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Description
The project aims to address the lack of equality, tolerance at school, as well as the issue of insufficient protection of rights of different minority groups. Using diversity literature, we plan to encourage:
1) reflection upon and review of teacher''s beliefs;
2) to foster tolerance, empathy, and appreciation of diversity.
The project has two target groups: teachers and schoolchildren residing in various regions of Lithuania. School environment is an ideal place to find solutions to ensure the protection of rights of the most vulnerable groups, because it is at school that we transfer knowledge, meaning and initiate change. The project will reach 90 teachers and around 2250 schoolchildren in various regions of Lithuania, thus contributing to the promotion of inclusion and advocacy of human rights.
Diversity literature is a tool that helps to understand, sympathize with and identify oneself with characters from different contexts and realities, thus developing the social skills of inclusion and respect for others. It is important to emphasize, that diversity literature in Lithuania is virtually non-existent: there is an acute shortage of both local and translated works. We aim to present literary works, which include different viewpoints and represent different groups of society, as a new way to human rights education. In the framework of the project, we will create a digital library freely accessible to teachers and their pupils. The library will include 10 books (already translated, newly created by Lithuanian authors and newly translated) accompanied by specially created teaching materials. The teaching materials will conform with official teaching programs, so that teachers could use them in their daily work, integrating into lesson plans, because we aim to make diversity literature a part of official teaching programs. We will organize training for teachers on how to use diversity literature in the classroom
Summary of project results
The project aimed to address the lack of equality, tolerance, and empathy at school, as well as the issue of insufficient protection of rights of different minority groups, and to create an online educational tool that enables teachers to introduce human rights education (HRE) in the class while teaching different subjects, thus integrating HRE in the formal educational process.
The project created the above mentioned tool – digital library of diversity for Lithuania‘s schools with various educational materials and invited over 50 literature, history and ethics teachers to be the first to test these materials in their classes. A total of 11 books or their extracts together with accompanying teaching materials have been uploaded in the library.
They are now accessible free of charge to all Lithuanian schools at https://ivairovesliteratura.lt/
Created output (the library) provides teachers with means to implement the newly adopted national teaching curriculum which is competence-based and gives teachers freedom to form 30% of curriculum content by themselves. The library also provides a seamless way to integrate HRE into the formal teaching process and introduce it during the teaching of different subjects (literature, languages, history, geography, art etc.)