Following a month’s worth of preparation, students in the Human Rights elective class presented their findings on a host of controversial issues ranging from abortion rights to the education system in North Korea.

John Terry’s class started the project in early January and finished up with a week of presentations at the end of Marking Period 2.

Terry is the teacher for the Human Rights class in WHHS. It is a half-year course where students learn about different human rights issues and topics in both history and today. Some things that were covered in the class were LGBTQ+ rights, white nationalism, women’s rights, the origin of human rights, and much more.

Recently the class was assigned a project in early January which was like a research conference. Collecting data, information, and opinions, students of the class were able to choose any topic that they were passionate to advocate and research about.

The number of people in the group depends on how many researching strategies were needed. Some examples of those strategies being interviews, surveys, internet-based research, as well as traditional media-based research. The first step was to learn how to research efficiently using reliable sources. The next was to transfer that knowledge into researching for the topic that was picked.

There was a great wide variety of topics students picked like human trafficking, affordable housing, disability rights, systemic racism, and a lot more. How the students presented their research was also their decision. Examples being a slideshow, a research paper, a video presentation, and more.

In an interview with Terry, he talked about how this was not his first time doing this sort of project before and he started it in 2013 just with a different class. He also talks about how he plans on doing it again not only in his human rights class but in his contemporary issues class as well.

“I think it went pretty well givin the circumstances and I think we made it work”, Terry said when speaking about his thoughts on how the project went. “I think your classmates were genuinely interested in giving answers and moving foward I would love to have a wider audience”, Terry continued.