TOT refresher course successfully finished

From February 5th to March 14th, the Human Rights Education Institute of Burma (HREIB) held a TOT refresher course in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

The purpose of the training was to ensure the shared understanding of human rights between HREIB’s new and old trainers from Yangon and Mandalay site, including knowledge of teaching methods, training lesson preparation and advocacy, empowerment, and additional knowledge, skills and opinions valuable for trainers.

During the training of basic human rights concepts, child rights, women’s rights, civil and political rights, economic, social and cultural rights, rights for disabled, rights for sexual orientation, rights for indigenous peoples, international human rights, Myanmar country laws, action toward human rights violations, drawing lessons for human rights, advocacy/ campaign skills, drawing annual work plans, financial and procedure reporting, conflict resolution, including HREIB’s administrative and financial policies were delivered in the training session through collaborative learning.

We developed mutual understanding between new and old trainers, learning from each other through the experience of senior trainers and strengthening the collaboration, unity and fellowship amongst fellow trainers.

A participant said that as a trainer he has an opportunity to share his knowledge with other trainers, and as a result he has improved lesson preparation skills, searching teaching aids skills, creativity and advocacy skills. By learning from the performance of senior trainers, he improved his advocacy/campaign skills.

Another participant added that he is very pleased with HREIB’s unique teaching method and wide knowledge about issues, even though he has experiences before. He will follow “sharpen the saw” and upgrade his ability to become a good trainer.

This was an advanced level ToT refresher course. It enabled the handover of HREIB’s lesson preparation, which has been in use for 10 years, to new trainers. Moreover, 5 new trainers were trained and important roles of human rights education tasks and trainers could be fully understood. Finally, the combination of the trainers’ different backgrounds and HREIB’s teaching methods helped to create an effective new lesson.

We recognized other important issues such as raising more qualified trainers through performing human rights education work, as well as roles of government and NGOs.

Two active teams were formed for Yangon and Mandalay based on this training. There are 7 members on the Yangon team and 5 members on the Mandalay team.

There were 7 members for Yangon and 4 members for Mandalay participating in the meeting.