Global Citizenship Education

Guiding Principle 3. Prioritising Human Rights

What is Prioritising Human Rights?

At the heart of Global Citizenship Education lies the fundamental principle of human rights. To nurture students and equip them to become informed and compassionate global citizens, educators must prioritise the understanding and defence of human rights. 

By emphasising human dignity, equity and justice, educators empower learners to recognise and challenge injustices, both locally and globally. This section will guide educators on how to integrate human rights into their curricula, fostering an environment in which students learn about their rights and their responsibilities in upholding the rights of others. Through this focus, we aim to cultivate a generation committed to creating a more just and equitable world.

Before taking on any GCE topic, ask these two questions:

1. Why are some people's rights respected, while other people’s are not?
2. Are everyone's rights valued in the solutions presented on this issue?

Prioritising human rights will take time to explore. We must remember that:

• We should always consider the human rights implications of an issue.
• When exploring environmental issues, we should always link them to human rights. For example, how does biodiversity loss affect people, not just animals and plants?

Activities

• Develop a Human Rights Charter: Creating a Human Rights Charter for the class
• Human Rights Spiderweb: This activity invites students to connect Human Rights issues to a GCE theme.
• Land Rights and Wrongs (link to be shared soon): Students explore human rights issues around indigenous land grabs using real case studies from The International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. 

Videos

• Amnesty International ‘Look Beyond Borders’: This 5 minute video addresses the fact that often we can use dehumanised language when talking about refugees, when in reality they are just like ourselves, and experience suffering, love and have dreams.
• Oxfam: Animated guide to land grabs: This two minute animation explains how families are being unfairly evicted from their land and left with no way to grow food or earn a living as a result of big land deals in poor countries.
• What if these headlines were about People Like you: This 2.38 minute video uses newspaper headlines to switch on our empathy dramatically, by planting us in the shoes of those often targeted for discrimination.

Rosary College

While studying Morality as part of the Religious Education curriculum students explored human rights. They chose a news article, report or case that concerned a moral or legal issue and reflected on whether they saw the outcome as just. Students presented their findings. They also researched Sunni and Shia groups and the associated conflicts within these communities.