Critical human rights, citizenship, and democracy education: Entanglements and regenerations
- PDF / 436,168 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 94 Downloads / 230 Views
Critical human rights, citizenship, and democracy education: Entanglements and regenerations Michalinos Zembylas and André Keet (eds). Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2018. 240 pp. Bloomsbury Critical Education series. ISBN 978-1-3500-4562-0 (hbk), ISBN 978-1-3501-3879-7 (pbk), ISBN 978-1-3500-4563-7 (ePUB), ISBN 978-1-3500-4565-1 (ePDF) Shirley Walters1
© UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning and Springer Nature B.V. 2020
My reading of this text does not come from within the field of citizenship (CE), democracy (DE) or human rights education (HRE). I am an outsider as far as the debates between CE, HRE and DE go. My interest in the problems at hand is my history as a social justice activist and scholar particularly within the field of adult learning and education (ALE). My doctoral thesis 35 years ago, which was entitled “Education for democratic participation”, studied education processes within antiapartheid social movements – the issues of citizenship, human rights and democracy are therefore very “close and personal” to my perspective while being framed differently from those of CE, HRE and DE. This edited collection addresses “critical” readings of CE, HRE and DE. It brings together a compendium of 13 chapters to engage with provocative questions about the possibilities for human rights, democracy and citizenship education to probe the basic assumptions on which they are fostered. The question is whether human rights, citizenship and democracy education can “simultaneously engage in understanding and undermining the new world in the process of becoming…” (p. 5). The editors state (p. 6) that there are two overarching goals driving this collection which are addressed in two separate parts: (1) the first part (chapters 2–7) provides theoretical work that cultivates a critical view of human rights, democracy and citizenship education and revisits these categories to advance socially just educational praxis; and (2) the second part (chapters 8–13) highlights case studies that redefine the purposes, practices and approaches in education for a better configuration with the justice-oriented objectives of human rights (HRE), democracy (DE) and citizenship education (CE). * Shirley Walters [email protected] 1
University of the Western Cape, Bellville, South Africa
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
S. Walters
The practices of HRE, DE and CE are interwoven in ways which are difficult to separate out. This is reflected in the broad definitional parameters of these three educational areas. Whereas CE refers to education that aims to promote citizens playing an active part in democratic life through the exercise of rights and responsibilities, DE has its educational focus on the idea, practices and principles of democracy, and HRE seeks the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms. The expansion of human rights as the dominant moral language of our age, and its constitutive relationship with constitutional democracies and their related conceptions of citizenship have been taken up primarily within th
Data Loading...
