Human Rights Education

Still Imagining A Better World

Seventh and eighth grade students at St. Luke's School in NYC join Amnesty International USA on February 5, 2007

During their monthly lunchtime meeting, seventh and eighth graders at St. Luke's School officially joined Amnesty International on Monday, February 5. After a decade of human rights work with hundreds of students over the years in this small, independent school in New York City, teacher Kim Allen pointed out that young student members have plenty of time, energy, and integrity -- they are ideal partners for the adult grassroots community of AIUSA members. In one particularly active school year, students in Kim's classes generated over a thousand letters among her 40 students; they were gratified by answers from the King of Morocco and the Tunisian ambassador, as well as the release of multi-year Focus Case Leyla Zana. News of her release came on this group's 8th grade graduation day. This year's work has embraced social and economic rights as well, including letters to the CEO of McDonald's in support of immigrant agricultural workers in Florida, inspired by the visit of human rights defender Lucas Benitez as a part of the Speak Truth to Power project, one of the HRE program's special initiatives with the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation. Faculty advisor Matthew Adams snapped a few shots of the students eagerly filling out their applications. For many of these students, it was the first time they'd officially joined anything. Isn't Amnesty International the right club to belong to?

For more information on joining Amnesty International USA, or to share your AIUSA school experiences with us, please contact mrobinson@aiusa.org

Imagining A Better World

BY RON LA JOIE

When the planes struck the World Trade Center, the windows at Elisabeth Irwin High School rattled violently in their old frames. Located on Charlton Street in Greenwich Village, less than a mile from what came to be known as "Ground Zero," the small culturally diverse school - student population 110 - is proud of its legacy as perhaps the city's most progressive secondary institution. Irwin students and faculty both retain terrifyingly vivid memories of that high summer morning when death dropped from a bright sky.

"It was just my second day of teaching," recounts Tom Murphy, a history teacher and coordinator of the school's Amnesty International chapter. "I heard the plane going over and I thought something was strange. It sounded more like it was taking off. Then we heard the explosion. We watched from the third floor labs and after the second plane hit we knew it wasn't an accident."

"It was definitely a watershed," echoes Principal Nicholas O'Han. "But since then there has been an intensity, a desire to support the values that have always animated our school."

A former Amnesty International intern, Murphy knew an Amnesty International Club would fit comfortably within that values system. So when the students returned to class two weeks after the attack, one of the first things he and student Ambar Galvan did was organize the school's first Amnesty International chapter. Irwin's Amnesty group, which includes 7th through 12th graders, spent the past academic year studying the International Declaration of Human Rights through the prism of the John Lennon classic "Imagine."

And in Mid May the group produced its first ever interactive human rights coffee house, a multi-disciplinary event featuring live performance, a photography and art exhibition, poetry, and educational displays all taking Amnesty's "Imagine" campaign as their central unifying theme. The entire school closed early Friday afternoon to help the Amnesty club prepare the auditorium, hallways and classrooms for the event.

"We wanted to look at human rights in a series of different ways, through poetry, photography, art and dance," explains Katie Heslop, a 17-year-old junior and event coordinator. "We have about seven to 10 people active in the group but for this almost the whole school helped out."

Coffee houses are a particularly hallowed tradition at the Greenwich Village school. In the 50s the school regularly hosted coffee houses for village folksingers "blacklisted" during the McCarthy witch-hunts. Pete Seeger played at Elisabeth Irwin.

Karen Robinson, Director of AIUSA's Human Rights Education Program, kicked off the evening by introducing Amnesty's "Imagine" video. The program also included poetry readings, Ballet Hispanico performing "The Dance of Want," the 10th Grade Music Class singing "Blowin' in the Wind" by a former Village resident and coffee house habituZ named Bob Dylan, "Speak Truth to Power," a series of dramatic readings and an anti-war rap by student Luis Lopez.

Later Robinson presented Galvan with a special award for Excellence in Human Rights Education. Galvan received the honor for her work in establishing the E.I. campus group, teaching human rights education to elementary school students at Irwin's associated elementary school, the Little Red School House, giving a presentation on human rights training to the Board of Ed/Office of Multicultural Education Office, and for her work as an intern with AIUSA's human rights education program. The Elisabeth Irwin singers then sang "Imagine" and the evening ended with a lively sing-along rendition of another Dylan classic, "The Times They Are a Changin'."

"Imagine was a great theme for the coffee house because that song really embodies what human rights are all about," says Ben Fishner a 17-year-old 11th grade student and activist who helped set up the photography exhibit. "Everyone was involved in this one way or another."

John Lennon wrote "Imagine" five decades after founder Elisabeth Irwin imagined and founded a school in 1921 "where prejudice will dwindle from lack of room to grow. Where freedom will lead to judgment."

At Elisabeth Irwin, despite everything, that dream is still alive.