Re-contextualising human rights education: some decolonial strategies and pedagogical/curricular possibilities

Abstract

This paper argues that a decolonising approach in human rights education (HRE) needs to examine human rights issues through a critical lens that interrogates the Eurocentric grounding of human rights universals and advances the project of re-contextualising human rights in the historical horizon of modernity/coloniality. This alternative configuration of HRE as ‘critical’ and ‘transformative’ offers pedagogical and curricular possibilities that go beyond conventional forms of HRE and create openings for pedagogical praxis along social justice lines. The quest to create these openings and possibilities is a fundamental element for decolonising the theory and pedagogical practices of human rights. It is argued that the move to create spaces for decolonising pedagogy and curriculum in HRE can take HRE theory and practice to a less Eurocentric outlook and thus a more multiperspectival and pluriversal understanding of human rights – one that recognises the histories of coloniality, the entanglements with human rights, and the consequences for social justice projects.

Keywords:

• Human rights
• human rights education
• decolonisation
• curriculum
• pedagogy

Notes

1. Wynter’s (2003) work offers a profound way of linking various forms of violence (e.g., colonialism, slavery, capitalist exploitation), while remaining attentive to their particularities (see also Wynter in Mignolo 2015). Her point is that while there are important distinctions among various social justice projects, the political struggles that seek to redress these violences have to critique the dominant version of the human she calls ‘Man’ (i.e., a Western bourgeois conception of the human).