Re-conceptualising Human Rights Education: from the Global to the Occupied (original) (raw)
Related papers
2017
This thesis provides a critical view of Human Rights Education (HRE) within a context of colonial occupation, authoritarian national ruling structure and oppressive social practices. It explores the reasons behind the introduction of HRE in Palestinian Authority (PA) schools in the Occupied West Bank. It investigates how stakeholders make meaning of and implement HRE. Finally, it examines the relationship between HRE and the struggle against the Occupation and for political and social change. The data was generated during six months divided over two field research trips. The research employed ethnographic methods such as classroom and whole school observations and semi-structured interviews. The analysis is framed within a critical constructivist paradigm allowing for reaching beyond mere descriptive accounts of HRE and foregrounding the findings within the indigenous knowledge. This thesis addresses gaps in the literature by problematising the theoretical basis of HRE and highlight...
Human Rights Education in Conflict and Occupation: Teaching Human Rights in Palestinian Schools
2016
This study builds on the idea that the conceptualisation and implementation of human rights education in the classroom and other instances in the local community can be different from the way in which the concept is understood and described in international policy documents. The literature review indicates that the context and local actors can affect the way human rights education is carried out. However, there has been little discussion on how human rights education practices are affected by a political conflict and oppression. The purpose of this thesis is therefore to increase knowledge about the implementation of human rights education, by contributing with perspectives on how a context marked by conflict and injustice can affect the norms and conditions for education in human rights. The occupied Palestinian territory is used as a case study, and interviews were carried out in which educators and experts describe their experiences regarding teaching human rights in a conflict-t...
The Geography and Political Context of Human Rights Education: Israel as a Case Study
Journal of Human Rights, 2012
Studies have shown that human rights education (HRE) can help promote democracy and social progress by empowering individuals and groups and pushing governments to fulfill their obligations towards residents. Assuming that such assessments are accurate, argue that the successful application of human rights education requires much more than what is generally discussed in the scholarly literature: adjustments to curriculum, additional resources, and adequate teacher training programs. Using Israel as a case study, I show that despite government investment in human rights education, the majority of Jewish youth still do not believe that Palestinian citizens of Israel should enjoy equal rights. This, I maintain, is because other forces, both structural and subjective, always hinder the individual and institutional internalization of HRE’s basic precepts. Next, I describe the almost complete segregation among Jews and Palestinians in the educational system as well as the centrality of a hyper-ethno-nationalist ideology, and argue that the specific spatial and political context within which the educational process takes place helps determine to what extent human rights education is successful in promoting the values and practices associated with tolerance, respect, and protection of rights. I conclude by offering an example of an alternative desegregated pedagogical model that tries to provide meaningful human rights education.
KULT_online. Review Journal for the Study of Culture, 2019
Entanglements and Regenerations and published as a part of Bloomsburry's series on Critical Education revisits some of the numerous engagements with the human rights project and its educational forms. The aim is to draw attention to controversies and a necessary critique of the concept of global pedagogy for human rights, democracy, and citizenship, in order to underline what many critical theorists and specifically post-and decolonial scholars have been stressing for decades: The ongoing suppression of various voices, namely those from the global south, whose perspectives on human rights might disrupt the hegemonic narrative of the global north -a narrative deeply intertwined with racism and colonial violence. Mindful of these entanglements, the authors within the volume probe into the limits of human rights as a critical endeavor and push for answers to the question of whether a critical human rights project is possible.
The Dominant Discourse of Human Rights Education: A Critique
Human rights education (HRE) is commonly viewed as imparting knowledge of human rights. This is problematic, because both human rights and education are multifaceted and the way that human rights are conceptualized will determine the types of educational practice and processes engaged in as a result. Using critical discourse analysis, this article unpicks the historical formation of human rights education, exploring how it has evolved and come to prominence; it examines the way that power relations shape the conceptions and practices of educators, which fail to capture diversity and complexity of knowledge. It shows how a dominant discourse of human rights education has been controlled through the global human rights framework and how this shapes a human rights education practice concerned with finding methods which make global human rights principles relevant and resonant in different communities. This is problematic because it ignores the way that power shapes and controls the formation of human rights education discourse and how practitioners and educators respond to that. Given this, the conclusion suggests how we should rethink human rights education discourse.
Dilemmas and hopes for human rights education: Curriculum and learning in international contexts
PROSPECTS: Comparative Journal of Curriculum, Learning, and Assessment, 2018
Human rights education (HRE), like the wider international human rights project, is a bold attempt to influence laws and state policies, while at the same time inspiring people to connect human rights to their everyday lives. In terms of incorporating HRE within the formal education sector, HRE is dependent upon the good will of state actors. To what extent are state actors deeply committed to HRE? As HRE is institutionalized within school and curriculum policies, is it able to retain its core emancipatory nature? As we examine the actual practice of HRE, we often see a gap between the theorists’ calling (back) for the emancipatory roots of HRE and the lived educational policies and practices of states and schools. This special issue explores this gap with examples from the Global South and Global North, reviewing recent theories, challenges, and solutions for enabling a transformative approach to HRE through and against the lens of state power.
Decolonizing Human Rights Education: Critical Pedagogy Praxis in Higher Education
This article tackles specific issues that arise in teaching human rights in a Western academic institution. As critical human rights scholars, we are concerned with a pedagogy of human rights that gives respect to cultural diversity and the cross-cultural applicability of concepts and social issues in ways that are not antithetical to the purpose of human rights itself. In the Australian context where we are located both as human rights educators and immigrants, our approach depends on giving critical attention to questions of colonialism and its aftermath; to how contemporary human rights are understood across diverse cultures and subjectivities; and how to enable decolonizing methodologies to ensure an ethical exchange and negotiation of human rights learning and teaching in a higher education context. This approach is significant since contemporary Australia is an immigrant nation, a settler colonial society that is located in the South and yet problematically dominated by ontological and epistemological orientations towards the North. We argue that a critical pedagogy of human rights involves a robust non-colonizing and ethical engagement that is both self-reflexive and aware of complicit power relations. We seek to interrogate power as understood through the relationship between lived experience, knowledge and education. In our article we examine, through examples in our own teaching practice, how we seek to create and enable a critical pedagogical space that allows such an ethical engagement to take place.
It is Time: Critical Human Rights Education in an Age of Counter-hegemonic Distrust
Propelled by the global dominance of human rights discourse and the well-established international consensus on its importance, Human Rights Education (HRE) has proliferated from the mid-1990s onwards. Instead of advancing criticality as a central purpose of education, HRE, as co-constructed within the agencies of the United Nations, became the uncritical legitimating arm of human rights universals. Thus, it has ultimately contributed to the counter-hegemonic distrust in human rights that we experience today. Popular and dominant formulations of HRE, I argue, lack the conceptual and practical resources to be transformative, let alone emancipatory. Steering my reasoning through the historical development of HRE, I contend that the time for Critical Human Rights Education has arrived.