Human Rights Education of Amnesty Int. CR
Evaluation mapped the Most Significant Changes among students, teachers, and the "live books". It helped clarify the future focus of human rights education. Selected stories are used to promote Live Libraries.
Amnesty International Czech Republic's human rights education
Amnesty International CR has focused on preventing discrimination, racism, and extremism since 2013. It has long-term partnerships with selected schools and low-threshold youth clubs across the CR. The aim is to increase students' engagement and support them in organizing their own actions in defense of human rights.
Image: A snapshot of FAIR Play, human rights education programme (Amnesty Int. CR)
Evaluation using the Most Significant Change method
From the outset, Amnesty International wanted to continuously monitor the impacts of its human rights education so it could adjust its activities if needed and strengthen its positive influence on students' attitudes. At the same time, it was aware of how complex it is to measure the impacts of human rights education.
We therefore applied a mixed-method evaluation, in which Inka Bartošová (Píbilová) worked as the methodology lead, trainer, facilitator of the final evaluation workshop, and consultant on drafting the final report. The evaluation itself—from preparation through data collection to analysis and the expanded evaluation report—was the responsibility of Amnesty International's education team.
For the ongoing annual evaluation, we chose a combination of questionnaires, teacher interviews, discussions with students, trainers, and the so-called living libraries (members of minorities who took part in the debates). In addition, volunteers trained by Inka collected Most Significant Change stories from participants. Amnesty staff and trainers then selected the single Most Significant Change story from across the CR, which was published together with findings from the other data collection methods.
An example of an annual project report including a story is here in Czech.
What the evaluation revealed
The evaluation identified changes in a range of different areas—from personal attitudes to shifts in the classroom atmosphere—and thus also a number of unexpected impacts. Stories from teachers, students, and Amnesty International volunteers can be found here in Czech.
The Most Significant Change stories made it possible to involve students, teachers, and school principals in a discussion about what human rights education brings, which values they consider key, and how to work with those values going forward.
Where to learn more
More about the Most Significant Change method (coming soon).
More about the evaluation of Amnesty International Czech Republic's human rights education here.