencing a violation of their human rights?
• Are internationally accepted standards of human rights enforceable?
• Who or what institutions should enforce the codes of human rights that have been accepted internationally?
The students should use examples to explain why they have made the conclusion they have.
Web Quest
A Web Quest is the process of finding the information the students need to complete a project from sources on the World Wide Web. To find the information students want from the Internet they will have to use a search engine. A search engine is a program available on the Internet that directs the searcher to the websites that has the information that they have asked for.
One of the most commonly used search engines is: http://www.google.ca/
The students completing a search will place key words, names, or dates in this box and click on the search button. After that the students will receive a list of websites that have the exact word they asked for in them.
The better the students are at asking for information the better their result will be. If the searchers use a series of key words they will get a better result. To force the search engine to show only result that have the selected words in them use the + sign in front of the words, names, or dates. For example, the students may want to type in Palestine and the date 1995, but to make these terms appear type: +Palestine +1995. If the researchers do not want to see a word in a web site they can use the “-” sign. So if they want to remove websites that mention war, the student would type +Palestine +1995 –war in the search engine.
In another case the students may want to use the phrase human rights, but the words should appear together for the best results, so they will type “human rights” in the search engine.
