Exercise 3.4. – The balloon ride

Procedure

1. The teacher manages the game. The students form groups of five to six people. Each group receives a poster and marker pens. The students draw a hot air balloon above the ocean or the local scenery. The sand bailast sacks symbolising ten human rights are stuck on to the poster (see list below).
2. Now the game begins. The students are to imagine themselves travelling with the “human rights balloon”. The balloon starts to sink and the passengers have to drop some bailast to avoid a serious accident.
   The task for the students is to prioritise the human rights represented by the bailast sacks. They will use criteria such as the following. Is one right implicitly contained in another? Is one right of particular importance for democracy or our personal needs?
3. However, the balloon keeps sinking and more bailast has to be thrown out at regulär intervals. The students have to drop more bailast sacks. After four or five sacks have been thrown overboard the balloon reaches the ground safely.
4. Reflection in the plenary round. Each group presents their list to the whole class/group and explains (some of) their priorities. Then the lists can be compared. Are there many differences? There should also be a debriefing about the work in the groups. Was it difficult to agree? Was it difficult to give priority to some human rights rather than to others? Hopefully it can be agreed that all the human rights listed are important but that people might differ in their priorities if they had to choose.
   In a functioning constitution, the abolition of any of these rights would cause serious damage to democracy. Human rights are natural rights and therefore unalienable. The balloon ride was therefore a simulation of a situation that we hope will never happen – the rule of a dictator.
   If the students come to question the rules of the game on these grounds, then its learning objective has been fully achieved.
   It is possible to extend the reflection by examining which of these rights has been included in the country’s constitution, and how these rights are protected.

Extension

When the exercise is done with younger students, the pieces of bailast – the rights – should be exchanged with items more familiär to the students, for example “free elections” could be substituted by “toys”. In the debriefing, these items could then be linked to children’s rights.

Materials