Activating Cultural and Social Change

The Pedagogies of Human Rights

Baden Offord, Caroline Fleay, Lisa Hartley, Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes, Dean Chan, Baden Offord, Caroline Fleay, Lisa Hartley, Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes, Dean Chan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000512816
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Media Studies

In this thought-provoking book, a diverse range of educators, activists, academics, and community advocates provide theoretical and practical ways of activating our knowledge and understanding of how to build a human rights culture.

Addressing approaches and applications to human rights within current socio-cultural, political, socio-legal, environmental, educational, and global contexts, these chapters explore tensions, contradictions, and complexities within human rights education. The book establishes cultural and educational practices as intrinsically linked to human rights consciousness and social justice, showing how signature pedagogies used by human rights practitioners can be intellectual, creative, or a combination of both. Across three sections, the book discusses ways of bringing about holistic, relevant, and compelling approaches for challenging and understanding structures of power, which have become a global system, while also suggesting a move from abstract human rights principles, declarations, and instruments to meaningful changes that do not dehumanise and distance us from intrinsic and extrinsic oppressions, denial of identity and community, and other forms of human rights abuse.

Offering new critical cultural studies approaches on how a human rights consciousness arises and is practised, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of cultural studies, education studies, critical sociology, human rights education, and human rights studies.

1 The pedagogies of human rights: in truthfulness, what should be done?

Baden Offord, Caroline Fleay, Lisa Hartley, Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes, and Dean Chan

DOI: 10.4324/9781003042488-1

As interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary educators and activist-led researchers – all with well developed connections to community-engaged work – we have shared a strong feeling for some time that it would be useful and valuable for a book that brought together a range of approaches that activated human rights. Our understanding of “activating knowledge” in relation to human rights emerged from our absolute passion to make a difference to the world, to enable socially just responses to what we observed to be deep structural inequalities, oppressions, discriminations and violence towards people, particularly those who were most often marginalised, silenced or invisible. However, intrinsic to our passion for actual social, cultural, economic and political change lay discomfort and profound questioning of the very framework of human rights education in which we worked, which we experienced as giving limited and narrow remit to the very real and urgent demands that come with radical change. In other words, we understood the notion of activating human rights education as a critical, creative, collaborative as well as self-reflexive project, one that was not afraid to speak truth to power both within and outside institutional contexts, which brought a sense of responsibility for Self and society.

Our first step was to gather together with a collective of like-minded folks. And so, on 24 July 2017, a group of 17 human rights activist academics, educators and researchers convened at Western Sydney University (WSU) under the auspices of the Whitlam Institute (WSU) and the Centre for Human Rights Education at Curtin University, to enquire into the relationship between human rights education and transformative-critical pedagogy. From a diverse range of disciplinary backgrounds, our purpose was to discuss and converse on aspects of how contemporary human rights are taught and learnt in both institutional/formal and non-institutional/informal settings. Since that initial meeting and dialogue, our group has expanded to become 28 contributors, including community workers and advocates, devoted to the development of this book, based on theoretical and contextual analysis and practical ways of activating knowledge and understanding of human rights pedagogy.

We believe that a key imperative of democratic societies is to have human rights practitioners articulate clear, honest and meaningful discussions about a human rights consciousness in terms of education, social justice and social change. We also believe that it is important to interrogate how we are understanding human rights, and what it is that we think we are doing in their name.

Within the three parts of this volume, Contexts, Perspectives and Practices, contributing authors provide windows into how a human rights consciousness arises and is contextualised and practised within a critical human rights education framework. This book is essentially about activating cultural and social change in society through the praxis of critical human rights pedagogy. It is also about the importance of critically reflecting on the work that we as human rights academics, activists, advocates, educators and practitioners engage in.

The premise that informs the basis of the following chapters is that “human beings are ontologically members of a community of suffering from which they cannot escape” (Turner 1993, 503). Consequently, as human rights educators, advocates, activists, community workers and scholars, we are concerned with the betterment of the world, but acknowledge from the outset that there are fundamental complexities bound up in trying to do this.

Foremost, there are many contradictions and assumptions involved in the idea of human rights and its connection to the pedagogical project: its philosophical, political, economic, historical, religious, ethical and epistemological origins are entangled with fundamental questions of power, culture and language. Entanglements, for example, in colonisation, imperialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, patriarchy, White supremacy and fundamentalism (to identify some) concomitant with various conceptions of purity, civilisation, progress, development, gender and sexuality, disability and so on (Giroux 2004; Offord 2017; Shotwell 2016; Woldeyes 2017; Woldeyes and Offord 2018; Yunkaporta 2019).

It is more than noteworthy that human rights were formed within a European Enlightenment prism; their normative presence and accepted practice have, problematically, become the dominant template globally. Inherent in this development are profound contradictions. As the Indian scholar Ashis Nandy has observed:

For more than two hundred years, the Enlightenment vision and the values it sanctions have provided the standard by which all cultures have been judged in the civilised world. It has shaped virtually every new imagination of a desirable society and every radical intervention in societies and states, even when – during this same period – Enlightenment values have also often been used to justify some of the major projects of Satanism in our times. (Cited in Offord et al. 2015, 15)

This means that intrinsic to the activation of cultural and social change through the field of what has now become ubiquitously known as human rights education (HRE), there are theoretical, conceptual and practice-based problematics and limitations that require a combination of muscular, critical, incisive, honest, truthful as well as compassionate and affect-driven investigations into what constitutes human rights pedagogy. There is nothing innocent about doing human rights education – the values that have come to form the contemporary human rights movement are from the very same place, as discussed earlier, that brought imperialism, colonisation, and established ongoing epistemic structures of violence that exist even in what we may consider to be the “best” of democratic societies (Moreton-Robinson 2020).

This historical background and existing reality of violence and suffering in the world compels us to critically think about our own position and approach to the field of human rights education. Human rights provide powerful juridical and conceptual tools that recognise the inviolability of human life. However, despite the declaration of these rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other instruments, the majority of the world’s populations have been living in contexts that deny dignity and respect for their lives. The common ideals of human rights, such as equality, freedom, individualism and universalism, are hailed over and above the condition of life marked by massive inequality and colonial violence. The recognition of the contradiction between the ideals of human rights and the reality of suffering suggests that a critical human rights pedagogy cannot be neutral. It requires not just accepting the importance of human rights ideals, but, more importantly, understanding why and how inequality, suffering and relations of domination are reproduced, and in what ways human rights could change in order to address these. By taking the condition of life rather than law as a starting point of thinking about human rights education, we study lived experiences, historical narratives and beliefs of people as important sources of knowledge. By recognising the context of human life as the source of human rights knowledge, we hope to reflect on the possibility of developing a pedagogy of human rights that aims to challenge the structures of power in our societies.

We know how crucial education is in terms of bringing about a society that values truth and the unfoldment of human consciousness; every attempt to make a better world for everyone, indeed, for every aspect of planetary life (when we understand the expansive nature of the project of becoming human), is contingent on the nature of that education.

Education is the transmission of cultural DNA from one generation to the next. It shapes the language and pathways of thinking, the contours of character and values, the social skills and creative potential of the individual. It determines the productive skills of a people. (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples 1996, 404)

In terms of human rights education, this transmission is absolutely compelling when it is guided by critical human rights pedagogy and the practice of freedom. The root of change in the world, to paraphrase Paulo Freire, is through asking questions. This is critical to learning and can be risky and surprising, but it lies at the heart of pedagogical praxis. Questions compel us to reflect, to consider, to interrogate our mutual ignorance of one another and act accordingly in ways that seek to bring change that leads to irenic coexistence. As we are concerned in this book about how to activate meaningful cultural and social change, focused on efforts for social justice and human rights education to make the world a better place, we ask: in truthfulness, what should be done?

How do we move from abstract human rights principles, declarations and instrumental and technical practices (Newell and Offord 2008) that de-contextualise, sanitise, dehumanise and distance us from intrinsic and extrinsic oppressions, discriminations, epistemic violence, denial of identity and community, and other forms of marginalisation and human rights abuse?

How do we bring about a holistic, relevant and compelling approach to challenging and understanding the structures of oppression, which have aggregated into a global system? (Reardon 2010, 53).

How do we interrogate, transform and radicalise the United Nations’ plan that human rights education

shall be shaped in such a way as to be relevant to the daily lives of learners, and shall seek to engage learners in a dialogue about the ways and means of transforming human rights from the expression of abstract norms to the reality of their social, economic, cultural, and political conditions? (United Nations 1996)

At the heart of the question of what should be done are serious considerations about the possibilities and potential for a pedagogical transformative praxis, where the aim is to radically change a society for the betterment; not just to modify society with endless and futile outcomes (Steinberg and Down 2020). But there are all too obvious limitations, analytical complexities and convoluted institutional expectations when it comes to justice and the practice of freedom. As others argue, “human rights education has long been a central method of diffusing human rights norms, principles, and values” (Linde and Arthur 2015, 27), and “[a] ‘declarationist’ approach to human rights education has been dominant in the history of the idea and practice of human rights education” (Snauwaert 2019, 2).

We share Michalinos Zembylas and André Keet’s (2019) position that

human rights are full of contradictions and Human Rights Education… has not only failed to address these contradictions, but it has also legitimated a narrow and uncritical type of human rights discourse in education. One of the most blatant contradictions pointed out is how everyone is supposed to have human rights, yet the reality is very different, as most people do not. (131)

With this in mind, our aim in this book is to orient human rights education through a critical and transformative lens, which we believe is absolutely crucial to any real effort to make the world a better place. If we do not concern ourselves with questioning from the outset the “taken-for-granted” nature of human rights and universal human rights principles, then we simply perpetuate normative and positivist values and thinking. This is not only seriously limited, but potentially dangerous. As Doris Lessing (1987) warned many years ago, we choose the prisons we live inside – a cautionary insight that continues to have important resonance for human rights educators and practitioners.

A critical and transformative orientation towards human rights education requires a robust, un-blinking, self-reflexive approach that will be frequently uncomfortable, unsettling and disruptive. Such an approach ought to shake the ground, produce epistemic earthquakes, challenge the status quo, ultimately moving us, in the Freireian sense, to “actions and change”.

Digging into the pedagogy of human rights

There is no one pedagogy of human rights and therefore no formula for its realisation. But there are important considerations that form the conceptualisation and understanding of undertaking such pedagogy, to enable the conditions for a critical human rights education for actual cultural and social change to take place.

In this book, we seek to present a range of views that critically engage what it means to activate human rights education, through our work as activists, academics, educators, media producers and community advocates. In responding to the notion that such activist-led scholarship in this field may not be assumed to be as robust and as intellectually sound as other non-activist fields, we have implemented a careful process of selection to ensure the collection’s integrity and merit.

To this end, we have had each chapter peer reviewed by two scholars. This rigour, we hope, will help build the nascent field of doing critical human rights education – in theory and in practice. The chapters thus address theoretical, contextual and practical pedagogical issues that illuminate and transform the taken-for-granted ideals of human rights. The contributions provide, in their respective ways, an exploration of human rights education; they provide examples of innovation in educational contexts in which a critical human rights education has been adopted; and, importantly, they offer insights into the transformative potential of human rights education when it is explicitly connected to the question of: truthfully, what should be done?

Structure and organisation

This book is presented in three parts. Part I refers to Contexts, Part II deals with Perspectives and Part III focuses on Practices.

In Part 1, we begin with five chapters that specifically contextualise human rights pedagogy in relation to their conception, location and application. The importance of critical and contextual understandings of human rights cannot be overstated. As mentioned earlier, critical human rights educators within formal and informal settings are compelled to be aware of the cultural, historical, political, economic, psychological and other aspects that presently underpin a global template of human rights normative ideals – fashioned from primarily European Enlightenment values. We consider contextual understanding as a foundational approach to doing pedagogies of human rights.

In Chapter 2, “Context-Centred Decolonial Pedagogy for Human Rights Education in Africa”, Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes challenges the practice of teaching the doctrine of human rights without reflecting on contexts. He argues that contexts are central in defining the nature and value of human rights. We cannot understand human rights, he argues, without first knowing the context in which human beings are living. Once context is critically examined, the meaning and practice of human rights are able to emerge through a shared dialogue by learners. The chapter reflects on the African experience using a decolonial lens. It distinguishes the Imagined Africa (the ideological construct of western power and Eurocentric knowledge) from the Real Africa (narratives of human experiences and needs in the continent). Woldeyes shows how the Imagined Africa has been the basis for applying human rights in the continent while the Real Africa is silenced and ignored. Through a critical analysis of Africa’s history, he explores the conceptual and material tools colonialism used to construct Africa as an empty and dark place....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Foreword: imagining and enacting hopeful futures in human rights education
• 1 The pedagogies of human rights: in truthfulness, what should be done?
• PART I: Contexts
• PART II: Perspectives
• PART III: Practices
• Index