Defining Human Rights

In this lesson and the next, students will consider what rights should belong to every human being on earth, as well as the challenges of trying to create an international framework of rights for all. First, students will define a right and then reflect in their journals about the rights that they feel they have, and those that they don’t have but should, at home, school, and in their communities. Then students will compare their definitions with the 1947 UNESCO definition of a right and work with a group to reach a consensus about three human rights they feel every person is entitled to enjoy. Next, students will learn how the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, grappled with these same questions as UN representatives worked together to draft a Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in the aftermath of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Holocaust.

Before you teach this lesson, please review the following guidance to tailor this lesson to your students’ contexts and needs.

Activity 1 Reflect on Your Rights

• For this journal entry, students will respond to a series of questions about their rights. Reveal the questions one at a time so students have a chance to think and write about each one before seeing the next question.

  • What is a right?
  • What rights do you have in your home?
  • What rights do you have at school?
  • What rights do you have in your community?
  • What rights do you think you should have in your home, school, or community but don’t feel that you do?

• Ask students to debrief in a Think, Pair, Share, adding ideas to their “What is a right?” response if they agree with something their partner wrote but they didn’t think about at the time.
• Then ask students to work with their partner to create a “working definition” for right and share it with another pair of students or with the class.

Activity 2 Compare Working Definition with UNESCO’s 1947 Definition of a Right

• Project the following definition of right and explain to students that in 1947, the United Nations Economic and Social Committee (UNESCO), a United Nations agency that was founded in 1946 to advance “. . . peace and security by promoting collaboration among the nations through education, science and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, for the rule of law and for human rights and fundamental freedoms, ³ ” defined a right as: . . . condition of living, without which . . . men cannot give the best of themselves as active members of the community because they are deprived of the means to fulfill themselves as human beings.
• Ask students to work in small groups to answer the following questions about the UNESCO definition of right:

  • In what ways is the UNESCO definition similar to and different from your working definition of right?
  • Do you think the UNESCO definition is too broad, too narrow, or just right?
  • If the United Nations asked your group to provide them with feedback about UNESCO’s definition of a right, what would you suggest?
  • What are three rights that your group unanimously believes are "universal"—that apply to all people from every cultural and political background? Why are these rights important to everyone regardless of age, gender, geography, history, politics, religion, etc.?

Activity 3 Learn about the Creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

• Tell students that they will now watch a video to learn about the process by which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted by representatives of nine countries in the United Nations, who also grappled with the question of what is a right and what rights should belong to every human being on earth.
• Play the video Fundamental Freedoms: Eleanor Roosevelt, the Holocaust, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (09:15). Pause the video 2–3 times so students can capture what they learned in a 3-2-1 response without missing any of the images that help tell the story of the historical events leading to the creation of the UDHR.

• 3: Details about what inspired Eleanor Roosevelt’s work
• 2: Challenges UN members faced writing the UDHR
• 1: Question about the UDHR or the process of creating it

• Debrief the video by completing three wraparounds. For each round, students share a phrase from their 3-2-1 responses, starting with details that inspired Eleanor Roosevelt’s work in round one.

Activity 4 Reflect on Human Rights and the UDHR

Ask student to respond to the following questions on an exit card that they will submit at the end of the lesson. They will be building off of these ideas in the next lesson.

• Who is responsible for protecting people’s fundamental rights?
• What responsibility do individuals have to ensure that everyone’s rights are protected? What responsibility do governments have to ensure that everyone’s rights are protected? What makes you say that?
• Who should be included in a country’s universe of obligation? Anyone in the country at a given time? Residents of the country? Citizens of the country?

• 3“UNESCO and the Declaration,” United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, accessed March 26, 2018.