Human Rights Education
Facing the Future through Pedagogies of Resistance
I participated in a panel at the Amnesty International Summit on Human Rights Education concerned with “Women and Human Rights.” The panel was led by Sheila Dauer, Director of the Women’s Human Rights Program for Amnesty International, USA. David Sadker from American University participated, along with a teacher and a former student from an independent school in New York City.
Dauer introduced the presentations with comments on the acute problems facing women today in many societies, especially as regards access to fundamental human rights such as health and education. Sadker discussed the state of teacher education in dealing with gender. He concluded that teacher education programs across the country are sadly deficient in sustained attention to issues of gender. The teacher and student both commented on gender dynamics in their teaching and schooling experiences, respectively. I focused my remarks on my course, “Women of the World: Issues in Teaching,” which I present annually at Teachers College.
I called my brief presentation, “Facing the Future through Pedagogies of Resistance.” I believe that through education we can resist the inheritance of patriarchy shaping social and cultural institutions around the world. My focus in this course is on a set of key social studies concepts with a gender bent: patriarchy, gender and sexuality, ethnocentrism, cultural relativism, human rights, violence and resistance.
I described the “interdisciplinary explorations and pedagogical engagements” made by students enrolled in the course. They do oral histories of significant women in their lives. They make great use of online resources for finding up-to-date information about women’s status worldwide; we then employ a variety of software applications to display the work in creative fashion, including Inspiration and Timeliner. We read novels such as The Brideprice (Emcheta), Cracking India (Sidwha), and So Long a Letter (Bâ). We explore the geography of women’s rights violations through Joni Seager’s State of Women of the World Atlas. We also read a powerful critique of Western feminism, Chila Bulbeck’s Re-orienting Western Feminisms: Women’s Diversity in a Postcolonial World.
This year, we will make use of the special issue of Social Education Merry Merryfield and I edited last winter (January/February 2003) on “Teaching about Women of the World.” In the opening essay, Merryfield and Binaya Subedi lay out a comprehensive framework for including gender in global studies. A number of articles on women of Latin America, South Asia, and West Africa, among others, written by students at Teachers College and Ohio State University, will be required reading in my course this fall.
The discussion with audience members following our panel presentation was enlightening. Clearly, many felt strongly about the degree to which the topic of women’s rights has been sidelined in the curriculum, especially due to recent pressures around standards and accountability.
The Summit offered a welcome opportunity to share concerns about human rights education generally in the social studies curriculum of America’s schools. With so much emphasis placed since passage of the “No Child Left Behind Act” on the fundamental skills of literacy and numeracy, not only does social studies lose ground, but attention to global studies, women, and human rights is further marginalized. Teachers and teacher educators need to find ways to resist this narrowing of the curriculum, especially as regards the history and contemporary situation of women of the world.