Human Rights Education Interns, Spring 2023
Every year, the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Education Project hosts a competitive human rights education internship, open to all undergraduate students.
Accepted human rights education interns study human rights history, law, and international enforcement. We meet with leaders in the field of human rights, such as representatives from the United Nation and experts at the Global Center on Human Trafficking.
Each intern identifies a pressing human rights issue that they want to learn more about—this has included topics as varied as antisemitism, food insecurity, educational equality, human trafficking, Black civil rights, indigenous environmental activism, and disability rights, among many others. Through guided research at the Montclair State University Sprague Library, interns produce an annotated bibliography of leading sources.
Next, interns study the pedagogy of meaningful and effective human rights education. This includes attending an Echoes & Reflections Holocaust education workshop, as well as participating in other anti-bias trainings. With guidance from the faculty of the College for Education and Engaged Learning, interns develop an age-appropriate lesson plan to teach about their human rights topic to an audience of secondary students.
These lesson plans are enhanced through technology workshops hosted by the ADP Center for Learning Technologies. Interns create interactive lessons that encourage active student participation and incorporate media such as film clips, poetry, art, survivor testimonies, and photographs to emphasize the human experience and cultivate empathy and understanding.
Finally, interns visit a local public school to present their lesson to an audience of middle school or high school students, under the supervision of a classroom teacher. Through these lessons, the interns deliver important content on human rights issues that secondary students do not typically encounter in the standard curriculum.
The human rights education internship is funded by the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education, and supported by the College for Education and Engaged Learning and the ADP Center for Learning Technology. The internship is supervised by Dr. Zoë Burkholder, Professor of Educational Foundations and Director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Education Project.
The human rights education interns’ lesson plans are published online and include lesson plans, google slide shows, and resources for educators — all free. We hope you will check them out here.