Human rights postcards

WHAT TO DO

Introduce Amnesty to students. Explain that Amnesty members all over the world take action on human rights issues by writing letters or sending postcards to governments to raise their concerns about particular cases.

Explain to students that they will be designing and printing their own sets of human rights action postcards. They need to choose an Amnesty campaign, and design a simple postcard print that is simple and relevant to the issue.  If they wish, they can then write their own personal appeals and then send them off to appropriate targets.

Provide students with information about one or several current Amnesty campaigns and give them copies of the Summary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Give them time to look at the campaigns, identify the human rights involved in the campaigns. Students should then choose a campaign, and sketch some initial ideas for their postcards.

Students should then create an image on one side of their postcard, using one of the methods below, and on the other side they should leave a space for a message, the name and address of the recipient, and a stamp.

Designs can be printed directly onto the card or printed on thin paper that is then glued onto the card.

Possible methods

• Create a stencil by drawing a design on some thick card, cutting the design out and printing the image from areas where the design has been cut out using a roller and printer ink or applying acrylic paint with a brush
• Cut a design into a potato and make a print using a roller and printing ink
• Cut, scratch or draw a design on a polystyrene tile and print using a roller and printing ink
• Create a monoprint by drawing or scratching a design on a tile or sheet of glass that has been inked with a roller
• Create a collage from scraps of coloured paper glued onto the card.
• Postcard designs can also made from shapes cut out of sheets of coloured paper and glued onto the card (collage).