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Another FaCTS Mellon Project

Historians as Engaged Readers: Understanding Human Rights in a Global Past

by Dr. Elizabeth S. Manley

This project seeks to take a newly created but not yet implemented course and develop it as a reading intensive seminar designed to fit within both the FaCTS theme — Fostering Active Reading — and the goals of Xavier University's Quality Enhancement Plan. The course, Human Rights in Global History, fulfills the core requirement for history and targets first and second year students. The plan for course development includes creating activities that engage students in the topic of global human rights, but that also enable them to fully dissect and interpret written historical materials covering a wide range of time periods and cultural backgrounds. Students will participate in individual and group activities that demand careful attention to primary source documents, journal articles, and human rights databases. The course development plan proposes three central components: solidifying basic document analysis, regular newspaper and journal topic analysis, and a final portfolio project of reading and interpretive efforts. The objective of the proposed course is to teach students to break down even the most foreign of documents into a more contemporary language, describe the issues at work in that particular historical moment, and ultimately envision the multiple lenses through which one could see a single historical event.

Start date: Monday, May 10, 2010
Finish date: Tuesday, May 10, 2011