Beijing +25 invited experimentation and creativity for new online, virtual learning. However, there was a need to bridge a wide divide between the knowledge base in academia with activism at the UN. This project seeks to take first steps to fill that void and promote new ways of building collective learning tools for an international feminist and women’s movement.
How to use this resource?
Educators of all types can utilize this resource in their own communities and contexts. Each module has been created to delve deeply into issues affecting women worldwide. From informal learning communities to college classrooms to reading groups, we hope that you find something useful here to discuss with your students, community members, friends, and colleagues. And in that exploration, we hope that you find your voice in making this world a more equitable place for all women, women-identifying folks, and girls.
Want to get involved?
To engage with the organizers of this resource, please email whrtlar@gmail.com. Comments, suggestions, contributions, networking ideas and blog posts for this living document are welcome and encouraged.
This Teaching, Learning, and Advocacy Resource (TLAR) is a user friendly resource for educators and activists comprised of learning modules organized around six themes dealing with the most pressing challenges to women’s human rights today. The goal was to create learning products from an incubation process led by scholars and activists at the UN. The process promoted experimentation, co-creation, and peer-led curriculum development, focused on action.
Fifty academics, researchers, civil society leaders and UN experts spent 6 months working in teams developing 42 teaching modules. Each theme is comprised of an overview module and up to 10 subtopic modules that address the key components of the theme. The modules follow a standard, easy to follow format that is designed to engage and educate learners while assisting instructors by adhering to academic standards.
Fun group activities and advocacy opportunities are anchored in foundational UN agreements and significant human rights documents. Challenging questions provoke deeper discussion and an exploration of the rights articulated in the Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and other international treaties, Human Rights mechanisms and international commitments.
The modules are far from a dry methodical review of these documents. The Peer Leaders and their teams designed TLAR as an online resource, including lots of videos, animations and interactive resources that engage and motivate the audience. The power of these new technology tools makes this compendium of information an actively engaging resource for all who chose to use it.
It is the great hope of the creators of TLAR that it will be an evolving resource; that teachers and activists will provide feedback on the materials and create modules of their own that will be incorporated in the online version for others to learn from and build on. Women’s human rights exemplify cross-cutting principles, affecting all aspects of life and innumerable issues. The themes and subtopics in the resource are comprehensive but by no means exhaustive.
The nature of this resource, organized in small bite-size modules, make it highly flexible so that it can be used in not only women’s studies but also in environmental studies, engineering, by political leaders, youth groups, philanthropists, civil society, and communications and cultural innovators. It is an attempt to build a better understanding across silos and, in so doing, build new alliances and empower existing movements through knowledge.
Women’s Human Rights Teaching, Learning, and Advocacy Resource 