[hr-education] Re: Considering HRE as a distinct subject in school?

Dear colleagues,

May I join your very interesting discussion from the perspective of the
European Training and Research Center for Human Rights and Democracy (ETC)
in Graz. Together with World University Service (WUS) Austria we had in
the past a project on integrating human rights into the teaching process
in South-Eastern Europe, where there was no tradition of human rights
teaching. With regard to the question whether human rights should be
taught as a distinctive subject the result of a long discussion was to
avoid human rights being compartmentalised, but to encourage teachers of
different subjects to integrate the human rights perspective into their
teaching. In a similar way in Austria human rights form a principle of
teaching, which all subjects should take into account and not a distinct
subject of primary or secondary education.

However, this raises the question of training of teachers, who are able to
meet these objectives. For this purpose, the European Training and
Research Center for Human Rights and Democracy (ETC) has developed regular
training programmes for teachers of different subjects, which enables them
to better integrate and develop the human rights dimension of their
subject, which usually is of great interest to the students. In addition,
adequate materials need to be made available for the teachers by service
institutions such as the service point, operating in the
Ludwig-Boltzmann-Institute of Human Rights in Vienna with the assistance
of the Austrian Ministry for Education, Science and Culture.

Furthermore, when teachers are formed in higher education, specific
training can be made available to them on the basis of an appropriate
curriculum so that they can acquire the necessary skills for integrating
human rights into their teaching from the outset. A model project would be
the "University Human Rights and Democratic Citizenship Curriculum"
developed with the assistance of the Austrian Ministry for Foreign Affairs
by the Research and Training Center for Human Rights and Democratic
Citizenship at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Zagreb,
which is also accompanied by the development and translation of relevant
teaching/training and reference materials.

In this context, the ETC Graz has developed a training manual on human
rights education entitled "Understanding Human Rights", which is available
in different languages on the website of the ETC, www.etc-graz.at,
together with additional materials which should assist teachers in gaining
a basic understanding of human rights, but also finding adequate materials
like exercises and games, which could be used in the teaching process.

In conclusion, the question of human rights education as a distinct
subject appears mainly on the level of tertiary education and sometimes
also secondary education, in which case it should be optional and not
obligatory in order to avoid that human rights become a subject like any
other, which students are forced to take. However, our experience shows
that there is always a strong interest, when human rights is offered and
therefore nobody should worry that giving the students a choice would be
to the detriment of human rights education.

Wolfgang Benedek
Director of ETC Graz
www.etc-graz.at




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