We are delighted to welcome Professor Audrey Osler as a Patron for The Steve Sinnott Foundation

We are delighted to have Professor Audrey Osler joining the Foundation as a Patron. Her work in human rights has had a huge impact in the world and reflects an essential part of what we do and what we stand for.

Audrey is a Professor of Education at the University of South-Eastern Norway and at the University of Leeds, UK. She is Editor-in-Chief of ‘Human Rights Education Review’. She has expertise in working for reconciliation in post-conflict settings in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Her most recent book is ‘Human Rights and Schooling: an ethical framework for teaching for social justice’ and she is currently writing ‘Where are you from? No, where are you really from?’ (Virago Press, 2022) drawing on history and memoir to discuss empire, migration and belonging.

She works in the related but distinct fields of Human Rights Education and Education for Democratic Citizenship, and her research is interdisciplinary in nature, drawing on sociology, political science, and legal scholarship. She has a special interest in children’s democratic participation rights; teachers’ work and citizenship; and race, ethnicity and the experiences of minoritized groups, in both established democracies and post-conflict societies. She works transnationally, and so much of her research is comparative.

Council of Europe General Rapporteur: Human Rights and Democracy in Action - Looking Ahead Education for Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights Education Conference 2012.

Presidential panel member: American Educational Research Association (San Francisco: 2005; New Orleans: 2011; Chicago: 2015; Washington DC: 2016)

Interview with Professor Audrey Osler

We recently had the opportunity to interview Audrey about the importance of educating children about human rights. Her experience of teaching human rights spans right across the age range, which provides important insights. You can watch the video here, and read a summary below.

Audrey: “Often human rights is seen as something relating to distant places, whereas I think the most important thing for children of all different ages is to understand their own human rights and then understand how they can defend each other’s rights.

I would begin in a primary school with the things that the children were concerned with. Children of all different ages have very strong views about justice and injustice, right down to small children saying what is fair or unfair. We see lots of older students in school, under the age of 18, standing up to the really big issues. There are children all over the globe who are standing up for the rights of other children, and standing up for big causes like climate justice and environmental issues. It's really important that we find out what the children are interested in, what they care about, and that's the best way in to a discussion about human rights.

I trained as a teacher and I don't think human rights was ever mentioned in my own training. I have supported many different schools with these topics, because they were simply not on the agenda. It's very exciting for many children to find out that all children everywhere have the same rights. That really grabs their imagination, and they will point out that that's not true in practise, we all deserve these rights but how are we going to make sure that everybody is able to claim them.

I think children can be seen as human rights defenders. It shouldn't just be about teachers detecting a problem, children should feel confident to able to express a problem too. It’s really important that they know when they can confidently speak out, using the language of rights and helping them feel empowered.

Human rights dialogue in education is really important so that we can look critically at the human rights framework with teachers. It is better for teachers to engage with, understand and apply then to be given a set of rules which they just have to go along with.

We also need to recognise that human rights learning takes place outside the school too, it takes place in society, it takes place in homes, in many different contexts. Teachers need to know that they are part of a bigger whole. We also need governments that support human rights. A powerful thing about the international framework is that it actually legitimises some difficult topics.

There are lots of people working on these issues who care passionately about these issues. Local networks can help teachers, and there are materials out there to help teachers. The first book I ever produced looked at children's literature and how young children's storey books, including picture books, could be used to teach human rights. Storey books can be a fabulous resource and teachers read often read a storey to young children everyday, and this is an easy way of bringing these discussions into your everyday practise.

We can't always assume that things will always get better in a progressive path forward. I think we often have to take small steps and have a vision of where we want to go. I feel privileged that I was brought up by a mother who encouraged me to think I could do anything, and be anything. She was really very inspiring to me. If you don’t have that when you're very young then it can be quite an impediment. At school girls had a slightly different curriculum to boys, and we had to challenge what seemed unfair, so I was very aware of these things from a young age.

We need to give young people strategies to know what to do about a situation, rather than great principles. It is important to have a sense of confidence in your rights, because I actually think that what goes on for people and especially girls and women, is often just very subtle small things which undermine our confidence. That is how human rights are eroded.”

Once again, we are delighted to have Professor Audrey Osler with us, and we look forward to creating even more impact on the lives of woman and girls through their human right to access education.

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Steve Sinnott • Aug 05, 2021

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.