Emerging Models of Human Rights Education
Methods & Strategy
Examples
Values and Awareness Model
- Methods can be creative (i.e. streetside education or media campaigns), or can follow a basic lecture format.
- Little emphasis is placed on the development of skills (communication, conflict resolution, & activism).
- Students taught to be "critical consumers" of human rights.
- Human Rights-related lessons within citizenship, history, social science, and law-related education classes.
- Infusion of human rights related themes into both formal and informal youth programming.
- Public Awareness Campaigns involving art, advertising, media coverage, and community events.
- To transmit basic knowledge of human rights issues and to foster its integration into public values.
- To pave the way for a world that respects human rights through awareness of the normative goals of UDHR.
- Key pedagogical strategy is engagement: to attract the interest of the participant.
Methods & Strategy
Accountability Model
Examples
- Participants are expected to be directly or indirectly associated with the guarantee of human rights through their professional career.
- To sensitize professionals to the nature of human rights violations and potentials within their profession
- To understand human rights law, mechanisms of protection, and lobbying and advocacy skills.
- To implement structurally based and legally guaranteed norms and practices related to human rights.
- Human rights training and topics are geared towards specialized vocational areas, and outcomes are geared towards content as well as skill-development.
- Training focuses on the ways in which professional responsibilities involve either directly monitoring human rights violations and advocating with necessary authorities or taking care to protect rights of people for whom they have some responsibility.
- The training of human rights and community activists on techniques for monitoring and documenting human rights abuses.
- The training of the same group in procedures for registering grievances with appropriate national and international bodies
- Pre-service and in-service trainings for lawyers, prosecutors, judges, police officers, and the military.
- Professionals, such as health and social service workers, journalists and other members of the media, can also be recipients of HRE Accountability programming.
Transformational Model
Examples
Methods & Strategy
- Geared towards empowering the individual to both recognize human rights abuses and commit to their prevention.
- Assumes that students have had personal experiences that can be seen as human rights violations and that they are predisposed to become promoters of human rights.
- This model involves techniques (based partly on developmental psychology) that involve self-reflection and support within the community.
- It treats individuals more holistically, and it is more challenging in its design and application.
- A complete program may include leadership development, conflict resolution training, vocational training, work and informal fellowship.
- This model can be found in programs operating in refugee camps, in post-conflict societies, with victims of domestic abuse and with groups serving the poor.
- There are also examples of "human rights communities," where governing bodies, local groups, and citizens examine traditional beliefs, collective memory, and aspirations as related to the UDHR.
- The model can also be found in schools, where an in-depth case study on human rights violation (i.e. Cambodian Genocide) can serve as an effective catalyst for examining human right violations.
Video Examples