Through board games, drama, debates and field trips, teachers who yesterday won a human rights curriculum design award want more elementary and high school students to get a firsthand idea of the abstract concept of human rights.
“I was shocked when I first walked into this place, and I think my students will feel the same, too,” said Tsai Ming-huang (蔡銘晃), a civic education teacher at Taipei Municipal Fuxing Senior High School, as he described how he felt when he first visited the well-preserved site where late human rights activist Deng Nan-jung (鄭南榕) set himself aflame in 1989 to protest the lack of freedom of speech under the authoritarian rule of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime at the time.
The award ceremony was held there yesterday.
PHOTO: LO PEI-DER, TAIPEI TIMES
Tsai worked with his colleague Kuo Wen-ying (郭文瑛) to design one curriculum about the site and another on the 228 Memorial Museum — both of the designs won recognition.
“A major problem that we often run into when we teach students about human rights is that it’s a very abstract idea,” Tsai said. “But here, everything is so well preserved that as you walk into this place, you feel you’ve traveled through a time warp and can actually feel the atmosphere.”
While Tsai and Kuo’s curriculum focused mostly on visiting sites where actual historic events took place, four teachers from Anshun Primary School in Tainan worked together to incorporate field trips, drama, debate and even a board game modeled after Monopoly into the curriculum they designed.
“We realized in class that kids today know 228 Day more as a holiday and don’t often have a good idea about what the 228 Incident was,” said Tseng Kui-feng (曾桂鳳), one of the teachers. “So we decided that maybe we should take the kids to places where things actually happened and tell them the stories.”
However, as Tseng and her team started to work, different ideas popped up.
Tseng’s colleague, Chen Ping (陳稟), who had taken part in drama training, wrote a short play featuring fighting between different animals in a park to show the boundary between freedom and abuse of freedom.
Huang Mei-hua (黃美華), another teacher on Tseng’s team, created a board game in which players would be asked a question related to human rights each time they moved to a new block.
To show how the human rights issue was not something “far away,” Tseng asked students to debate on whether parents should be allowed to read their children’s letters without permission.
Tsao Chin-jung (曹欽榮), a member of the Truth and Reconciliation Association, said that it was important to teach about human rights to prevent repeating the mistakes of the past.
“It’s been only 20 years since Deng set himself on fire — is it a long time? No, it’s not, but it’s long enough for our younger generation born after martial law was lifted to not know about it,” he said. “That explains why we need to start [teaching about human rights] now.”
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching