Read for free until 2:30 p.m.
Listening to children’s rights: Duderstadt students put audio files online
Doderstadt. From one minute to the next, on Wednesday morning, Marktstraße was filled with jubilant children: more than 100 pupils from St. Elisabeth Primary School came to the weekly market to present the results of their work on a topic important to the public: fourth graders’ engagement with children’s rights. The result is 15 audio files spoken by children, accessible via QR codes. They are gathered by a barrier in the center of the city.
Read more after the announcement
Read more after the announcement
“Here you can learn something about the right to …” is the title of each of the fifteen fields, which also contains, in addition to an image and a quote from Children’s Rights, a QR code behind which there is a link to an audio file. Interested parties can use the summer to access the partition wall and scan codes with their smartphones. Subsequently, councils will be set up in various locations in the city to enable Duderstadt residents and city guests to deal with children’s rights and the primary school project on a permanent basis. “The issue is too important to work on behind closed doors,” Principal Tanja Niederstraßer explained on Wednesday.
Mayor Thorsten Vicki (FDP), who reported on how zoning and slab planning took place in the city centre, took off: In fact, he spoke to Niederstrasser about something very different from what you did about the Children’s Rights Project. It was clear to him: This belongs to the public.
The Children’s Rights Schools Program is an international program in cooperation with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and is implemented in many countries around the world. According to the principal, 38 pilot schools have been involved in Lower Saxony since the 2020/2021 academic year. St. Elisabeth’s School in Doderstadt is part of the Southeast Lower Saxony network with a school from Göttingen, Goslar and Salzgitter.
Read more after the announcement
Read more after the announcement
The goal is to permanently embed children’s rights into everyday school life and to create a participatory and integrated learning environment for all children, says Niederstrasser. During the Child Rights School Training, all project schools went through a seven-stage program of live events, self-learning modules and tasks to be completed. After completion of the program, all pilot schools will receive the “Children’s Rights School” certificate from the Minister of Education in 2024.
Survey at the beginning of the school year
Pupils in classes 4c1 and 4c2 at St. Elizabeth’s School in Duderstadt with completed listening stations. Back to right: Middle school teacher Mary Grobeker.
© Source: St. Elizabeth’s School
At the beginning of the school year there was a survey among students, which showed that although all the children at St Elizabeth’s School felt well involved in school decisions, they did not know much about children’s rights. “The middle school teacher, Marie Grobeker, used this as an opportunity to develop and implement a teaching unit on the topic of children’s rights in the fourth year religion subject,” Niederstraßer reports. The result is the now-presented audio clips, from which 15 listening stations must emanate. Class representatives 4c1, 4c2, Lea, Hannah, Gabriel and Philipp presented themselves on Wednesday.
But it shouldn’t just stay with this outcome: As a long-term impact, students must develop an enduring social commitment and claim their rights locally and globally, according to the project. This was also pointed out by the Lower Saxony state coordinator for children’s rights schools, Julian von Maguari, on Wednesday. We hope that children who know their worth and their rights will become the “compassionate adults of tomorrow”. She praised the commitment of St. Elizabeth School and noted its Catholic patronage, saying, “Children’s rights and the Christian faith go hand in hand wonderfully,” calling Jesus a “pioneer of children’s rights.”