Community-engaged praxis on HRE and migration: public school partnerships for just futures

• In Event: Part 1: Advancing peace, justice and human rights through community-engaged praxis in education

Proposal

The scholarship, practice and implementation of Human Rights Education (HRE) has grown exponentially in the last few decades as it has been integrated into schools, classrooms, policies, and non-formal settings across the globe (Hantzopoulos & Bajaj, 202; Bajaj, 2016). Overall, HRE is a form of education that “utilizes teaching and learning processes in classrooms and communities to educate about basic rights and for the broadening of respect for the dignity and freedom(s) of all people (s).” (p. #) While there are different types of models and purposes of HRE, this presentation delves into and considers the more transformative and critical approaches that amplify transformative agency and dignity in practice. In particular, we share a robust example of community-engaged praxis, in which undergraduate students not only learn about HRE in the course “Our Lives: Our World: Teaching and Learning About Human Rights Alongside Youth” but also have the opportunity to put theory into practice through partnering with local high schools.
In this presentation, we will discuss how the co-authors, undergraduate students and their professor, created a human-rights based curriculum with a local high school economics class in New York that teaches about human rights, migration, and the economy in their local and global contexts. The college class also partnered with the teacher to implement and adjust the curriculum over six weeks to her high school students. Steeped in approaches from human rights education, critical peace education, and critical ethnic studies, our curriculum drew from critical theories to center the experiences of the high school students, as well as consider the experiences of others, and used these as catalysts for social change. We framed the curriculum with past experiences and present realities of migrations locally and globally, to consider how student might conceptualize more just futures for themselves and others, particularly in these polarizing times. In our presentation, we will review the various steps on how we developed this partnership, walking participants through the process of creating and working together, as well as the final outcome, and share reflections on the strengths and lessons learned of the collaboration. The reflections are drawn from participant observation, journals, and informal interviews with participants.
Our aim to provide audience members not only with ways to consider how they may be able to set up their own community-engaged partnerships relative to their work and goals towards social change, but also to contemplate the possibilities and challenges in engaging in community-engaged praxis at large. We contribute to burgeoning scholarship on the implications of peace, social justice, and human rights education by showing how it is implemented in practice, contributing to building theory through praxis.

Author

• Maria Hantzopoulos, Vassar College