Lessons Learned from ... Albania:
Introducing human rights in primary school nationwide

In Albania in 1995, every student in grades 1-8 had a human rights textbook. This was the result of a remarkable joint effort by Albanian education authorities, teachers, NGOs and international donors throughout the 1990s.

Beginning in 1993, the Institute of Pedagogical Research (IPR), a government institution for curricular development and innovation, cooperated with local and international non-governmental organizations in promoting human rights education in schools. The key local partner was the Albanian Centre for Human Rights, headed by a former teacher, Kozara Kati. This Centre and the staff at the Institute would remain partners in this effort over the decade that followed.

The Albanian team of teachers, activists and curricular specialists dedicated to human rights education (HRE) were committed from the very beginning to developing a national strategy would touch all schools. Thus, the HRE effort in Albania targeted not only materials development, but also planned for:

curricular changes that would require that HRE be taught at the primary and secondary school levels

integration of HRE into in-service training and recertification of teachers

inclusion of human rights-related themes in pre-service education.

The first human rights teachers' manual was translated into Albanian and used for three teacher trainings in 1993, in cooperation with the Norwegian Foundation "Ana." A subsequent cooperation with the Netherlands Helsinki Committee and the Danish Centre for Human Rights resulted in the development of original pupil's activity booklets for use in grades 1-8.

These booklets focused on the principles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child but reflected the cardinal problems of life in Albania. The principles used by the Albanian writers in writing the materials were that:

the booklets should speak of the Albanian reality, which reflected many challenges to meeting basic needs

the books should educate about both rights and responsibilities, ensuring that children in the "post-totalitarian" environment would not feel that they have unlimited rights and freedoms

activities should be organised in such a way that children could express their own views, thus trying to overcome the paternalism that still shaped relations between the generations

the booklets should present the idea of non-discrimination, an issue especially poignant for those students migrating from the rural areas to the larger towns and cities

These booklets were piloted and eventually accepted for use as an cross-curricular theme for grades 1-8 by the Ministry of Education, which printed half a million copies that were distributed to students in 1995. Around the same time, the Institute of Pedagogical Research, in cooperation with the Albanian Human Rights Centr,e succeeded in furthering the reach of the program. Following the use of the booklets in classrooms and sponsored regional trainings, human rights were integrated into the ongoing work of the teacher training programme for the Local Educational Authorities. These authorities train educators after 5, 10 and 20 years of teaching. A human rights module for civic teachers was included in the training and related testing that are linked with salary increases.

Since 2000, there have been several new developments in Albania's human rights education program, which is a main subdomain of knowledge in the civic educaton standards.