Earlier today I presented at the OSCE Supplementary Human Dimension Meeting on Human Rights Education and Training, which takes place in Vienna from 25-26 March 2004. Below is my presentation:
I want to begin by expressing my gratitude to the OSCE and ODIHR offices for organizing this supplementary meeting on human rights education. This gathering of governments, IGOs and NGOs to discuss best practice, with the intention of development recommendations on HRE, is further evidence of OSCE’s dedication to this issue and the broader recognition of the importance of education and training in the field of human rights. I commend you on these goals.
My name is Felisa Tibbitts and I direct an international, non-governmental organization called Human Rights Education Associates, or HREA. Our name already tells you what our primary mission is: to support human rights education. We do this through the training of activists and professionals; the development of educational programming and materials; and through community building using on-line technologies. Through our Global HRE listserv we are able to reach a network of over 3,200 individuals and organizations interested or involved in HRE. This gives me some kind of pulse on NGOs activities in HRE activities worldwide.
In my presentation, I will be drawing on my experience of 12 years in developing human rights education programs in the schooling sector. I cannot possibly share with you in 10 minutes all the things I have learned and observed over these years. As our conversations are supposed to lead to specific recommendations, I have framed my presentation around some key recommendations that I think are essential for HRE in the schooling sector.
Areas of Consensus
Before I move into my recommendations, allow me to acknowledge that we have really built some kind of consensus over the last years about key features of human rights education.
– Education in and for human rights belongs in the schooling sector
– We are talking about the full range of human rights
– It is the responsibility of governments to carry out HRE
– Participatory methodologies should be used
– Human rights education has to do with thinking, feeling and doing. That is,
HRE should:
* include knowledge about human rights;
* foster personal attitudes of tolerance and respect; and
* develop the individual’s awareness of the ways by which human rights can be translated into social and political reality at both the national and international levels.
These goals of HRE are quite broad and challenging. In the schooling sector in practice, human rights education is introduced to address a problem. This is often quite specific to current events in the country. HRE has been used to promote tolerance and conflict resolution, to address minority rights, to strengthen the rule of law, to help heal wounds following a situation of conflict and to promote child-centered classrooms. We have to recognize that HRE fits into human rights-related agendas that are specific to a national or community context.
Recommendation 1. Define clear learner goals.
Teachers respond to the language of learner outcomes and assessment. Recommendation 1: within a schooling system, define quite specifically what learner outcomes you have for the HRE program and have accountability for these learner goals. The accountability can be through including human rights in the re-education of teachers and also in the ways that students are assessed, both by their teachers and in the state system.
I notice that the program talks about HRE and the promotion of tolerance. Bear in mind that different educational programs can promote tolerance, and human rights education can promote goals other than tolerance. There is a great deal of variety out there, and we have to be specific and have accountability in order to enhance the possibility that a human rights educational program will be understood and implemented.
Recommendation 2. Be creative in involving human rights in school curricula.
Those of us working to integrate human rights education in schools know that this is most straightforward for subjects like citizenship education, history or political science at the secondary school level, although there are also many nice examples of children’s rights approaches at the primary school level. In rare cases, human rights is a separate subject. We work hard to have curricular policies put in place, materials developed and so on – and struggle to find a few hours for educators to offer human rights-related lessons. Frankly speaking, there is very little time in most national curricula and it is left up to the discretion of individual teachers how much they teach human rights. This calls into question the realism of achieving goals of affecting students in all three dimensions of thinking, feeling and doing.
My second recommendation is to recognize that HRE has a place in non-traditional subjects, such as the sciences, technology and especially the humanities. Some examples for the sciences include integrating the human rights framework into discussions on contemporary issues, such as environmental degradation or exploring the link between health and the right to medical care, focusing in the situation of HIV/AIDS in Africa. In mathematics, you can examine how statistics are used to support certain human rights-related work, such as refugee flows and the work of Truth Commissions. In economics, student can explore conditions leading to structural poverty and consider this in light of economic rights and the new movement for corporate social responsibility. Using the Internet and on-line newspaper and journal sources, students can explore media bias and the use of human rights language in covering events.
Given how few hours are likely to be devoted to human rights education in schools, it is exceedingly practical to think about involving a team of teachers in a given school to address human rights-related issues in their own subject matter. A whole school approach can be a viable way to promote human rights culture and learning in the school environment. Remember also that HRE takes place in non-formal and informal ways in the school setting. Special events and programs can be organized on human rights topics, and the culture and management of schools is an appropriate subject for human rights inquiry. I will return to the latter topic towards the end of my presentation.
Recommendation 3. Involve parents and community members.
When we talk about HRE in the schools, we are thinking primarily about teachers and youth. Each of these groups will require their own kind of human rights education. However, we shouldn’t think that HRE in the classroom stops there. We are indirectly involving the families and communities that the educators and students are part of. Students are parts of families and they will discuss at home what they are learning at school. Teachers and the school as a whole are embedded in a particular community. My recommendation is that we recognize this, and embrace this. In fact, we might consider that an important goal of HRE in schools is to reach out to the community, to bring the community in (through resource speakers, for example) and to encourage students to analyze community needs through a human rights lens as well as participate in formulating solutions.
Recommendation 4. Prepare teachers adequately to teach human rights.
We must ensure that teachers are prepared to facilitate human rights education. At the present moment, it is most likely that teachers will have the opportunity to participate in an in-service training – if they are fortunate. In the best of all worlds, teachers will learn the rationale, content and methodology of HRE for their given system when they are in their pre-service training. At this time in a teacher’s career, this is when they are most open to new ideas and methods of teaching. To my mind, a core recommendation is that teachers have access to pre-service and ongoing in-service training in HRE. This cannot be overstated and strategies will vary by country. This training will concern both the methodology of teaching human rights as well as the content of educational programming.
Recommendation 5. Foster cooperation between the government and NGO sectors.
In most countries with HRE programming, it is the NGO sector or civil society that has been most active in carrying such programming out. This was one of the conclusions of the review of the Decade for HRE that was organized by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Therefore, although we want to use this forum to encourage governments to further their commitments to HRE, I believe that it is important that the OSCE officially support a government-civil society cooperation in this area.
Recommendation 6. Promote the infusion of human rights throughout the educational system.
Let’s step back a bit from the classroom. The human rights framework is one that should apply to all levels of the educational system, and this is another recommendation that I hope we can make at the end of this conference. One level of work is curricular guidelines, subjects, materials, methodologies, training – what I have already been touching upon.
However, schools are institutions that should ideally operate on the basis of human rights principles. Elements of school operation should be examined from a human rights point of view, including the governance structure, relations among staff, between staff and students, opportunities for students to influence school policies, bullying and harassment policies, and discipline measures. The school should be a place that promotes and protects the human rights of staff as well as students.
A human rights perspective should also be applied to the education system as a whole.
Is there segregation? Are the participation and completion rates of girls, minorities, poorer children, children coming from rural areas actively encouraged? Do students have an opportunity to study in their mother tongue? Are special needs children mainstreamed? How different is the quality of schooling from school to school?
Finally, I think the OSCE for the opportunity to present these ideas and I encourage you to help keep HRE on the public agenda. The Decade for HRE is about to conclude, but very soon at the Commission meeting, a resolution will be proposed for a Second Decade, this time calling for the OHCHR to subsequently develop an international plan of action that will be formulated in realistic terms, with an indication of minimum activity for each country accompanied by indicators of success. We need this global framework for human rights education so that we can continue to develop national strategies that will bring us closer to the vision of more just and peaceable communities. The input of ODIHR and OSCE developing such an international plan might help to strengthen the political resolve behind such an effort.