Exploring Human Rights with Newcomer Students

Woven Teaching was proud to partner with Women Forward International (WFI) and Ygnacio Valley High School in Concord, CA to offer a class of “newcomer students” a project to learn about human rights and how to protect and uphold them. Using Woven Teaching’s resource, Human Rights Are for Everyone: A Guide to Teaching for Positive Change, newcomer students learned about human rights movements around the world and examined human rights issues in their own community and at school. 

According to the U.S. Department of Education (2023), “newcomers” refers to K-12 students born outside the United States who have arrived in the country in the last three years and are still learning English. The term “newcomer families” refers to the families or guardians of these students. Under the guidance of teacher Samantha Hopper, students at Ygnacio Valley High School participated in a long term project with Women Forward International to learn the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This project culminated in an event on May 31, 2024 where students shared poems relating their own visions for a world where human rights are protected and upheld for everyone. The event was attended by students, their families and friends, as well as teachers and administrators from the Mount Diablo Valley Unified School District. It also included a resource fair to connect newcomer families to organizations in the community.

The team from Woven Teaching, Women Forward International, and Ygnacio Valley High School are working together to plan the next stage of the program and ways to involve other students at the school and in the district. We look forward to seeing the program grow in the 2024-2025 school year!