A new lens for social change

Exploring social issues and human rights require a special kind of teaching strategy. Students need to explore and critically understand issues, but they also need to see themselves as capable of affecting positive change. This is truly active global citizenship. 

Creating this experience requires a high level of student involvement and use of engaging materials that appeal to our technologically savvy youth. Like it or not, students consume a lot of information through the Internet, their cellular phones, Facebook, YouTube and online chat rooms. If we embrace this technology and show students how to utilize it to affect positive action, we can create meaningful experiences.

The Directors of Change program offers strategies that inform, engage and motivate action through the use of an interactive website initiated by a youth-created documentary film.
 
Traditional teaching tools, like textbooks, artifacts, photographs and literature, provide insight into the lived experience, but to understand complex social issues in a critical way, students also need multiple perspectives, directly from the source. Documentary film delivers this.

The Directors of Change documentary Harambee includes interviews and footage from a village in rural Kenya. It chronicles one community’s experience in the face of issues like lack of water and sanitation, gender inequity and access to basic health care. 

The teacher’s role in this program is unique. Using the documentary as a launching point, teachers become facilitators, helping students identify what they see as key issues and guide them to make connections between those issues and basic human rights. Educators can follow this by helping students generate questions for further research and support them as they share what they have learned. 

The program’s culminating activity is the creation of online newspapers or short documentaries. Students can post their online newspapers, documentaries and even blogs on the Directors of Change website and discuss the issues and their viewpoints with other students in the program. The website becomes a hub of youth perspectives representing different opinions and ideas. 

With the educator as their guide, students are able to learn from each other, as well as their Kenyan peers overseas, while connecting with new friends from across Canada.  

Catherine McCauley, M.Ed
Director of Teacher Development
Free The Children 

Free The Children is the largest network of children helping children through education in the world, with more than one million youth involved in our innovative education and development programs in 45 countries. Founded by international child rights activist Craig Kielburger, Free The Children has an established track-record of success, with three nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize and partnerships with the United Nations and Oprah’s Angel Network.