Drama in Child Rights Education - Developing a Pedagogical Model

1. IntroductionIn introducing the Global Education First (GEF) initiative in 2012, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon portrayed the necessary changes in the goals and methods of education for preparing students to face the future challenges of the global world.Schools have traditionally prepared people to pass exams, proceed to the next level, and graduate into the workplace. We now face the much greater challenge of raising global citizens. Education must fully assume its central role in helping people to forge more just, peaceful, tolerant, and inclusive societies. It must give people the understanding, skills, and values they need to cooperate in resolving the interconnected challenges of the 21st century (Education First, 2012, 20). In addition to knowledge and competence in different subject areas, students more than before need to be equipped with a will and an ability to collaborate with people reflecting various cultural backgrounds, life styles, and values. Students need to be prepared for global citizenship featured by active participation, collaboration, and reinforcement of human rights. This calls for increased attention and allocation of resources to the pedagogy of human rights education. Increased understanding, skills, and personal strength for sustaining and further strengthening peace, equity, and wellbeing are needed for a sustainable future. However, research indicates problems in implementing human rights education, and child rights education in particular. This calls for more knowledge about the pedagogy of human rights education.Learning and teaching about child rights are not systematically embedded in curricular frameworks and teachers are rarely familiar with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (DICE, 2010). For example, even though respondents in the recent international UNICEF baseline survey identified teacher training as the most important area for action, such as academic freedom and de-regulation of higher education seemed to refrain from achieving coherence in the area (Jerome, Emerson, Lundy, & Orr, 2015). On the other hand, opportunities for children's participation in decision-making in school were widespread but the number of schools and type of participation were mixed in most countries. Notably, child rights education was explicitly and consistently monitored only in a few countries.This paper report results from an action research project and study that aimed at testing and further development of a drama based model in child rights education. The study aim at clarifying teachers' and students' experiences and gains from the implementation of the model, exercises, and materials on child rights education developed by the the Finnish National Committee for UNICEF. The authors first outline a theoretical basis for human and child rights education, which is followed by an introduction of drama as a powerful pedagogical method of learning about, through, and for human rights. After this, we will focus on an action research and some results from a study that engaged regular secondary school teachers and their students in implementing the pedagogical model for child rights education.2. Human rights educationHuman rights education is informed by and consistent with The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 but also with other international human rights agreements. In their definitions, researchers and agencies tend to lean on the UN Declaration on Human Rights Education and Training, which was the first official international definition of human rights education. It has been said to 'represent the current conception on the content of human rights education and training in the international law' (Kouros & Vainio 2014, 6). It lists three components of human rights education. First, education about human rights includes provision of knowledge and understanding of human rights norms and principles, the underpinning values and the mechanisms for the protection of human rights. …