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Human
Rights in a Global Classroom : Introduction to Law, the Individual,
and the Community: A Cross-Cultural Dialogue
By Craig Scott
Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law.
I have been asked to write
a few words on the use of communications technology as part of a
"global classroom" course that will be run here at the
Faculty of Law in second term. The course is offered as an upper
year seminar worth three credits and is called Law, the Individual,
and the Community: A Cross-Cultural Dialogue. This seminar has been
developed based on the experience gained from a pilot version of
the course which was run from January to March 1997.
The seminar is centred on dialogue
amongst parallel classes at the University of Toronto, the National
University of Singapore (NUS), the Universiti Sains Malaysia (in
Penang), Turku Law School in Finland, and Emory University in Atlanta,
USA, primarily by Human Rights in a Global Classroom means of Internet-based
conferencing technology. Some students at the University of Hong
Kong may join in this year, although that law school will not formally
come onstream until the 1999-2000 year.
At its broadest, the course
is thematically organised around competing ideas about the appropriate
relationship between individual and community and the role of law
and legal institutions in regulating that relationship. Emphasis
is placed on recognising and then working through different perspectives
and experiences of students, not just amongst participating classes
but within any given class. By using the idea of human rights as
a focus for interactions, the course directly tackles questions
of the tensions between the claimed universality of fundamental
values and the normative relevance of societal particularities (cultural,
historical, socio-economic, etc.). Topics that will be addressed,
in one or more dimensions, will include the death penalty, corporal
punishment in schools, access to healthcare, parental control over
children, sexual diversity, customary and religious norms in relation
to women, and regulation of police and the military so as to prevent
torture and brutality. Selected case judgments and scenarios, drawn
mainly from international human rights law, will provide the concrete
focus for exploring within individual topics the broader thematic
readings of the course.
The Course’s Communication
Technology
The main form of communication
technology used to link the students will be an Internet discussion
group site to which students in the course will have password-only
access. The discussions relate to course materials that will be
made available in hard copy, it having been decided for various
reasons that putting reading materials on the Internet itself has
serious pedagogical shortcomings.
Communication is text-based.
Students type in and "post" contributions to "conferences"
involving all students from all the participating universities.
All of these conference discussions are "asynchronous"
in that students contribute to the discussion, in writing, at different
times (i.e. they are not "real-time" communications).
These contributions are then "archived" on the website
(in the chronological order in which they are posted and according
to the specific sub-conference thread of conversation to which the
contribution was posted). Other students, accessing the website
at their convenience, will scroll through the latest postings, and
respond to one or more — or start a new stream of conversation if
it is felt the current streams need to be supplemented. The course
is organised around eight common weeks, each week corresponding
to a different topic. For each topic-week, there will be a dedicated
conference and a residual ninth conference for those students who
wish to continue discussions from a previous week, even as the course
has moved on to a new topic.
There are six co-instructors,
one from each school other than Malaysia where there are two instructors.
Each class meets on its own to the extent and in the manner the
home instructor decides is desirable in terms of how he or she thinks
students will get the most out of the global classroom. One instructor
may choose to meet an hour a week to review issues being raised
on the Internet site while another instructor may decide to meet
every second week for a couple hours in a compute lab and have students
go online as a group. Still another may choose to use a class or
two to discuss the content of one of the audio talks to be found
on the course’s website (described below). Due to differences in
term time, there may not be a complete overlap for all five schools
for all eight weeks, but it is likely that the minimal complete
overlap will be six weeks. USM, for example, will meet for a full
five to six weeks on their own before the global classroom portion
starts in January, as their term starts in November. They will then
join the first six of the eight topic-weeks before their term ends.
Apart from monitoring and (lightly)
moderating the conference discussions as well as running some parallel
sessions for their own students, the co-instructors will also be
individually responsible for a separate virtual forum comprised
of a cross-section of students from all or most of the locations.
This forum will "meet" online throughout the course, or
a large chunk of it. Cross-cutting themes being considered are those
which challenge the state-centred paradigm which still structures
inquiries into the relationship between individual and community.
So, for example, individual criminal responsibility for human rights
violations might be one theme and the transnational legal relationship
between multinational corporations and local (especially indigenous)
communities might be another. These cross-cutting groups are likely
to "meet" three or four times, over the course of term,
in real time through the use of an IRC (Internet Relay Chat — or,
simply, "chat") facility. This, too, will be text-only,
but the interaction will be immediate. The groups will accordingly
be selected taking into account not only student’s particular interests
in the themes being explored but also the logistics of real-time
interaction across multiple time zones.
The Course’s Co-instructors
I am fortunate to have as co-instructors
scholars who are leaders in the field of human rights. The Malaysian
colleagues who are joining the global classroom are Professors Maznah
Mohamad (Dept. of Development Studies) and Johan Saravanamuttu (Dept.
of Political Science). Prof. Mohamad’s primary area of expertise
relates to women in development as well as women and Islamic law
(she is National Coordinator of the Women and Muslim Law Project).
Prof. Saravanamuttu is currently focusing on the theory and practice
of civil society in Southeast Asian societies. Professors Mohamad
and Saravanamuttu will draw on their extensive involvement with
women’s organisations (such as Sisters in Islam and the Association
of Women Lawyers) and social reform movements (such as Aliran) in
Malaysia. Professor Kevin Tan in Singapore is one of the leading
legal scholars in South-east Asia, widely recognised as the leading
constitutional law scholar for Singaporean and Malaysian law combined.
He teaches a course on Law & Society in Singapore and has long focused
on critical problems in international human rights law. The pilot
version of this course was co-taught with his colleague Professor
Thio Li-ann, who will be on leave next year, but will likely return
for future versions of the course. She also works in both constitutional
and public international law, and has been a leading voice in the
legal community in Singapore promoting women’s equality. It is not
unknown for both Professors Tan and Thio to cause some controversy
in Singapore by virtue of critical analysis found in their academic
writing or public comments. Prof. Martin Scheinin, a member of the
United Nations Human Rights Committee and one of the world’s leading
experts on the legal protection of social and economic rights, heads
up a class participating in the global classroom next year from
the Institute of Human Rights at Abo University in Turku, Finland.
Also participating is a Prof. Abdullahi An-Na’im’s international
human rights seminar at Emory University in Atlanta. Prof. An-Na’im,
in exile from the Sudan, was head of Human Rights Watch (Africa)
and is widely recognised as the leading international legal scholar
working on issues of universality, culture and human rights.
An Audio Bank of Talks by
the Co-Instructors and Others
Apart from good, old-fashioned
e-mail, one other form of technology will seek to benefit from this
exciting range of instructors. On the website will be stored an
audio bank of short lectures (or, perhaps more accurately, musings)
by the various co-instructors on selected topics. Prof. An-Naím
at USM and Prof. Mohamad at USM may, for example, do talks on Islamic
values and the interaction between internal versus international
struggles for women’s rights. Prof. Tan at Singapore may do an overview
of the basic contours of the critique of Western human rights discourse
mounted over the last decade from several quarters in Asia. Prof.
Scheinin may provide some framework for thinking about the link
between cultural rights and protection of communities from resource
exploitation activities of multinationals. Prof. Saravanamuttu at
USM may relate his work on the development of civil society movements
to the role of non-governmental organisations in forging a transnational
language and sensibility of human rights. I am also giving some
thought to asking non-participating scholars also to do brief talks
which may be placed in the audio bank as part of a longer-term project
of creating a U of T oral archive of international human rights
law. These talks can be individually downloaded to law school computers
or student computers which have the right software, and listened
to at the leisure of the students. As mentioned above, some may
serve as the basis for the meetings of individual classes with their
home instructors. The plan is to also provide a set of cassettes
containing all the talks to each school so that they can be listened
to on a standard cassette player.
The Pilot Course, Winter 1997,
and Some Lessons Learned With Respect to Video-Conferencing
As briefly noted earlier, a
pilot version of the course was run from January to March 1997 in
the winter term of the 1996-1997 academic year. This pilot course
involved only U of T and NUS, having emerged from my sabbatical
stay in Singapore from January to June 1996. With the enthusiastic
support of both NUS and U of T, it was decided to go ahead as soon
as possible with the pilot project on a bilateral, and admittedly
experimental, basis. Thus, within six months of approval of the
course by the two universities, a single global classroom was created
out of two locations, bearing the name we have retained for the
upcoming expanded version of the course: Law, the Individual, and
the Community: A Cross-Cultural Dialogue.
Professors Tan and Thio led
15 students at the NUS Faculty of Law while I had 12 students here
at U of T. Dialogue as a two-way learning process was emphasised
throughout. The main form of communication technology used to link
the classes and to facilitate this process was room-to-room video-conferencing
over “ISDN” telephone lines. This placed the classes in real-time
contact with each other. The U of T class used a specially-equipped
room at the Faculty of Engineering in which a large screen projected
the incoming image of the Singapore students in their room and another
screen showed what outgoing image was being beamed to Singapore.
There were eight two-hour sessions, with the class in Toronto meeting
at 7-9 PM on Tuesday nights which translated across 13 hours of
time zones into 8-10 AM Wednesday mornings in Singapore.
A parallel, but less central,
form of communication was an Internet conference website similar
to that which is now central to the new version of the course. In
the context of video-conferencing being the core mode of the course,
the website was used for several purposes. One purpose was as a
site for discussion amongst members of the entire combined class
of a No. of set topics flowing out of the themes of the course
readings. A related purpose was its use as a post-class discussion
site for students to continue dialogue in the days following a video-conference
session. As well, students were partnered with “electronic penpals”
at the other institution and used the website as one means to prepare
cooperative presentations on selected topics for the last four of
the eight video-conference sessions.
Despite the compressed planning
and preparation, the course in 1996-1997 was largely successful,
judging by student evaluations at both NUS and U of T and by the
instructors’ assessment of the quality of the discussions which
transpired throughout much of the course. However, it was obvious
that there were a No. of aspects of the course that needed either
modification or refinement, especially given that the plan from
the beginning was to consider expanding the course to other partners
around the world.
The most significant amendment
to the course design is the elimination of video-conferencing as
the central feature of the course – at least the costly video-conferencing
via ISDN lines as opposed to the possibilities that are emerging
with respect to low-cost Internet-based video communication (see
below). Instead, as already noted, Internet-based discussion groups
and IRC (Internet Relay Chats) will be made the essence of the course
in future. Removing video-conferencing will allow lower-cost and
more technologically-accessible communication contexts. In addition,
it was found in 1996-1997 that the level of reflectiveness of student
contributions was noticeably higher and more sustained through the
Internet discussion group than during the video-conference sessions.
However, because it was underemphasised in the pilot course, that
level of reflective engagement dropped off noticeably about halfway
through the course as the students focused on preparing their cooperative
presentations for the last four video-conference sessions. With
respect to written Internet conferencing, it is apparent that not
only do students have more time to consider what they wish to say
and how to say it, but also they are able to situate their contribution
more effectively in relation to the archive of postings made by
other students on any given issue or in any given thread of conversation.
It is important to note that
there are indeed many virtues to bilateral video-conferencing and
much was learned by the three co-instructors on which techniques
work and which do not. The intimacy and immediacy of interaction
has real benefits and it can be a very cost-effective way to bring
“in” guest teachers. On the other hand, careful pre-class preparation
and relatively hands-on moderation is needed for interactive sessions
to work. And, in retrospect, it does not appear to have been a wise
use of time and resources to ask students to take charge of presentations
and leading discussion in the last four sessions. This is not the
occasion to go into the pros and cons of video-conferencing in any
further detail, but I am always available to colleagues or indeed
students who are thinking about organising classes, events or a
whole course around this technology.
In any case, video-conferencing
technology is currently not conducive to a multi-school (as opposed
to bilateral) global classroom. It will likely only be a year or
two before high-quality Internet-based video-conferencing can facilitate
interaction between multiple classrooms with the aid of screen projectors
that will enlarge the images on a screen in the front of a classroom.
The current Internet technology can be made to work, but the co-instructors
have decided that, pedagogically, returns are sufficiently limited
that it is best to wait until both this course and the technology
itself find their legs.
There is no doubt whatsoever
that it would be ideal to be able to have two or three video-conference
sessions that would allow students to put faces to names and to
get a better sense of the personalities of their interlocutors around
the globe. As a substitute, we will make use of a photo bank and
student profiles to help approximate the intimacy video-conferencing
produces.
We have not completely ruled
out for the upcoming course some experimental Internet video-conferencing,
perhaps involving one or more of the cross-cutting thematic groups.
The University Sains Malaysia has just developed and patented an
Internet video-conferencing software that allows, the inventors
claim, for clear, multi-point communication. The USM university
authorities are keen to offer this technology as a contribution
to the global classroom. The co-instructors have yet to test it
out, so it may well not suit our needs for this coming term. Even
if it does, the decision may still be made to keep things simple(r)
and to limit interaction to written conferencing and chatting, along
with audio bank downloads.
Reading Materials
One final lesson of the pilot
course is that some general principles about teaching do not change
just because technology is involved. One such principle is that
both the subject-matter and amount of reading has to be carefully
chosen in light of the pedagogical aim of that course and the teaching
methods of that instructor. Partly because of the compressed time
period in which the pilot course was put together, it is fair to
say that the materials suffered. There is a need, judging by this
first experience, to have a much leaner (while, hopefully, just
as interesting) set of mandatory readings than we did in 1996-97
in order for the Internet dialogues to be more focused and in depth,
and thus more fruitful. A meeting of four of the co-instructors
was held this past June in Malaysia to finalise the main lines of
the readings, following a period of consultation amongst all the
instructors by e-mail. The co-instructors are now collaborating
on a set of materials that they seek to have available for the start
of November when the Malaysia class begins its version of the course.
The Future of the Course
Eventually, the hope is that
a kind of basic template will be developed for future versions of
the course. The hope is, at some point, to publish the materials
(as cheaply as possible) and to set up a user-friendly website so
that schools from around the world can form their own global classroom
clusters without the need for either a U of T or an NUS partner
to be participating. The conferencing software would be accessible
as would the audio bank of human rights talks, and so on.
There is already much interest
around the world, from Cape Town to Hong Kong to Budapest to Tokyo
to Beijing, in joining the course. We suspect that five to six schools
is probably the upper limit for a viable cluster, such that the
course will only be able to draw in new partners if multiple clusters
are relatively easy to create and maintain. If, eventually, multiple
clusters do come into being in a few years, various new ideas can
be tried like the occasional grand conference of all schools or
cross-sections thereof, or rotating schools through different clusters
from year to year. The hope of the original instructors, myself
and Professors Tan and Thio, is to find a way to allow U of T and
NUS to remain the joint host of this global classroom course even
if neither is participating in a given year, either in a given cluster
or at all. The ideal would, as always, be to attract some core funding
to make this possible, including enough to pay for the time of a
staff member to coordinate the linking-up of schools, the registration
of students, trouble-shooting and so on. Such funding might also
be sought simultaneously to bring to life the above-advanced idea
of a Internet U of T audio bank of human rights talks.
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September 1998,
Volume 1 No. 4
Contents
Human
Rights in a Global Classroom: Introduction to Law, the Individual, and
the Community: A Cross-Cultural Dialogue
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