Becoming Global Citizens @ Charlottesville High School

Welcome to the digital home for the Becoming a Global Citizen class at Charlottesville High School! We are a class that was started as a partnership with the University of Virginia in 2013.

If you want to see what the class has been doing recently, please check out our blog. Our blog is in reverse chronological order, so our students can see what is happening. There is also the most current student assignment prompt available in the toolbar before it gets moved into our blog. This seems small but helps our students with visibility..

If you have never been to our site before, it may make more sense for you to start by looking at our archives month by month over on the right side of our page. Each year starts in August or September and goes until the students move into the action project phase. Our class is always a work in progress, so while you will see some things repeated from year to year, other things are always changing based on current events and unexpected opportunities.

You may be interested in reading more about specific topics, so you can search in our toolbar.

This course is designed to help create a generation of intellectually inspired, knowledge producing, and socially responsible students. Through dynamic and creative readings, films, assignments, and activities students will engage with each of the three core themes of the course: human rights, empowerment, and social justice. A number of events will be facilitated by graduate and undergraduate student mentors from the University of Virginia as well as a variety of guest speakers (including activists, academics, and artists who utilize their work to advocate for issues related to social justice).

Students will learn about the history of the United Nations and human rights. They will be introduced to the tenets of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (the UDHR) and human rights treaties that mobilize persons and resources to action when rights are violated.

Students will explore the relationship between human rights and social justice through engaging with issues that are important to them, including but not limited to: stereotyping and discrimination, immigration, climate change, and freedom of expression. Through stories and narratives shared by youth (both verbal and written), students will connect with abstract concepts related to the three core themes.

They will evaluate how “real life” is converted to stories that contain shared and “vital” experiences that transcend boundaries and will explore the following questions: Why do stories matter? How do stories connect us? What is my story? Throughout the course students will be challenged to consider the ways in which they come to know and understand themselves, each other, the world around them, and their ability to act as responsible and aware agents of change.

Thanks to Lola Manning, Ms. McLaughlin’s art student for contributing the image above!