About This Unique Course

This annual 6 credit, 10 day (all day long) intensive course for the Human Rights UniverCITY Summer Institute was offered at the University of Winnipeg Global College, listed in the calendar as ‘HR-2600 Emerging Issues in Human Rights’ (formerly known as Adventures in Global Citizenship.) It started on the Tuesday after the August long weekend, introducing students to local and global human rights challenges and opportunities, and their implications for global citizenship. The course examines “lived rights” through voices, perspectives and actions of individuals and groups working for human rights – globally and locally – using our city as our campus.

2018 Student shares her video essay storyboard to the class

2018 Student writing during class

Senator McPhedran sits with three student at the Afro-Caribbean Pavilion

This human rights intensive is a ‘jump start’ course for students entering university for the first time and provides an opportunity to get to know university life and university level academic requirements in a supportive learning environment where the ‘first year’ and ‘upper year’ students are learning from each other, as well as from the wide range of experts who lecture in this diverse course to focus on ‘lived rights’.

Student gives thank-you to Dr. Art Miki while Senator McPhedran looks on

Elder Leslie Spillett speaks to 2018 class at Ka Ni Kanichihk

Students sit around table at NorWest Community Food Centre with Community Chef Grant Mitchell

The course is structured to strengthen skills in critical thinking and analysis, writing and oral presentations within a human rights framework, as a foundation for increasing student readiness and confidence in a range of post-secondary academic programs.

Students from many departments are drawn to this course, including from Business, Criminal Justice, Education, and the Sciences.

This course is launched by the “class on a bus” as everyone journeys together, to Folklorama pavilions, being briefed en route by Prof. McPhedran on human rights issues for each country visited.

The Winnipeg Free Press (Carol Sanders and John Lewis) reported on Day 1 of the Human Rights UniverCITY 2017:

https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/this-city-is-their-classroom-439356533.html

Here’s an excerpt:
August 9, 2017 – For a summer course called Emerging Issues in Human Rights that uses the city as its classroom, the emergence of a group of LGBTTQ* asylum seekers calling themselves the Ghana pavilion couldn’t have been timed better.

“It will come up in my class,” said Global College instructor and Manitoba Sen. Marilou McPhedran, who created the course seven years ago at the University of Winnipeg.

“Sexual orientation and gender identity are always an issue students are open to address,” she said.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
McPhedran signs a petition calling on the Ghanaian government to change its anti-LGBTTQ* policies.