Time: Tuesday, 27/Aug/2024: 13:15 - 14:45 Session Chair: Ann Quennerstedt |
Location: Room 001 in ΧΩΔ 01 (Common Teaching Facilities [CTF01]) [Ground Floor] Cap: 34 |
Paper
Human Rights Education for Children with Intellectual Disability in a Swedish School Context
Örebro university, Sweden
Presenting Author:This research examines children´s human rights education in compulsory schools for pupils with intellectual disabilities. The writings about children's human rights in the Swedish school´s governing documents (for pupils without and with intellectual disabilities) are consistent with the UN documents, which define human rights education as education about, through, and for human rights (Strouthers, 2015). Through human rights education, children must be allowed to develop and grow as rights holders. A rights holder is a person who has knowledge of their rights and their ability to exercise their own, as well as respect the rights of others. Growing as a rights holder is something children do when they learn about human rights as well as they acquire rights-conscious attitudes, values, and behaviors through being a participant in human interaction.
Sweden has a long tradition of educating pupils with intellectual disability in segregated schools. In Sweden, the education of this group of pupils has a separate national curriculum and course syllabus, and teachers have a rather large room for interpreting values, goals, and regulations (Göransson & Klang, 2021).
Internationally, much research has examined educational institutions as arenas for children´s rights, and human rights education research in formal education is an emerging field of study (Quennerstedt & Moody, 2020). However, the adapted school is an institution where research about Human Rights Education is lacking. Therefore, knowledge about Human Rights Education for pupils with intellectual disability is almost non-existent, both in Sweden and internationally.
Something that has been noticed in research on the teacher's role is that teachers feel uncertain about how to teach human rights (Struthers, 2016; Quennerstedt, 2019; Quennerstedt et al., 2020), and that teachers' knowledge of human rights tends to be too weak and without subject matter depth (Cassidy, Brunner & Webster, 2014). There is a lack of knowledge about how teachers who work with pupils with intellectual disability interpret and implement the curriculum.
A Didaktik approach and terminology create the theoretical framework. Didaktik is the theory and practice of teaching and learning (Gundem, 2011). Collected data are analyzed with qualitative content analysis using Didaktik theory and Dewey's theory of collateral or embedded learning (Dewey, 1938). Dewey´s collateral learning is the lesson learners take from the accidental experience with the lesson rather than from the instructor´s intent.
This study explores the role of teachers educating children with intellectual disability in adapted primary schools about, through, and for human rights.
The purpose of planned teaching about children's human rights is examined, as well as the content and implementation of the teaching. Also, embedded human rights education is examined. The investigation of unplanned/embedded education is directed at two rights themes: equal value and freedom of expression. The following questions guided the research:
- How can planned human rights education take place in an adapted primary school, and how do teachers view planned education as part of human rights education?
- How can embedded human rights education take place in an adapted primary school, and how do teachers view embedded education as part of human rights education?
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources Used
Two schools participated in the study that have adapted primary schools for pupils with intellectual disabilities. The pupils in the study are 7 to 12 years old.
Observations of teachers and pupils, and interviews of the teachers in one class per school were carried out. The fieldwork lasted about 4-5 weeks in each school, with about 100 hours of observation per school spread over this time and 2-4 interviews with each teacher. The classes in adapted elementary school include several stacked grades, as there are usually few students in each grade and one to three teachers per school. The teachers were asked by the researcher to undertake planned work with the class on children's human rights. The teacher selected the content, methods, and scope of this work without involvement of the researcher. Other teaching and classroom activities were also observed to identify embedded human rights education.
Semi-structured interviews took place before and after the implementation of the planned teaching. In a pre-interview, the teachers were asked what purpose they had with the teaching, the content and how they intended to work. In a post-interview, the teachers reflected on the completed teaching, and if they would have done something differently if they were to do the lesson again. All interviews were recorded and transcribed. The observations of the planned teaching situations were documented with film recordings.
The embedded human rights education was investigated through observations of other teaching situations and the rest of everyday school life. Field notes documented these observations. The teachers were also interviewed about embedded teaching and were then asked to reflect on teaching and learning in everyday life and unplanned situations. The stimulated recall technique was used during these interviews, i.e., situations the researcher had observed were used as a basis for reflection.
Collected data is then analyzed based on previously developed analytical tools, such as qualitative content analysis using didactic theory and Dewey´s theory of embedded learning. Qualitative content analysis is a process designed to condense raw data into categories or themes based on valid inference and interpretation. Qualitative content analysis is “any qualitative data reduction and sense-making effort that takes a volume of qualitative material and attempts to identify core consistencies and meanings” (Patton, 2015, p.453). This progress uses inductive reasoning. From inductive reasoning, themes and categories emerge from the data through the researcher's careful investigation and constant comparison. Through didactic theory, aim, content, and working methods are separated in the analysis.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or Findings
The study is expected to make an essential contribution to the very limited knowledge about pedagogical children´s rights work in adapted schools where pupils with intellectual disability are educated, and particularly about human rights education in adapted schools. Initial findings show that:
Planned (by the teacher) human rights education training
- Time and repetition were highlighted by the teachers as a prerequisite for pupils with intellectual disabilities to learn about rights.
- Communicative aids fulfilled an important purpose in planned teaching through rights where pupils could assert the right to their voice and freedom of expression. However, it also showed the risk of limiting the pupil's actions to what the adults around them thought they should communicate about. An adult perspective on communication means that various tools for communication (image support, materials, room design) are based on the teacher's perspective, where communication is about what they want the students to communicate. Rarely did the communication emanate from the student's perspective and their interaction with peers in play situations and everyday communication.
Embedded human rights education training (unplanned)
- Pupils with a severe disability require a relationship with an adult who recognizes the pupil's body language and signals and can interpret and pay attention to the child's needs, opinions, and wishes. This seems to be particularly important in unplanned teaching where others (pupils and other school staff) outside the “relational sphere” encounter pupils with severe intellectual disabilities. The adult often needed to step in, talk, and stand up for the student's rights.
Planned and embedded human rights education training.
- Many teachers in the classroom, which makes one-to-one-teaching possible risk minimizing teaching situations (planned and unplanned) where the pupils, together with other pupils and/or adults, get to practice experiencing through rights.
References
Cassidy, C., Brunner, R., Webster, E. (2014). Teaching human rights? ‘All hell will break loose!’ Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 9(1), 19–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/1746197913475768
Dewey, J. (1938/1997). Experience & Education. New York: Touchstone.
Gundem, B. (2011). Europeisk didaktikk. Tenkning og viten. [European didactics. Thinking and knowing.] Oslo: Universitetsforlaget
Göransson, K. Klang, N. (2021). Lärares uppfattningar om skola och undervisning för elever som läser enligt grund- och gymnasiesärskolans läroplaner. I M. Tideman (Red.), Utbildning och undervisning i särskolan-forskningsinsikter möter lärar-och eleverfarenheter (s. 32 – 58).Natur & Kultur.
Patton, M. Q. (2015). Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Quennerstedt, A. (2019). Teaching children’s human rights in early childhood education and school (Reports in Education No 21). Örebro: Örebro University.
Quennerstedt, A. Moody, Z. (2020). Educational children’s rights research 1989–2019: Achievements, gaps and future prospects. The International Journal of Children’s Rights, 28(1), 183–208. doi:10.1163/15718182-02801003
Quennerstedt, A. Thelander,N. Hägglund.S. (2020). Barns och ungas rättigheter i utbildning
Gleerups Utbildning AB
Struthers, A. (2015) Human rights education: educating about, through and for human rights. The International Journal of Human Rights 19 (1), 53-73
Struthers, A. (2016); Breaking Down Boundaries: Voice and participation in English primary education. The International Journal of Children's Rights 24 (2), 434-468
Paper
Conceptualising a Human Rights Education Approach to Address Global Inequities and Moral Ambiguity at the Compulsory School Level.
1University of Iceland, Iceland; 2Independent
Presenting Author:Students live in an age of increasing global inequity and moral ambiguity, raising concerns about the purposes of education in schools (Biesta, 2020). Shifting demographics exacerbate social, political, and economic disparities, creating contexts of disadvantage for certain members of society. Iceland and Lutruwita/Tasmania, Australia are both island communities characterised by increasing cultural diversity in schools. In Iceland this has been the result of a rapidly increasing migrant population. Migration is also a factor in Lutruwita/Tasmania, in addition to assertion of indigenous identity and culture. Additionally, the role of religious studies in state school programmes, one of the main contributors to values formation in the past, has declined (Evans, 2008; Gunnarsson, 2020; Poulter et al., 2017). In Iceland and Lutruwita/Tasmania there have been discussions about how best to address diversity and the moral development of students through schooling (Aðalbjarnardóttir, 2011; Gunnarsson, 2020; Kristjánsson, 2001; Walker et al., 2012) with attention being paid to multicultural, inclusive and citizenship education.
In this paper, we argue that addressing cultural diversity is interrelated to the debate on schools as a place to foster socio-moral development. We call for social justice pedagogies that engage with the social, economic, cultural, civil, and political dimensions of lived realities in response to the the risk of drawing on particular philosophical or religious beliefs and principles which are culturally specific. We propose an education framework which is transcendental in the sense that it is universally recognised and pays attention to the intersecting moral, legal and political dimensions of life. Although applicable internationally, we focus on the Icelandic and Lutruwitan/Tasmanian school contexts to answer the question: How can human rights education assist lower secondary school students to form values and apply them to make decisions in their own lives and about communities at local, regional and global levels?
HRE is a new field in the school contexts of Iceland and Australia, implemented in fragmented and ad hoc ways dependent on committed individual teachers (Burridge et al., 2016; Gollifer, 2022a, 2022b). Despite democracy and human rights being one of the six fundamental pillars in the general section of the Icelandic national curriculum guides for all levels of schooling, HRE is not a compulsory part of teacher education. Democracy has a longer history in Iceland than human rights, as is the case in other Nordic countries where democracy and human rights tend to be understood as synonymous with national values (Osler & Lybæk, 2014; Strømmen Lile, 2019; Vesterdal, 2016).
In Australia, individual states manage their own state school systems informed by national government curriculum guidelines. The Lutruwita/Tasmanian Department of Education has adopted the Australian National Curriculum for lower secondary students (Yr. 7-10). The Civics and Citizenship strand of the Humanities and Social Science subject area focuses on Australians’ legal and constitutional rights and the parliamentary/democratic process and how they underpin a socially cohesive society. In Year 9 and 10 students look beyond Australia but with a strongly Australian perspective (ACARA, n.d).
The disparate ad hoc approach to addressing social justice and moral concerns in schools through preservative pedagogies that favour national perspectives can dilute attention towards opportunities for students to critically and holistically form value-based beliefs. We propose a HRE conceptual framework that emphasises the core cosmopolitan principles of universality, indivisibility, solidarity, and reciprocity as relevant to multiple country contexts, irrespective of distinct historical and cultural backgrounds.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources Used
This conceptual essay is the first of two papers. It proposes a HRE framework that will inform a small-scale case study on how cultural diversity and socio-moral development are addressed in Iceland and Lutruwita/Tasmania. Guided by the research question How can human rights education assist lower secondary school students to form values and apply them to make decisions in their own lives and about communities at local, regional and global levels?, we seek to create new HRE knowledge by building on carefully selected sources of information which we discuss in relation to previously developed pedagogical concepts and theories (Hirschheim, 2008; Jaakkola, 2020).
We are two educators with extensive experience working in diverse socio-cultural and political country contexts and who now reside in Iceland (author one) and Lutruwita/Tasmania (author two). The commitment to explore the role of education as a means of addressing social and moral concerns led to our collaboration. Our choice to work with two island communities with distinct historical and cultural backgrounds allows for an international HRE perspective. Furthermore, it provides an opportunity to discuss the tensions between the universality of human rights and calls for contextualised and decolonised HRE responses (Zembylas & Keet, 2019). Tasmania, the most southern, and only island state of Australia, and Iceland share small populations. Both have diversifying populations in terms of culture, language, ethnicity and socio-economic status and colonial pasts that raise questions about the impact of dominant power structures and discourse on groups at risk of being marginalised from mainstream society.
We start by identifying common pedagogical approaches by drawing on and adapting existing social-justice education typologies to categorise pedagogy into conservative/preservative; liberal/progressive; critical/emancipatory; critical/transformative (see Gorski & Parekh, 2020; Tibbitts, 2017). We then draw on Biesta’s (2020) subjectification; critical pedagogy (Freire, 1996); Adami’s (2014) conceptualisation of rights as relational and decolonial ethics (Zembylas, 2020) to argue that HRE can offer a framework where the moral, legal and political intersect to create opportunities for subjectification. These three dimensions encourage cosmopolitan understandings that emphasise the need for plurality in the context of diverse life narratives and highlight a set of ethical orientations that question conventional assumptions about culture and values formed through colonial logic and Eurocentrism.
As stated earlier, our intention is to use the conceptual outcomes of the paper to guide an empirical case study conducted in a small school sample in both Iceland and Lutruwita/Tasmania.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or Findings
We conclude that learning about cultural diversity and socio-moral development in lower secondary schools tends to reflect liberal/progressive pedagogies. Critical forms of pedagogy that seek emancipation and/or transformation require opportunities for students to become actively engaged with questions of how they are in the world as opposed to who they are. Biesta (2020) argues for three domains of education. Qualification refers to the transmission of knowledge and skills while socialisation explains the representation of values, norms and practices through the educational process, implicitly or explicitly. The third domain, subjectification, is used by Biesta to explain how education can impact the student by enhancing or restricting individual capabilities. Subjectification is the freedom to act, or not act. Biesta (2021) argues that while all three domains of education are important, schools place more emphasis on qualification and socialisation at the expense of subjectification. We suggest that Biesta‘s notion of ‘subjectedness’ can be enhanced through forms of HRE that emphasise the legal, moral and political dimensions of human rights in contexts of lived realities. Dialogue and transformative praxis informed by content and contexts of diverse life narratives provide a cosmopolitan understanding that emphasises the need for plurality. Irrespective of distinct historical and cultural country contexts, transformative HRE places human dignity at its core, underpinned by universal values, indivisible rights contexts, and critical content. Addressing subjectedness through intersecting moral, legal and political dimensions of human rights has great potential to assist lower secondary school students to form values and apply them to make decisions in their own lives and about communities at local, regional and global levels. This conceptualisation contributes to scholarly work on relevant HRE pedagogies in a world of global inequities and moral ambiguity.
References
Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). (n.d). https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/
Aðalbjarnardóttir, S. (2011). Borgaravitund ungs fólks í lýðræðisþjóðfélagi [Democratic citizenship among young people in a democratic society]. Institute of Educational Research.
Biesta, G. J. J. (2020). Risking ourselves in education: Qualification, socialization, and subjectification revisited. Educational Theory, 70, 89-104. https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.12411
Biesta, G. J. J. (2021). World-Centred Education. A View for the Present. Routledge.
Burridge, N., Buchanan, J., & Chodkiewicz, A. (2014). Human Rights and History Education: An Australian Study. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 39(3). http://ro.ecu.edu.au/ajte/vol39/iss3/2
Evans, C. (2008). Religious Education in Public Schools: An International Human Rights Perspective. Human Rights Law Review, 8(3), pp. 449-473.https://doi.org/10.1093/hrlr/ngn020
Gollifer, S. E. (2022a). Challenges and possibilities for transformative human rights education in Icelandic upper secondary schools. Human Rights Education Review. https://doi.org/10.7577/hrer.4981
Gollifer, S. E. (2022b). Inertial constraints to educational change: The case of human rights education in Iceland. Netla. https://ojs.hi.is/netla/article/view/3650/2249 Jónsson, O. P.
Gorski, P. C. & Parekh, G. (2020). Supporting Critical Multicultural Teacher Educators: Transformative teaching, social justice education, and , and perceptions of institutional support, Intercultural Education, 31:3, 265-285, DOI: 10.1080/14675986.2020.1728497
Gunnarsson, Gunnar J. (2020). Facing the New Situation of Religious Education in Iceland. Religions, 11(10). https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11100537
Hirschheim, R. (2008). Some guidelines for the critical reviewing of conceptual papers. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 9(8), 432–441.
Jaakkola, E. (2020). Designing conceptual articles: four approaches. AMS Review, 10, 18–26. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13162-020-00161-0
Osler, A., & Lybæk, L. (2014). ‘Educating “the new Norwegian we”: An examination of national and cosmopolitan education policy discourses in the context of extremism and Islamophobia’. Oxford Review of Education, 40 (5), 543–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2014.946896
Statistics Iceland. (2023). Population. Inhabitants. https://www.statice.is/statistics/population/inhabitants/
Tibbitts, F., (2017). "Revisiting ‘Emerging Models of Human Rights Education’," International Journal of Human Rights Education, 1(1) . Retrieved from http://repository.usfca.edu/ijhre/vol1/iss1/2
Vesterdal, K. (2019). Championing human rights close to home and far away: Human rights education in the light of national identity construction and foreign policy in Norway. Human Rights Education Review, 2(1), 5-24.
Walker, S., Brownlee, J., Whiteford, C., Cobb-Moore , C., Johansson, E., , Ailwood, J.& Boulton-Lewis, G. (2012). Early years teachers’ epistemic beliefs and beliefs about children’s moral learning. Teachers and Teaching, 18:2, 263-275, DOI: 10.1080/13540602.2012.632267
Zembylas, M. (2020). "Toward a Decolonial Ethics in Human Rights and Peace Education,"
International Journal of Human Rights Education, 4 (1). https://repository.usfca.edu/ijhre/vol4/iss1/2
Zembylas, M., & Keet, A. (2019). Critical Human Rights Education. Advancing Social-Justice-Oriented Educational Praxes.
Paper
Protecting Invisible Children: How Human Rights Education Could Improve School Safeguarding
University of Warwick, United Kingdom
Presenting Author:This paper brings together two distinct but interrelated fields: human rights education (HRE) and safeguarding. It endeavours to show that the former can be beneficial for the efficacy of the latter. By extending an argument put forward recently by Laura Lundy and Gabriela Martínez Sainz, and subsequently by me in a Human Rights Education Review article, that for Human Rights Education to be effective it must enable children to recognise and respond to lived human rights injustices, the paper places this important issue within the existing framework and processes associated with safeguarding young people in formal education. It attempts to both elucidate and consolidate the connection between HRE and safeguarding, arguing that if HRE were to become an integral part of safeguarding training and delivery, children may be better equipped to recognise and speak up about violations of their human rights, rather than relying on a passive system of adult observation.
This paper places these arguments in the context of an empirical study carried out by me, together with my Co-I, Dr Ruth Brittle, in 2021, which sought to tentatively map the landscape of the interaction between HRE and safeguarding in the separate jurisdictions of Scotland and England. I will present the findings from our scoping survey, offering a glimpse into current attitudes and practice amongst teachers and Designated Safeguarding Leads (DSLs)/Designated Child Protection Officers (DCPOs) in England and Scotland. I will then discuss some of the interesting points raised by the data and offer some tentative concluding observations, as well as suggestions for areas of future research.
If teachers currently lack knowledge and confidence on the topic of human rights, having received little or no training in this area, then simply dictating that HRE should form part of existing safeguarding guidance and training is likely to be an ineffectual route to meaningful change. By mapping a small part of the landscape in this area, we gained a better understanding of the current interaction between safeguarding and HRE in each jurisdiction, thus enabling us to start a conversation about how best to approach the next steps of introducing meaningful change in safeguarding practice that will be beneficial to researchers and practitioners beyond the UK context.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources Used
In order to map the landscape as fully as we were able, we created a survey (using the platform SurveyMonkey) that collected scoping data from: (i) primary and secondary teachers; and (ii) Designated Safeguarding Leads (DSLs) in England and Designated Child Protection Officers (DCPOs) in Scotland, regarding their knowledge of, and attitudes towards, human rights. The overall aim of the survey was to tentatively evaluate the extent to which human rights approaches are embedded in school safeguarding practices in both England and Scotland. Data was gathered through a simple survey comprising 13 questions around HRE and safeguarding.
The survey was sent to state primary and secondary schools in both countries, including academies and Multi Academy Trusts (MATs). We focused upon England and Scotland in order to compare knowledge of, and attitudes towards, human rights between the two nations, particularly in light of the Scottish Government’s impending incorporation of the UNCRC into domestic law. With existing research suggesting that attitudes to human rights in Scotland may generally be more positive than in England, we were keen to find out if this tracked through to formal education. We received 617 responses to our survey, comprising 380 teachers and 237 DSLs/DCPOs.
Unfortunately, time and ethical constraints meant that we were unable to circulate a second survey we had prepared amongst children and young people. We recognise that this limits the value of our data set, as the voice of the child is conspicuous by its absence. We are instead relying on teachers reporting to us what they believe children know and feel about the topics covered in the survey. This is far from ideal and, indeed, speaks to a broader problem (that lies beyond the scope of this paper) of constraints imposed by university ethics committees severely curtailing the abilities of researchers to work directly with children. By allowing adults to speak on behalf of children in this research, we are failing to practice what we preach about the importance and centrality of children’s voices. Faced with the choice between speaking only to teachers or abandoning the research, however, we felt that the former was the preferred course of action, and we agreed to pursue a separate follow-up study that would elicit the views of children on this topic.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or Findings
Our data revealed that Scottish teachers and DCPOs tended to have better knowledge of human rights and the UNCRC than their English counterparts. There are various reasons why this is likely to be the case, all relating to the more central position of human rights and the UNCRC within the Scottish educational policy landscape. The UNCRC underpins key legislation and policy documents that inform Scottish educational practice, including: (i) GIRFEC; (ii) the Early Years Framework; and (iii) The Standard for Provisional Registration with the General Teaching Council for Scotland. References to the UNCRC within these documents is ostensibly resulting in human rights terminology being mainstreamed to a greater extent in Scottish teaching practice.
The majority of teachers in both jurisdictions considered human rights to be taught as part of the curriculum, either in planned lessons or in assemblies. This is particularly the case with regard to primary teachers and DSLs/DCPOs across both nations; with the latter category being the most confident that HRE is happening in one form or another. This is a positive finding, and it is particularly reassuring that those whose job it is to safeguard children are most confident of the place of HRE within their schools. There is still work to be done, however, with teachers and DSLs/DCPOs in both Scotland and England reporting that human rights are not taught at all within the curriculum (including in assemblies) or that they are unaware as to whether such teaching is happening.
References
Lundy, L., & Martínez Sainz, G. (2018). The role of law and legal knowledge for a transformative human rights education: Addressing violations of children’s rights in formal education. Human Rights Education Review, 1(2), 4-24. https://doi.org/10.7577/hrer.2560
Struthers, A. (2021). Protecting invisible children in England: how human rights education could improve school safeguarding. Human Rights Education Review, 4(3), 45-64. https://doi.org/10.7577/hrer.4473
Lord Laming. (2003). The Victoria Climbe Inquiry. Retrieved from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/273183/5730.pdf.
Haringey serious case reviews: child A (2008). Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/haringey-local-safeguarding-children-board-first-serious-case-review-child-a.HM Government. (2018).
Department for Education. (September 2021). Keeping children safe in education (2020): Statutory guidance for schools and colleges. Part one: Information for all school and college staff. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/keeping-children-safe-in-education--2
Watkins, D. (2022). Exploring the role of domestic law in human rights education. Human Rights Education Review, 5(2), 98–116. https://doi.org/10.7577/hrer.4578
Draugedalen, K., & Osler, A. (2022). Teachers as human rights defenders: strengthening HRE and safeguarding theory to prevent child sexual abuse . Human Rights Education Review, 5(2), 32–55. https://doi.org/10.7577/hrer.4776
Struthers, A., ‘Building Blocks and Beyond: How Human Rights Education in Initial Teacher Education May Help to Change the Human Rights Landscape in Scotland’ (2015) 47(2) Scottish Educational Review 5-19