Join StoryChasers! StoryChasers - Empowering Responsible Digital Citizenship - Invent the future! Scratch | Home | imagine, program, share
12th April 2006

Journal Prompt for students

posted in globalvoices, literacy |

Here is a thought provoking weblink and prompt for students writing in journals for class: Rebecca MacKinnon’s post from April 1, 2006: “How does it feel when your brother gets detained without charge for over a month and the police won’t tell you why, or where he is?”

Rebecca’s closing sentences in this blog post can provide ideas for classroom discussions and debate on issues of free speech, censorship, human rights, and foreign policy:

Can blogs stop human rights violations? Jinyan is right to be skeptical. But will many more Chinese become aware of what’s happening to their own countrymen through blogs like Nina’s and Jinyan’s? It seems likely. Victims and their families now have a direct means to speak out, in their own way. They have a vehicle through which they can receive sympathy from people inside China and people around the world. They can connect with other victims. They “own” and have control over their own stories in a way that was never the case before. In the past, the only way other Chinese people knew about detentions like these were via Western media reports, which sometimes filtered back into China. Such reports are often discounted as exaggerations or Western anti-China propaganda. Many Chinese feel they have good reason to take human rights stories coming out of the West with a grain of salt. But now victimized Chinese can speak directly to their fellow countrymen - without their voices making the double pass through the filter of Western perception and political agendas. This is so much more powerful, and so much more difficult to discount.

These are powerful reasons why your students should be familiar with, regularly access and comment on, and blog about The Global Voices Project.

You have an opportunity today and every day of your life (when you have Internet access) to not only edify student bloggers, but also edify and support those persecuted by the Chinese government like Jinyan by writing a supportive comment.

What are you waiting for?

On this day..

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 12th, 2006 at 8:55 am and is filed under globalvoices, literacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments are closed.