Becoming A Human Rights Master Trainer: the Journey

With the growing prevalence of religion, culture, ethnic, social, and political related conflict globally, individuals are increasingly confronted with ideas that fuel misconceptions, fears, and intolerance about those who believe differently than them. Children are particularlyvulnerable to the ideas of intolerance and hatethat lead to violent extremism and need a framework tounderstand freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief as a fundamentalhuman right in order to become resilient to such ideas and know how to respond to them out of a value for people regardless of what they believe. The Director of the Teachers Union for the Mosul/Nineveh Plains region of Iraq recognized an urgent need for ways to teach children to value the freedom of conscience, become resilient against the ideas of hate and intolerance, and overcome the effects of trauma. It is in this context that the Union invited Hardwired to train teachers in the Nineveh Plains and Mosul to help d create communities that embrace a diversity of religions and beliefs to prevent recurrent cycles of religion-related conflict. This paper follows the journey of 27 teachers as they struggle with challenges to conceptually change knowledge, attitudes, and practices. By the end of training all of the teachers demonstrated that they were ready to take on the role as a beginner Master Trainer to allow for scalability and sustainability of the work in Mosul and the Nineveh Plains. Master Trainers demonstrated conceptual change in their understanding of freedom of conscience, religion, or belief