Human Rights Education Creative Competition for Schools

We have had lots of entries for our human rights competition for schools, and you still have a few more days to register and get involved.

Our Human Rights Education – Learning Through Creating competition for schools launched in December 2021 with a vibrant panel discussion.

Chaired by Gawain Little of the National Education Union, the panel included Evadne Bygrave ambassador of The Steve Sinnott Foundation, Daniel Kebede the National President of the NEU, Marie Antionette Corr of The Gambia Teachers Union, Professor Augustin John, writer and education campaigner, and Professor Audrey Osler of University of Leeds and University of South Eastern Norway. The video below is a summary of the discussion, at the end of this post you can watch the whole discussion for inspiration.

Gawain Little: The NEU is partnering with the Steve Sinnott Foundation and the Gambia Teachers Union to launch ‘Creating Change: the world I want to live in’. A competition which aims to encourage young people to make their voices heard on human rights, and to support teachers in the UK and partner countries of the Steve Sinnott Foundation such as The Gambia, with human rights education in the classroom.

Climate change, poverty, access to education, and gender equality, young people's voices must be heard on these issues that impact their lives, their communities, and their world.

Young people's voices matter. However all too often their voices are not heard. This is why the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child enshrined in international law children's right to be heard. This is why we're launching this competition. To provide a platform for young people's thoughts, ideas and voices on human rights.

I'm also pleased that the Steve Sinnott Foundation has led on the creation of a resource pack for teachers, which accompanies the competition, and comprises classroom activities that have been submitted by teachers and human rights campaigners.

International solidarity is a cornerstone of education trade unionism, and I'm incredibly proud of the NEU’s international solidarity work. It is work that's rooted in human trade union and children's rights. Human rights education is about human rights, and for human rights. That means promoting knowledge and understanding of human rights, and their principles, alongside empowering young people to enjoy and exercise their rights, and to respect and uphold the rights of others.

Daniel Kebede: Human rights education is such an important thing to pursue. We live in really precarious and challenging times, where many young people are missing out on education because of the impact of climate change.

Young people want to be educated about human rights. It is vital that we create human rights literate young people. This is a really important competition do just that.

Marie Antionette Corr: This competition is apt, and is very timely for us, especially during these very trying times in The Gambia. We have been given the opportunity of being invited by the Human Rights Commission to be part of the review of the curriculum. So, it is a very good time for us to be involved in this competition.

We are going to promote it and make sure that we include all sectors who work with youth groups, like the Peace Ambassadors, and the Health Educators. We will extend it to them because they need it.

Augustin John: There is a real need to focus children in metropolitan countries like Britain, on human rights abuses in our own space, and understand how that plays into the way education policies and schooling practises are framed.

We need to fight for and demand, that the way schools organise themselves should be against a human rights backcloth, so that they are conscious all the time of the extent to which some of their own regimes are denying children of their human rights.

Evadne Bygrave: From a teaching point of view, creativity is the way forward. This makes it a lot more inclusive, especially for those children who unfortunately are being left behind, because the curriculum is out of their reach.

Using a creative approach gives them that opportunity to get engaged, learn from their peers and learn from their own strengths as well. Many children and young people learn in different ways, and using a creative approach is what's going to support them, and support their learning.

Audrey Osler: The human rights resource pack has an exercise that teachers can do themselves, to find out the state of human rights in their school as they understand it. That exercise also offers students the chance to think about how they understand the state of human rights in the school too. Students and teachers need to have a dialogue about human rights, and each understand the experience of the other.

If teaches and students assume that the school itself is a safe human rights space for everyone, without actually asking young people how they feel, I think that can lead to cynicism. I don't think we should be teaching about human rights without actually finding out how students experience the school.

Gawain Little: Please do download the resource pack and register for the competition. Please encourage schools in your area to use it. Please encourage everyone to get involved, and to make this massively important project a reality.

Please do register for the competition. Please do get involved and let us change education.

As Paulo Freire said, through changing education, we change the people who will change the world, because fundamentally, that's what human rights education, and all education, is about.

“Education does not change society, education changes people, and people change society.” Paulo Freire

Find out more about the competition here:

Sign up for the competition here:

Watch the whole launch webinar video here:

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Steve Sinnott • May 29, 2022

Capacity development as part of education

By BY JOSEPHINE DODDS • 06 May, 2024

Education has been identified as a key aspect to achieve societal development. This has been highlighted with the 2015 sustainable development goals, with goal 4 being to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. Education has also shifted to being a means to transmit peace and global tolerance through increasing the understanding of other cultures. This has tied in with the rise of capacity development initiatives in development practice that seek to empower and enable individuals and communities to build upon their preexisting capacities. It is a key strategy to ensure educational development by international organisations, governments, and communities. The main principles of capacity development are participation, locally driven agenda, ongoing learning, long term investment and building upon local capacities. By integrating these principles into educational development, it allows for school communities to become involved in peace building activities. Through following a locally driven agenda schools can become centres for fostering peace and understanding and address local issues that may prevent children from attending or staying in school. This is what the UNESCO Associated Schools network aims to achieve by involving schools and educational institutes at a global level, creating networks of educators and students that share information, knowledge and spread UNESCOs value of peace. It aims to join schools through four pillars of learning: learning to know, learning to do, learning to be and learning to live together to create sustainable learning and teaching environments that involve communities in conservation activities, petitions and cultural events. Schools undertake social and educational projects that allow students to get involved with supporting developmental and humanitarian organisations, through fundraising and field trips. Recently The Steve Sinnott Foundation organised an international trip to Japan for the 70th Anniversary of UNESCO ASPnet for the Arts and Culture for peace exchange, bringing together students from The Gambia, Oman, Singapore, Korea and Coventry. By expanding education to include individuals and communities’ local agendas and addressing international issues, education can provide a platform for ongoing learning and development. It allows for students to develop their ability to think critically and connect with others meaning they can both learn and understand issues that might not be highlighted otherwise. By allowing schools, students, and communities to connect and direct their own development and focusing on developing existing capacities, the meaning and aim of education shifts from traditional roles to being focused upon understanding and peace.

Women and girls education GUPT perspective

By BY DALILA EL BARHMI • 29 Apr, 2024

Women’s and Girls’ Full Participation in Society: “Are Palestinian women reaping the benefits of education in similar ways to the rest of the world?” Palestinian women continue to be some of the most educated women in the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region. While women’s academic participation is indeed measurable, they are not reaping the benefits of education. Palestinian women, especially educated Palestinian women, are overlooked, and under-represented in Palestinian society. Current indicators reveal that access to education has not significantly improved women’s status in Palestinian society. It is therefore imperative to benefit from Palestinian women’s education and skills in society not only as a social right, but as a development necessity. The percentage of educated women in Palestine is remarkable and one of the highest around the world with a 99.6% in 2020 for completion in primary and upper secondary. While Palestinian women have always been visible in the national struggle, they have limited leadership and decision making-opportunities. Their participation in civil society and the formal government has been restricted. In decision making positions, women comprise only 8.3% of all ministers, 0% of ministerial representatives, and 6% of assistants to the ministerial representatives. Within all ministries women comprise 30% of staff. In the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, women are the majority, comprising 68.1%. Education unions leading by example: Education unions have viewed the education of future generations, with a focus on girls, as a form of protest, resistance to the country and Arab region’s ongoing-conflict, displacement, and upheaval. Accordingly, women and girls’ education has thrived in recent years. COVID 19 crisis a catalyst for transforming education unions: Education unions voiced that an appropriate response to COVID -19 in the education sector should consider the rights and best interests of students, teachers and education support personnel and involve education unions in developing the containment and recovery measures. This response accelerated the transformation process of the largest union in Palestine, the General Union of Palestinian Teachers (GUPT). They want to have a truly representative union and integrate women educators in the union decision making structures. Despite the pandemic, GUPT continued to engage in social dialogue with the government, continued to fight for decent working conditions and welfare for teachers and education personnel and engage in a process of trade union transformation reflecting the realities of the 21st century. The union stepped up during the rapid shift to distance learning, they have developed online programmes, trained teachers on distance learning and supported students to decrease inequality among learners. The union also urged that the transformation should also challenge discrimination and increase women’s involvement in education, in trade unions and in society. This process was a driver to enhance women’s leadership within the union’s structures. From words to action: Mechanisms put in place to enhance women educators’ participation. With the support of international sister organisations, GUPT developed their own strategy to promote women’s participation and leadership within their union and in education. They developed a strategy, and we identified the following objectives: Increase the number of women in key union leadership and decision-making bodies at the regional and national level, through capacity development training on leadership for women. They have also introduced policies such as gender quotas and allocated budgets for their gender equity programmes. Activate the role of their Women’s Committee and prioritise the recruitment of young female teachers. The union is also working to identify and address the barriers to women’s participation in union leadership and decision making. In education the union is working with the Ministry of Education to review school books so that gender discrimination is not inherently written into the curriculum. GUPT is also organising sensitization training for educators so that discriminatory stereotypes are not perpetuated in the classroom. Finally, for the GUPT it is important to secure the right to education for all Palestinian students, especially girls. Teaching and learning must occur in quality, safe environments. Every effort must be made to eradicate the different types of violence that occur all too frequently in and around educational settings.

Support the Women in our Public Schools on the way to Diversifying Teaching

By BY MARY CATHRYN RICKER • 22 Apr, 2024

Early in my work as the president of my local teacher’s union I was invited to a community leader meeting about reforming the teaching profession. Amidst the discussion of harsher teacher evaluations, raising standards for teaching, creating easier entry into the profession, merit pay for “good” teachers, and more, I brought up the fact that working conditions and salaries hadn’t meaningfully changed since the 1960s. “We’re in favor of paying math and science teachers more so they can be compensated closer to what they’d get in the private sector,” a business community representative replied, offering an idea that was not new to me. Full disclosure: my dad was a career math teacher from that era of math and science majors who answered their government’s call to become math and science teachers who would boost the United States of America’s bench in the space race. I could easily picture how a larger salary could have changed our family’s budget. Teachers’ unions like mine (and my dad’s) addressed pay disparities based on gender that were common a generation earlier by fighting for a salary schedule focused on experience and education. So, I offered back, “If we want to differentiate pay related to the most important job in education, then we should seriously consider paying kindergarten and first grade teachers more than anyone because they teach students to read, which is the rocket science of education,” alluding to an influential issue of AFT’s American Educator magazine from 1999. “Well, I’m sure those teachers are fine but I have volunteered in first grade classrooms and their work doesn’t compare to math and science teachers.” Oh. Interesting. We clearly weren’t going to see eye to eye in our differentiated pay conversation. More so, there are decades long gender stereotypes lurking behind that conversation. In addition to the history of gender based pay inequities, elementary school teachers are assumed to be female while more secondary teachers are male. There has long been a disconnect between the importance communities, elected officials, and countries have placed on education. From local funding efforts to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education, support for education is nearly universal in most communities. That support for education doesn’t always translate to support for educators and, with a majority of educators worldwide being female, that sets a dangerous precedent. Our teachers deserve professional working conditions because teaching and learning begins with their expertise. Additionally, a teacher’s working conditions are a student’s learning conditions and so administrators, public officials, or policymakers mistreating, undermining, or disrespecting teachers sends a message to students that teachers do not deserve respect, fair treatment, or professionalization. In addition to a stubborn lack of recognition of teachers as professionals, a vicious cycle exists around salary. Teachers have historically low wages because it is feminized and because it is feminized teacher’s wages are suppressed. The evidence that belonging to a union, with the ability to negotiate collectively, improves teacher compensation is key in disrupting this vicious cycle. Teaching has been a feminized profession for over a century and, despite efforts to diversify the profession, remains a feminized profession. In fact, the OECD reports that the gender gap increased from 2005 to 2019. In order for our students to have the most representative learning conditions, we need the most representative teachers so we must continue to diversify teaching to represent everyone in our communities, including by gender. Efforts like Black Men Teach, active in my home state of Minnesota, can make a meaningful difference. I would posit treating the current majority female teaching population as professionals—with professional wages, recognizing their expertise in teaching and learning rather than infantilizing them, respecting their commitment to education rather than exploiting it—would both model for students the way to treat women (and thereby model for female students how they can expect to be treated in any profession) and create the conditions for everyone to see teaching as a profession worth pursuing.