Human Rights as Powerful Knowledge for Teachers in Contexts of Superdiversity

• In Event: Adopting a Human Rights Framework to Support Social Justice Through the Teaching of Social Studies

Abstract

This paper critically examines the perspectives of future teachers towards human rights, drawing on data from an undergraduate course in London, a city of demographic super-diversity (Vertovec, 2007). A 30 hour course Education, Values and Society is offered to students currently working as teaching assistants in urban schools. The 10 weekly classes, taught by an experienced scholar, aim to encourage participants to apply ‘philosophical and sociological thinking to fundamental educational questions’. The course handbook lists these as: ‘What values underpin education in a democratic society? What is equality? What rights do, and should, children have in school?’ The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) are studied as texts that teachers can draw on when seeking to answer these questions. There are also compulsory readings on human and children’s rights (Alderson, 1999; Howe & Covell, 2010; Starkey, 2012). The course handbook claims that pedagogy is based on ‘a co-constructive approach that ensures everyone is an active contributor’.
Participative methods based on pedagogical research approaches (Starkey et al., 2014) were deployed to record and evaluate student engagement with and reaction to this human rights framework. Data was collected from one class of 20 mature students including British students of diverse ethnic backgrounds, Eastern Europeans, and those who had moved from the Caribbean, India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Latin America. The data set comprises student-led presentations, formal evaluations, formative and summative assignments on the one hand and ethnographic field notes and reflections by participant observers, namely graduate teaching assistants, a visiting professor and the course tutor.
Analysis of the data suggests that whilst students appreciated the opportunity to learn about human rights principles, they sometimes had difficulty in using this knowledge in their assessed work for the course. Some students also challenged the extent to which a human rights framework can be applied to issues engaging personal conscience and religious belief such as gender and sexuality (Bickmore, 2002), and relationships and sex education (Reiss, 2003). In a powerful contribution to the course, one student shared the experience of working in a ‘rights respecting school’ where children’s rights and the CRC frame the school curriculum.
The findings suggest that In spite of the intention to promote co-construction of knowledge, the asymmetrical power relation between tutor and students tended to position students as learners rather than as creators of knowledge (Camicia & Bayon, 2012; Jaffe, 2009). Consequently new approaches may be required if students are to gain the confidence to go beyond the value frameworks in which they have already been socialised. These insights fed into the planning for the next presentation of the course. The pedagogical approach was adjusted to create greater opportunities for students to exercise their right to narrate (Bhabha, 2003; Osler & Zhu, 2011), and thereby to interpret and use the powerful knowledge (Young & Muller, 2013) of human rights for their own personal and professional context.

Author

• Hugh Starkey, UCL Institute of Education - London