Learning by Doing: Lessons from the Graduate Students in the Boston Human Rights City Pilot Project

Abstract

Abstract This article describes the experience and lessons learned by graduate students and supervising faculty in piloting an action-research project aimed at realizing positive economic and social change by advancing the vision of Boston as a human rights city that was articulated in a city council resolution adopted in 2011. It details the efforts led by the graduate students in their roles as paid outreach coordinators and research assistants to resuscitate the latent social movement that had resulted in the adoption of the Boston Human Rights City resolution. Against the backdrop of the Boston Human Rights City pilot project’s success at inspiring the re-establishment of the long-defunct city-level human rights commission, each of the graduate student leaders shares their reflections on and analysis of their experience of ‘learning by doing’. They detail the challenges they confronted and what key lessons were yielded by their trial and error. The article concludes with a summary of insights that readers (including the human rights commissioners) might find helpful with respect to both transdisciplinary human rights pedagogy in higher education, especially at the graduate level, and development of social movements, particularly in the advancement of the Human Rights Cities movement. The article therefore contributes to ongoing elucidation in the Journal of Human Rights Practice of what makes for effective human rights education—both in academic environments and in society more generally—outside of the prevalent disciplinary focus on law. Through the lens of the authors’ example of the direct, hands-on experience provided to students by the project, the article invites deeper engagement with transdisciplinary experiential learning as human rights education praxis that aims to reach members of local communities outside the classroom by creating a city-level culture of valuing, protecting and promoting economic and social rights.