Learning Human Rights With Face To Faith

Do your students know what human rights are? Are they familiar with current cases in which those rights are threatened?

Face to Faith, an organization started by Prime Minister Tony Blair to bring students of different faiths and cultures together, is partnering with Hardwired.org in December to help “educate and encourage advocacy on the rights of religious and belief minority groups.”

Part of that education includes video-conferences and blogging, where students in different parts of the world can connect with each other and discuss those rights.

As part of that effort, my religion students will participate in a video conference in December. They will discuss the issue with several other schools around the world who will Skype in for the conference. Face to Faith will supply a speaker who will talk about the issue for twenty minutes before the conference.

In addition, my students will blog with three other schools about human rights issues. Face to Faith will facilitate and supervise the blog. My students will virtually meet students from Israel, Indonesia, and India.

And its all free!

I am preparing my students by reviewing several case histories in which human rights and religious freedom were threatened. Face to Faith supplied the cases but I added additional links for my students so that they could get a broader picture of the different cases.

In one case, a young Muslim model sued Abercrombie and Fitch because she thought that the company fired her because of her hijab or headscarf.

In another case, Sudan imprisoned a young woman for leaving the Muslim faith and in Pakistan authorities imprisoned a young woman for allegedly defiling the name of the prophet Mohammad.

Abercrombie & Fitch and religious bias