Module 2
Where Passion Meets Purpose: Finding Your Changemaker Path
Overview
Using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as foundational lenses, students explore real-world challenges and discover ways to raise awareness and inspire change. Through pre-planning activities like hexagonal thinking, they identify an issue that matters to them and define a personal call to action. As they prepare for their own projects, students examine how storytelling can drive change by exploring its key elements across written, visual, performing, and cinematic arts. Finally, they learn how powerful storytelling can influence emotions, shape ideas, and build meaningful connections with audiences.
Lessons
Who Makes Your Heart Race?
View LessonThis lesson will guide students as they begin to independently explore changemakers and how these changemakers use art/media to highlight their issues. This step-stone lesson will lead students to discover their own causes and select their own methods of creative changemaking.
Connecting the UDHR to the Sustainable Development Goals
View LessonSustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as foundations for students’ awareness of human rights. These documents will provide the lens through which students will peer as they begin to think about the challenges facing their communities (or the world at large) while exploring possible methods to shine their own creative lights on these challenges.
What’s the Issue?
View LessonThrough the use of hexagonal thinking, students will make connections to the articles of the UDHR or to one of the SDGs. Hexagonal thinking will help to narrow the students’ scope to one article or one goal, which will then allow them to identify a specific issue and call to action that will be at the center of their creative action campaigns.
Find a Changemaker Working on Your Issue
View LessonStudents will search for and study the work of successful human rights defenders who have championed a cause similar to or the same as the students’ issues of choice.
Let’s Visualize to Actualize!
View LessonStudents will create a visual brainstorm that will serve as a roadmap before they begin work on their Creative Changemakers project.
What’s Your Story and How Will It Best be Told?
View LessonStudents will examine how storytelling can create change in their communities and the world at large. They will do this by taking a closer look at the elements of storytelling and how these elements appear not just in written and verbal expression, but also in the visual, performing, and cinematic arts. They will then explore how sound storytelling can affect how others feel and think, thus, creating a connection between themselves and their audiences.
