[p4k] Know Your Rights
These are exciting days at Canarsie. It’s December now, and the program is gearing up, transitioning from pure education to production. We’re beginning to think about this year’s game concretely, beginning to apply the lessons we’ve learned. On Monday we held a four-hour workshop on the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights that was dramatically different from our past sessions.
Traditionally, our workshops have followed a model of introducing a topic, discussing it, playing an online game about the issue, and then discussing the game and the issue together. Monday, however, we took a break from the computers and gave the students the opportunity to really stretch their creativity. After discussing human rights, the class broke up into small groups and developed skits that demonstrated human rights violations. There are many parallels between theatre and games (as Agusto Boal and Gonzolo Frasca would surely agree) and, while the kids didn’t immediately see the connection, they dove into the task. We actually had to restrain their enthusiasm a bit, as some of the performances involved leaping around and screaming in imitation of police brutality and war.
For the rest of the afternoon students worked in groups to research various human rights topics online and gain a better sense of specific issues. They investigated news stories about racism, health, education, human rights, and children’s rights. Thursday, the research continued, and then we came together to pick our issue area. Some of the kids already had game designs for different topics, and argued passionately for their design and issue. After three rounds of voting, it was decided that human rights should be the issue area for the game. This still sounds broad, but it is specifically human rights that don’t deal with health, education, children’s rights, or racism. Abu Ghraib and Hurricane Katrina were both popular topics to be further studied.
One student was passionate about an issue that I didn’t fully understand until after class. He wouldn’t zero in on a specific issue, but was insistent that the UNDHR itself was important. What I finally realized is that he was stressing the importance of knowing one’s rights. It’s easy to be abused when you don’t even know what protections humans are entitled to. A lot of our students initially had difficulty differentiating between rights and laws; they didn’t see the difference between the Bill of Rights and a criminal code. Rights are not limitations on the people, but rather limitations on the state.
The Bill of Rights and the UDHR are intended to keep the public safe from persecution and tyranny, and that can only be accomplished if people know their rights. In the UDHR’s preamble there is the statement “every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms…” Every person has an obligation to inform his or her fellow citizens of their inalienable liberties. That is a sacred duty. I’m not deciding what the issue for our game will be, the students are, but I would be very proud if they chose human rights education. This week, we’ll pick the exact issue our game will be about. These are very exciting days indeed.
