Teaching Human Rights from Below: Towards Solidarity, Resistance and Social Justice (original) (raw)
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This paper presents the findings from a collaborative inquiry research study that explored instructors’ perspectives and students’ perceptions of an innovative ten-day graduate level human rights education course for educators. The course was the result of a partnership between the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The purpose of the course was to encourage students to critically examine human rights; specifically, whose human rights stories get told, how they get told, and by whom. The findings suggest that while there were worthwhile insights gained when considering on teaching about, through, and for human rights, there were also significant challenges that can inform other courses that encourage students to adopt a critical stance with topics, like human rights, that seem unassailable. Cet article présente les résultats d’une recherche menée en collaboration dont l’objectif était d’explorer les perspectives des instructe...
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The purpose of this critical ethnography was to investigate the experiences of teachers and students when literacy instruction was framed within human rights education. Informed by cosmopolitan and critical socio-cultural theory incorporating Freirean concepts of critical literacy and praxis, this study highlights the experiences of two servant leader interns (teachers) and sixteen scholars (students) participating in human rights education sessions within the context of a Children's Defense Fund (CDF) Freedom School. Data sources included semi-structured and informal interviews, scholar and intern artifacts including multimedia projects, and recorded classroom discussions. Data were analyzed utilizing Michel Foucault's concept of " regime of truth " in order to examine how the CDF Freedom School and Human Rights Education articulated notions of freedom, knowledge, rights and power as a counter-narrative to the dominant discourse in literacy education. The findings indicate that while both discourses sought to empower students through literacy and in learning of their rights, the particular naming of literacy, identity and rights within each were constraining as well as liberating for the participating scholars. A key implication of this study is the need for a cosmopolitan critical literacy in both discourses that recognizes the need for global and local literacies, identities and rights for 21 st century adolescents.