Human Rights in Higher Education

Institutional, Classroom, and Community Approaches to Teaching Social Justice

Lindsey N. Kingston

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319914206
• eBook ISBN: 9783319914213
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book focuses on human rights education (HRE) in higher education, with an emphasis on supporting undergraduate education for social justice and global citizenship at the institutional, classroom, and community levels. Drawing from the work of human rights scholars and advocates at Webster University, Kingston begins a critical discussion about the potential of HRE on college campuses and beyond. Chapter contributors address the institutional issues inherent to building a "human rights campus, " promoting just governance models, facilitating student research, and fostering inclusive campus communities. They further explore opportunities within the classroom by highlighting dynamic courses on global sustainable development and post-genocide reconciliation, as well as considering how to create trauma sensitive learning spaces and utilize photography as a human rights teaching tool. Finally, scholar-advocates detail how HRE can be expanded to include the broader community—including teaching critical criminology to aspiring police officers, facilitating community dialogue through academic conferences, and engaging in social justice work related to access to justice, domestic violence, and human trafficking.

© The Author(s) 2018

Lindsey N. Kingston (ed.)Human Rights in Higher EducationPalgrave Studies in Global Citizenship Education and Democracyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91421-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction—Human Rights in Higher Education: Institutional, Classroom, and Community Approaches to Teaching Social Justice

Lindsey N. Kingston¹

(1)

Department of History, Politics, and International Relations, Webster University, St. Louis, MO, USA

End Abstract

The impetus for this edited volume came from a simple phone call; a professor at a well-known research university (which shall remain nameless) wanted my advice on creating a human rights institute. Eager to encourage human rights education (HRE)—and particularly within a prestigious institution that held vast resources and expertise—I settled in for a long conversation. Within a matter of minutes, however, it became clear that this well-intentioned idea of “teaching human rights” was a vague one indeed. Aside from holding the general belief that human rights are important and interesting to students, this colleague had little knowledge of the practicalities of teaching rights and social justice —or how to support HRE in any sustained and meaningful way. After the phone call ended, it occurred to me that what we had been doing at my own institution, Webster University—a teaching-focused, private university based in Saint Louis, Missouri—was perhaps worth sharing. ¹ Once this idea had formed in my mind, the foundation for this book was quickly established. I began to see how various approaches to HRE had combined in innovative and noteworthy ways. And so, writing from Saint Louis—a hub of refugee resettlement and “Black Lives Matter ” activism, among many other things—I offer this resource for educators hoping to engage in HRE at the university level.

This introductory chapter outlines the concept of HRE in higher education, including a preliminary review of its vast potential and inherent challenges, thus setting the stage for the discussions and case studies to come. Although respect for (and attention to) HRE has increased dramatically in recent decades, educators face ongoing obstacles to integrating human rights scholarship into existing programs and structures. The central argument guiding this book is that HRE in higher education requires the intersection of three complementary approaches centering on institutions, classrooms, and communities. First, institutions must not only support curricular offerings, but also integrate human rights norms into their governance and priorities. This requires valuing social responsibility and the public good , as well as engaged scholarship . Second, teaching strategies emphasizing human rights and social justice can transform our classrooms across academic disciplines , expanding HRE while supporting underprivileged student groups. Third, community approaches offer opportunities to expand HRE more broadly, building community–university partnerships and providing resources for enhanced advocacy and service work. Drawing on the experiences of my colleagues at Webster University (in Saint Louis, as well as our campus in Leiden, the Netherlands ), this edited volume offers possibilities for advancing HRE on campus and beyond.

Human Rights in Higher Education

The United Nations defines HRE as:

all educational, training, information, awareness-raising, and learning activities aimed at promoting universal respect for and observance of all human rights and fundamental freedoms and thus contributing, inter alia, to the prevention of human rights violations and abuses by providing persons with knowledge, skills and understand and developing their attitudes and behaviours, to empower them to contribute to the building and promotion of a universal culture of human rights. (United Nations General Assembly 2011, Article 2.1)

A newfound respect for HRE has emerged within the past 30 years as human rights educators push for the inclusion of HRE in school and university curricula. In the United States, for instance, researchers realized that public schools offered lessons linked to specific subtopics such as the Civil Rights Movement and the Holocaust, but failed to teach students about the international human rights system and its impact on their lives. HRE advocates argued that the systematic integration of human rights needed to become part of American classrooms (Tibbitts 2015, 9–10). During this time, human rights educators also began linking rights to social change efforts and challenging the assumption that HRE belonged solely within the purview of lawyers (Tibbitts 2015, 5). United Nations programs such as the World Decade for Human Rights Education (1995–2005) and the World Program for Human Rights Education promoted HRE in primary and second schools, as well as within higher education, while organizations such as Human Rights Education Associates (HREA) developed teaching and learning materials to share with educators (Tibbitts 2015, 12; see also Human Rights Education Associates, n.d.). This growing recognition, as exemplified by UN initiatives, “have given national HRE planners a sense of solidarity and direction by delineating human rights education as a field of inquiry capable of standing on its own, apart from such other educational frameworks as civic education and peace education ” (Holland and Martin 2014, 3–4). In 2011, the United Nations General Assembly recognized the importance of HRE by adopting the Declaration on Human Rights Education and Training. The Declaration asserts that HRE represents a “lifelong process that concerns all ages” that encompasses the provision of knowledge related to human rights norms, principles, and protection mechanisms; learning and teaching in ways that respect both educators and learners; and empowering people to enjoy and exercise their rights while respecting and upholding the rights of others (United Nations General Assembly 2011, Articles 2.2 and Article 3.1). Indeed, the UN has promoted HRE as a preventative tool aimed at strengthening respect for human rights norms (Gerber 2013). HRE programs in post-conflict zones such as Sierra Leone, Mexico, and Peru focus on issues such as promoting women’s rights and fighting patriarchal values, protecting child laborers, and increasing access to justice and rights education (Holland and Martin 2014; see also Holland and Martin 2017). In U.S. schools such as San Francisco International High School, educators have integrated HRE into high school curricula serving immigrant and refugee students to validate their lived experiences and help them connect to their new communities (Fix and Clifford 2015, 129–130).

Yet despite growing support for HRE, human rights educators continue to face challenges when it comes to integrating human rights into curricula and building new programs. It is noteworthy, for instance, that the U.S. government has been slow to integrate HRE into its public school system and lags behind fellow UN members in developing and promoting HRE approaches. Possible explanations for this hesitancy include U.S. “exceptionalism”—which implies that rights violations occur in faraway places, but not in the United States—and a neoliberal, market-economy approach to education that frames HRE as a commodity rather than a fundamental right (Katz and Spero 2015, 18–20). These problems are exacerbated within higher education, where faculty members interested in human rights and social justice often lament the lack of political and financial support devoted to HRE. Existing university human rights centers are frequently highlighted in university promotional materials but nevertheless must run on shoestring budgets and with limited, if any, core faculty members. At the majority of universities, human rights may be addressed as a supplemental lesson or two—or perhaps one elective course—within international relations, legal studies, or sociology programs. Educators hoping to integrate human rights into preexisting courses find that HRE resources usually aim too low (toward grade-school learners) or too high (toward law students), failing to account for undergraduate students seeking HRE beyond introductory lessons on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

With such discrepancy in mind, it is vital for faculty and higher education administrators to consider how institutions can meaningfully advance the goals of HRE. Indeed, this book offers opportunities to implement and advance HRE at the institutional, classroom, and community levels of our colleges and universities.

Institution Building

Human rights in higher education requires institutions that not only support HRE in the curricula, but also integrate rights-based norms in their governance structures and university priorities. Some scholars contend that higher education is best viewed as a “public good ” that encompasses social benefits beyond mere individual and economic gains; higher education as a public good strengthens the public relationship between educational systems and broader society (Chambers 2005, 4). “In essence the public good can become the underlying link that ties faculty work together in ways that can meaningfully meet institutional needs and needs of the public,” writes Kelly Ward (2005). “[T]he ‘public good ’ can become an organizing scheme for a faculty member to organize his or her work where teaching, research, and service roles can be carried out in ways that are mindful of communities beyond the campus and discipline” (224). This commitment to social responsibility is frequently echoed by school teachers, as well; one study found that 95% of U.S. teachers expressed support for infusing social justice in teacher preparation programs, as well as making social justice a mandatory topic in public school classrooms (Baltodano 2006). Marta P. Baltodano (2009) writes that society—including schools—continues to reproduce social inequalities despite these commitments, in part, because of lack of understanding about the philosophical principles underpinning social justice and its connections to the global economy (273). She recommends making the study of social justice a mandatory subject from kindergarten through university, with the aim of infusing school curricula with the basic tenets of history, political economy, human rights, and advocacy (274).

Yet critics warn that neoliberal policies and trends—which emphasize individualism and consumerism, downplaying the value of intellectual involvement in public policy debates and decision-making—serve to undermine universities as sites of democratic learning and social activism (Hyslop-Margison and Savarese 2012, 51–52). “In spite of their traditional, if somewhat romanticized, role as the gatekeepers of intellectual freedom , universities have drifted rapidly toward serving the instrumental demands of the marketplace,” write Emery Hyslop-Margison and Josephine L. Savarese (2012). “Faced with huge public financing reductions, universities increasingly focus on technical training programs and ubiquitous credentialising rather than on creating informed and engaged democratic citizens” (54). Indeed, Adrianna J. Kezar (2005a) argues that the “social charter” between higher education and society is being rewritten as public institutions are being encouraged to become for-profit entities “with economic engines and with private and economic rather than public and social goals…The broader notion of social accountability (such as preservation of knowledge or development of the arts) has been thinned down and replaced with responsiveness to the market” (24). In response, Hyslop-Margison and Savarese (2012) contend that “concerned academics no longer have the luxury of intellectual isolation and political inaction but must instead confront the present situation in manifest ways” (52). This includes challenging government meddling in university governance and the under-funding of higher education, as well as removing the institutional control of the “managerial class” over universities (Hyslop-Margison and Savarese 2012, 52). In Missouri, for instance, State Representative Rick Brattin introduced a 2017 bill to eliminate tenure at the state’s public colleges and universities. Brattin argued that House Bill 266 was necessary to ensure that professors focused on training students to find jobs after graduation, rather than “going off the rails” and failing to emphasize “real-world application and betterment of their life skills” (Zamudio-Suaréz 2017). ² This attack on the tenure system—which Brattin called “un-American”—reflects a wider “mission shift” from public–social ideals to private–economic goals th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction—Human Rights in Higher Education: Institutional, Classroom, and Community Approaches to Teaching Social Justice
• Part I. Institutional Approaches
• Part II. Classroom Teaching
• Part III. Community Engagement
• Back Matter