Europe
12.03.2020

Human Rights Education in Ukraine: the First Training of Trainers within SIMschool Project

Together with our partners EdCamp, we have spent last week of February in Kharkiv, Ukraine conducting the first Training of Trainers within the project “SIMschool – Teaching Human Rights with Simulation Games”.

During four very intense days, we got a chance to get to know our projects participants – 15 schoolteachers and 5 civil society actors – an inspiring, experienced and motivated group that will stay with us for all the two years of the project and will be the changemakers in Ukrainian human rights education.

Within the first part of the event, we talked about human rights in general, discussed and analyzed different topics: non-discriminative approach to education, how human rights are taught at school, vision of the project, to name a few.

Two days of the training were dedicated to experiencing various small games that can be used as a non-formal education tool for teaching such topics as Intro to Human Rights, Non-Discrimination, and Participation within a classroom or as an extracurricular activity. In small groups, we reviewed the games, discussed their pros and cons, and brainstormed the way to adjust them to the Ukrainian school. As a result, each thematic block now contains 4-8 games that can be used in a proposed order to fully cover a specific topic or as an independent unit.

There is a lot of work to be done during the next trainings, but the beginning was already very promising and encouraging. We are looking forward to the second training in the end of April to get the participants’ feedback on the game testing with their own students. And of course can’t wait to experience a simulation game all together and then assist our participants in developing their own ones!

Read more about our SIMSchools project here