Human rights educator speaks to students about different cultures
Universal human rights began as a “dream born out of the horrors of the second world war,” said Audrey Osler, a visiting professor and founding director of the Center for Citizenship and Human Rights Education, at her Wednesday lecture. Osler argued that the obligation to see this dream come to fruition falls on the global community.
Osler first became interested in human rights education after attending an international conference while working as a high school teacher. Since then, Osler has worked as a consultant and adviser for UNESCO, the Council of Europe, the European Commission, the Fundamental Rights Agency and the British Council.
Steven Camicia, assistant professor in the Teacher Education and Leadership program, was the catalyst that brought Osler to USU. The two had worked together before, after meeting at a conference a year ago. Camicia said he thought the lecture went well.
“She does a great job understanding the different nations and putting them in the context of human rights,” Camicia said.
Camicia said learning about human rights can hopefully give different groups on campus the opportunity to structure conversations in a productive way. He also said bringing international scholars to USU brings the school into the international community.
In her presentation, Osler talked about her interest in the ways different societies, cutltures and countries tell the “story of democracy.” Osler said students “don’t only have the right and entitlement to an education, but the entitlement to a human rights education.”
Osler said human rights is more than policies and laws.
“Human rights,” she said, “provide a set of principles for learning to live together, for examining education policy, addressing diversity and recognizing the dignity and the equal rights of others in our local communities.”
Osler said the development of human rights gives a platform for productive discussions, so both sides of an issue can be respected and find common ground.
“I don’t see any value in banging heads together,” she said.
The framework for human rights, Osler said, came from Franklin Roosevelt in 1941, when he identified the four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of belief, freedom from fear, freedom from want. In 1945, the United Nations was formed, and three years later, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was signed. Osler referenced the UDHR as a representation of “vision and promise.”
Osler said the dream of human rights was “predicated on education as a central aspect of the new project.”
Osler also discussed citizenship, which she said can be conceptualized as a “status, a feeling and a practice.” Citizenship as a status tends to be exclusive, she said, and this conception contrasts with “the status of all individuals as holders of human rights.”
“The status of human rights holder is inclusive,” Osler said. “All human beings, including those who are stateless, are holders of human rights.”
The other view of citizenship is citizenship as a feeling or belonging. Though status and feeling may not be related, the legal rights that come with status may help with the sense of belonging, Osler said. Prerequisites for belonging, Osler said, include: “access to services and resources; legal rights of residence; social and psychological security; an absence of discrimination and/or legal redress if discrimination occurs; and acceptance and recognition by others within the community.”
Singapore, she said, focuses on citizenship as a feeling because of the concern in retention of citizens.
“The aim is to encourage young citizens to recognize a duty,” she said, “and vital obligation in protecting their country, and overcoming its apparent vulnerability.”
She said history is sometimes harnessed to tell a “national story,” which can be present in schools and is often retold to “citizens, residents and, indeed, visitors and tourists to the country.”
Lastly, citizenship as a practice, she said, is “the everyday citizenship engagement in which each individual can participate, in working alongside others to make a difference.”
Osler said the different concepts of citizenship are interlinked.
“Citizenship status may give an individual a sense of security,” she said, “and enable them to feel they belong and so enhance their engagement in the affairs of the community.”
Osler transitioned into a discussion about the exclusivity that can arise from a categorization of citizenship. Since 2001, after the attacks on the U.S., the categorization of Muslims, or what she called “Islamophobia,” has become “more or less an acceptable form of racism.”
“It is not even commonly acknowledged as a form of racism,” she said, “to categorise our fellow Muslim citizens as a homogeneous group, all sharing narrow religious views, a propensity for violence and thus for terrorism.”
She said these examples of intolerance are the reason there needs to be a cultural shift.
“We need to develop new narratives of democracy, which extend our current ones, largely based on nation,” she said, “and which may, in education, be invoking rather different emotions than those of tolerance that we hope for in our students.”
Osler said young people need to understand how their lives are connected with the lives of others who they may never meet, and how their decisions, such as consumer decisions or political decisions, affect people in other places.
“We cannot leave it to media to explain terror, war, violence, peace,” she said. ” Many problems need global solutions and global solidarity.”
Osler concluded by emphasising three points: it’s easier to teach about past examples of intolerance, rather than current ones but that shouldn’t be an excuse; human rights provides an “internationally agreed framework for procedural rules and a standard against which students can evaluate policy positions;” and the human rights framework provides “security for examining our own positions and those of others.”
In her final statement, Osler reiterated the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, who said universal rights begin in small places, close to home.”
Osler said, “as Eleanor Roosevelt recognized, it is in the small places close to home we need as educators to support our students, to show solidarity with others so all can seek equal justice, equal opportunity and equal dignity, with out discrimination.”
– k.vandyke@aggiemail.usu.edu