Students taught tolerance, humanity with touring classroom (Blackburn News)

A touring mobile unit is moving through Windsor-Essex with a message of tolerance.

The Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, a non-profit group that aims to educate people on diversity and social justice, is touring the region with its Tour For Humanity, a mobile educational unit. This week, the trailer is making stops at middle and secondary schools in the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board for presentations focused on a dark aspect of Canadian history, the residential school system.

One of the tour’s local stops is Windsor’s Corpus Christi Middle School and F.J. Brennan High School. The trailer can fit about 30 students at a time for a one-hour session featuring a multimedia presentation and a question-and-answer period. Quotes and portraits from influential figures are on the mobile unit’s walls, including Gandhi, Anne Frank, and the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr. The Tour visits locations across Canada during the school year, with 600 schools visited since it began in 2013. Emily Barsanti-Innes, an education associate with the FSWC, says younger students are first taught the importance of treating everyone with care and respect regardless of their background.

“Practising empathy, practising caring about people who are different and practising learning about people who are different, is something that you practise now so that when you’re an adult, it just becomes second nature,” said Barsanti-Innes.

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