Database on Human Rights Education and Training

http://www.unhchr.ch/hredu.nsf/

This invaluable source of teaching material for EDC with a focus on human rights is provided by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) with its Database of Human Rights Education and Training.

Authors/Editors

Extensive in-depth information about OHCHR can be found on a special part of its website.

Description of Contents

The database - as can be seen on the screenshot above - is divided into four interlinked sections with General, Institutions and Programmes being the most interesting for teachers of EDC and Human Rights Education. The following screenshots show each of these sections.

The vertical navigation bars in all sections are containing a link to a search function, which allows you to search all the contents of the database.

Hints for using the directory and the database

With respect to the abundance of material offered, it is very important to know how to use the directory and the database. This is why I would like to show you two different ways to do so with the first one using the directory as starting point.

If you search for teaching material for human rights education in primary schools, you would first click on "General" (1), "Substantive Focus" (in the vertical navigation bar) (2), then scroll through the "Substantive Focus" section using the "Previous" and "Next" buttons (3), click on "human rights education" (4), on "material" (5), thus expanding the "material" section, and finally find a first interesting source, the "ABC-Teaching human rights...".

When clicking on that link a new window/new tab with extensive information about the source selected (see screenshot below which shows only a small part of the site) will open. Read the content summary and thus make sure that the source chosen really meets your requirements. If so, the only thing that remains to be done is clicking on the link to the document - in our case a PDF-file -, open it in your Adobe Reader and save it to your hard disk.

This is the way you always should use when preferring to work with the various directories of the database on human rights education. Another option could and should be using the search function provided. Unfortunately, though, when I was visiting the site in October 2005, this feature was only available for the sections "Programmes" and "Institutions". Within the section "General", however, it simply didn't work.

This is all the more regrettable as especially in this section it would be needed most and could extraordinarily facilitate finding the material you're looking for and thus could be a real time-saver. So one only can hope that the search engine for the "General" section will be available again as soon as possible.

Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the "Database on Human Rights Education and Training" belongs to those sources of EDC which are imperative to know when you're in search for ideas and material for your courses.