Rights of Young People & In-School Human Rights Practice

Facilitating Polarizing Conversations
This session equips educators with skills and tools to hold space for dialogue in a manner that promotes intellectual growth, encourages meaningful dialogue, facilitates connection and promotes the emotional well-being and safety of all learners.

Exploring Cultural Diversity through Paint The Rails
Paint the Rails offers a unique opportunity for educators to engage young people in reflecting on the cultural makeup and settlement of our communities. Through the use of community-grounded murals that exist along Edmonton’s Light Rail Train (LRT), this session engages in the importance of storytelling, diversity and the celebration of students' cultural and ethnic diversity; fostering inclusion, belonging and critical analysis. Teachers will gain access to a toolkit with a range of diverse lesson plans that allow for exploration, critical thinking and connection.

Advocacy for Parents and Students
This self-advocacy session provides tools and strategies for parents and students to approach and navigate challenges that they may be facing within the school system in Alberta. Participants will use academic, disciplinary and relationship scenarios to learn hands-on to apply those strategies.

Advancing Truth and Reconciliation in Education
In this workshop, educators will work through important questions about teaching Truth and Reconciliation in an age-appropriate way while creating a space for reflection and engagement on what Reconciliation means and how students can engage in meaningful ways. A toolkit of lesson plans on language rights, residential schools, worldview, treaty and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples provides hands-on experiential lessons that take students from awareness into localized action.

Rights Respecting Schools
In collaboration with UNICEF Canada, JHC has supported schools in British Columbia and Alberta to apply a children’s rights lens to the whole organization, creating spaces of diversity, inclusion and equity while also creating powerful spaces for young people to learn about children’s rights while translating this into action within their school community. This series of workshops allows a school to enter a journey of growth and commitment to children’s rights.

Understanding Children’s Rights
In this workshop, JHC uses tools and activities to guide educators in exploring children’s rights and learning creative strategies to introduce students to the Declaration of the Rights of the Child using experiential learning approaches.

Challenging Canada's Story
In this session, participants engage in dialogue and learning on the diverse histories that make up Canada’s social fabric and develop an understanding of their impact on physical and online communities.

Ableism in Education
Decision-makers, government officials, board members, and parents who are directly engaged in how schools operate play critical roles in changing ableist prejudices and are responsible for ensuring schools are inclusive for students and employees while fostering generational change. The classroom is where many of us get some of our first chances to succeed, take risks safely, and build confidence and self-esteem, outside of our family. This workshop will explore ways in which ableist attitudes isolate students with disabilities in classroom activities and strategies which can be developed to ensure they are included in these activities. We will use samples of lesson plans to enable teachers to open up discussions and discuss ableism and inclusion.