We are saddened to learn that Dr. Fletcher passed away early this fall. He was an active HRE USA member and Flowers Grant recipient in 2021, along with Michel Buckley. Their project seeks to help high schools around New York City establish student-led human rights clubs. Rest in peace, Dr. Fletcher.
A native of Brevard, North Carolina, Fletcher was a respected educator, scholar, and activist who fought for human rights and justice. He was known for his calm demeanor, charming personality, and melodic Southern accent. During his 24 years at Lehman College, he served as an assistant professor in the Department of Middle and High School Education; department chair; and coordinator for programs in English Education, Technology in Education, and Human Rights and Restorative Justice in Education.
Date: Thursday, November 17, 2022 Time: 7 pm – 8:15 pm Central Time | GMT -5:00 Where: Zoom Cost: FREE and open to the public, registration required
Guest Speaker: Natalia Etten
Natalia Etten is an associate director at a DC-based international affairs think tank. Throughout her career, and prior to her new role, Natalia has supported hundreds of emerging leaders from Eastern Europe, Central and Southeast Asia, and the Caucasus via various flagship U.S. government-funded programs, including Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI) Seeds for the Future and Regional Workshops and Edmund S. Muskie Professional Fellowship Program. During her tenure, she oversaw grassroots community projects across Southeast Asia, orchestrated internship placements across the USA for Foreign Fulbright Scholarship recipients, and designed experiential international, domestic, and virtual events spanning from Astana, Kazakhstan to Jakarta, Indonesia.
Through her pro bono work, Natalia serves on the board of a grassroots civic leadership exchange non-profit in Minnesota, Global Synergy Group. As co-director, she creates youth civic leadership engagement and development exchange programs for young leaders in Ukraine and Minnesota and leads humanitarian aid efforts in hard-to-reach communities affected by the war in Ukraine.
Natalia holds two master’s degrees, one in Ukrainian Language and Literature from Crimean Engineering and Pedagogical University and the other in Comparative and International Development Education from the University of Minnesota. She is committed to connecting people, ideas, and cultures and providing civic leadership development opportunities for the brightest minds of the world.
Description: The guest speaker will take a closer look at the war, its causes, the results so far, and share an update of current human rights violations taking place and will respond to questions from the attendees.
Hallie McRae is a rising junior studying Political Science and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. She is passionate about human rights and social justice advocacy, participating in programs and organizations dedicated to each. On campus, she is involved in UC Berkeley’s ACLU club, leading the Know Your Rights project team under the Criminal Justice Reform committee. Here, students inform the community about the rights they hold surrounding police and immigration forces through the creation of handouts, presentations to local high schools, and general education campaigns. She is also involved in student government, coordinating educational outreach and support for survivors of sexual violence and sexual harassment, and is a member of the Repair The World Campus Corps, targeting food insecurity by mobilizing community members each week to pack and deliver bags with essentials to unhoused folks. Engaging with Human Rights Watch Student Task Force throughout high school, Hallie benefitted largely from human rights education and advocacy in academic settings, and is thrilled to continue the work of expanding human rights education and organizational work in schools and communities nationwide with HRE USA.
Maddy Wegner is an educator and communications specialist who enjoys building teams, developing new approaches to and resources on education issues, and engaging others — especially young people — in these processes. She has served as the National Youth Leadership Council’s (NYLC’s) Director of Content and Engagement, developing resources for service- learning practitioners that bring research to practice and integrating human and child rights frameworks, for the past five years. She also has served as NYLC’s Director of Communications, overseeing strategic communications including policy, marketing, research, and curriculum development.
While the roots of her teaching trace back to teaching middle and high school English Language Arts, her interests in peace-building and conflict resolution have led her to more informal education settings. Through work with a number of nonprofits she has helped inspire young people to action through the lives and work of Nobel Peace Prize laureates by co-developing a series of iBooks entitled Being the Change as well as another series rooted in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
A member of the Executive Committee for Minneapolis’ Child Friendly Cities designation, she is a recipient of the Stellar Service-learning Award and an “Outstanding Contributions to Service-Learning” award from the Minnesota Department of Education. She received her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College, her teacher training through the University of California, Berkeley’s Bay Area Writing Project and an M.S.J. from Northwestern University.
Adrianna Zhang (she/her) is a first-year student at Stanford University. She is the Founder & Executive Director of San Francisco Communities who Help Advance the New Generation of Education, or SF CHANGE, a nationwide organization that has presented free educational workshops to over 30,000 students around the United States. Passionate about education equity, she has spearheaded children’s rights workshops for thousands of students in partnership with UNICEF’s international Child-Friendly Cities initiative, brought children’s rights workshops to 200+ classrooms, and integrated rights education into school curriculums around the nation.
Adrianna also serves as the Chair of the San Francisco Youth Commission where she led the Vote16SF ballot measure to 207k+ votes, secured free public transportation for youth in San Francisco, and wrote legislation on affordable housing, Title IX reform, and more. She is also an active member of the National Vote16 Advisory Board.
Adrianna was a speaker at TEDxCity of San Francisco 2021 where she discussed youth civic engagement to an audience of 10k+ people. She was a guest panelist at the University of Warwick’s panel on Children’s Rights in Literature and a speaker at the Children’s Rights in the USA conference hosted by Salem State University.
Human Rights Educators USA’s annual Training as Action Series (TAAS) is here! A virtual training series focused on bridging personal and collective action on some of the most critical human rights issues of today.
Come join us as we engage in dialogue regarding Indigenous rights, youth action, gun violence, and much more! REGISTRATION: bit.ly/hreusa-taas2022
Upcoming Event Sessions:
Children’s Rights & Youth Activism: Monday, November 7, 2022 7:00-9:00 pm ET
Ending Gun Violence: Monday, November 14, 2022 7:00-9:00 pm ET
Incorporating Human Rights in the Classroom: Saturday, November 19, 11:00-1:00 pm ET
Due to our generous co-sponsors, the remaining sessions will be provided at no charge to our participants. HRE USA is accepting donations that will help to support our 2023 Winter-Spring Capacity-Building Webinar Series. You may also contribute directly through our 2022-23 Professional Development Initiatives Giving Platform – HRE USA – a project of CTA: 2022-23 HRE Professional Development (givegab.com).
World leaders are coming together this November at the international climate negotiations (COP27), and Climate Generation is here to help you stay in-the-know with the Window into COP delegation.
Follow the COP27 conference through the eyes of eleven everyday climate leaders on the ground in Egypt — because international climate policy should be accessible to everyone.
⭐ Understand climate change action on a global scale ⭐ First access to videos, blogs, and interviews with leaders around the world ⭐ Gain the language and tools to talk about climate change with your community or students
Book Launch Webinar: the latest addition to the SSEC Book Series (Information Age Publishing) entitled Out of Turmoil: Catalysts for Re-Learning, Re-Teaching, and Re-Imagining History and Social Science (in press 2022). Click here to register
During this session, you will workshop best practices and effective techniques for facilitation, conflict management, and inquiry-based questioning, focusing on current social issues being debated in society.
The HRE USA community would like to thank our 2022 Edmonds Fellows, Veronica Bido, Hallie McRae, and Natalie Roach, for their time and talents interviewing HRE USA members and regional representatives. We will be adding additional interviews to this platform in the future and appreciate our members’ time and efforts to meet with our Edmonds Fellows to not only share their experiences, but also provide feedback on ways to strengthen our Network overall and our Regional chapters.
Gloria T. Alter and Bill Fernekes are very pleased to announce the publication of The Human Rights Imperative in Teacher Education: Developing Compassion, Understanding and Advocacy (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2022). This edited volume contains contributions by a distinguished set of authors from the USA, Canada, Chile, Nigeria, and the United Kingdom, all leaders in the field of human rights education. The book combines theory and practice to help educators make human rights education (HRE) a central focus of daily educational practice and includes sample HRE units on the rights of global migrants, Indigenous peoples and LGBTQ+ communities. A comprehensive bibliography and set of appendices provide many resources for further study and research.
Contributors to the book include current and former HRE USA Steering Committee members Gloria T. Alter (co-editor), Bill Fernekes (co-editor), Nancy Flowers, Page Hersey, Glenn Mitoma, Kristi-Rudelius-Palmer and Felisa Tibbitts as well as HRE USA Advisory Board members Abraham Magendzo and Audrey Osler.
A poster session on the book’s development and content will be presented at the National Council for the Social Studies annual meeting in Philadelphia on Friday, Dec. 2 from 11:30 am-12:30 pm at the Philadelphia Convention Center—Convention Center Reg Bridge West. A discount flyer is attached to this email and we encourage you to consider adoption of the book for courses in teacher education programs, inclusion in college/university and school library collections, and purchase by school administrators and classroom teachers.
HRE USA 