ABSTRACT
The Human Rights Working Group of the University of Massachusetts Boston is a four-year-old group composed of students, staff, faculty, and human rights activists from the wider community. Taking as a starting point the Universal Declaration of Human Rights we proposed that: A Human Rights course could be one that raises consciousness and knowledge about human rights, discusses their importance to achieve a free and just society, and stresses the need to integrate those rights into the public sphere. This can be done over a wide range of perspectives and methods, such as courses that introduce students to legal frameworks, discuss justice promotion, teach critical analysis, or explore historical roots of human rights topics. As faculty continued to express interest and academic departments continued to submit syllabi a picture began to emerge that many of the courses in the university had a human rights dimension that could fit well within our vision of creating an academic program.
