Teaching materials

Thanks to many years of experience in the development of educational materials for Swiss schools, IDE offers every year to classes all over Switzerland teaching materials related to children's rights.

Since its launch in 2000, the project has thus aimed at raising awareness on children's rights among teachers and students in Switzerland through the distribution of free educational material and the proposal of training courses for teaching staff. Teaching materials are produced in a differentiated way for each cycle of compulsory schooling and adapted according to linguistic regions, i.e. French, Italian and German-speaking Switzerland, in line with the actions coordinated by Education21 and IDE and financially supported by the Federal Social Insurance Office. Since 2020, teaching materials have also been available in Romansh.

The general aim of the project is therefore to promote and put into practice the International Convention on the Rights of the Child in schools, in line with the recommendations addressed to Switzerland by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in February 2015 concerning the need to develop training programmes on children's rights for all professionals working with and for children.

See teaching materials

Since 2021, the project has been taken over by the organizations Pestalozzi Village Foundation, Integras and Terre des Hommes Suisse/Schweiz.

See teaching materials 2021

Objectives

The main objectives are, on the one hand, to make pupils aware of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child and particularly of the above-mentioned rights and, on the other hand, to propose activities to make these rights more active in their daily lives.

The various activities allow for the exercise of several cross-cutting skills, such as collaboration, communication and reflective thinking. Each child is thus invited to :

- Construct an opinion,

- Communicate a point of view and argue,

- Reflect on his prejudices,

- Nuance his point, and

- Respecting others in their differences and learning to live together.

The teaching materials propose a working method that aspires to bring out and get to know the children's words. It is adapted to children according to their age, while mixing play and group reflection. The teacher acts as a guide between the world of children and society, with its codes of participation. This method can also be used in an extra-curricular setting.