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The Sustainable Development Goals promoted by United Nations (UN) advocate that education is a fundamental right for human beings, and free universal primary education should be accessible to all regardless of gender or country of origin. Education on human rights aims to provide information on fundamental rights, equality and being non-discriminatory in nature by having its universal appeal. Learners should be exposed to human rights education and to relate it to their cultural context and build on real-life experience. Students should be encouraged to foster participation in creating a learning environment free from fear and upholds empowerment and human rights values. Universities and faculty members play a vital role in imparting education that helps build a strong foundation of society where people are respected and treated equally and gets equal opportunity for upward social mobility while protecting the dignity of such rights. This book addresses the role of education to uplift people out of poverty and oppression by imparting social justice education at the institution and the community level. Chapters are dedicated to human rights education which talks about fostering a sense of awareness among learners about the dignity of human life through various interventional programs. Such rights are discussed with respect to migrant workers, foster youth and prisoners in different countries and how students from all levels can benefit from such education.

Human rights education (HRE) is a professional field and a developing curricular movement that combines work in human rights and education. A variety of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) endorse teaching human rights, an increasing number of national governments incorporate human rights content in formal school curriculum, and many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) throughout the world train teachers, produce teaching manuals, and advocate for HRE in schools. While the movement dates back at least to the 1970s, in 1995 the United Nations initiated a Decade for Human Rights Education and formally defined HRE as “training, dissemination, and information efforts aimed at the building of a universal culture of human rights through the imparting of knowledge and skills and the moulding of attitudes” (United Nations, 1998, p. 3).

Education is a fundamental right that can lift people out of poverty, empower women, safeguard children from exploitative labor and promote democracy. In this sense, the right to education, which is recognized in several treaties, cannot be separated from the right to an education in human rights. The latter is crucial to the realization of human rights and contributes significantly to achieving equality, tolerance and respect for the dignity of others. Plus, through education in human rights, people would also not become more sympathetic about our differences, but they would also be empowered to demand and exercise their own rights, which will certainly contribute to their observance and implementation. This introductory chapter will explore why education in human rights is one of the most powerful tools to prevent atrocities and to guarantee every person a dignified life. Consequently, it will also argue that it is vital to integrate human rights education into the curriculum and classroom. Furthermore, this chapter will consider the right to receive this kind of education and the State’s obligation to guarantee it. Finally, it will analyze the best ways to teach human rights in higher education through active learning (simulations, discussions, role-play and moot courts).

There has been a lack of human rights education for a long period since New China was founded. Human rights education appeared at the university level in the 1990s, and has developed quickly over the past decade in mainland China. The purpose of this paper is to argue that human rights education in mainland China has had its own characteristics and problems during its development, and intends to identify and solve its problems in order to achieve sustainability.

First, this paper surveys the development of human rights education in mainland China. Second, it summarizes its characteristics and problems objectively, and then gives some ideas and suggestions for its future sustainable development.

Human rights education in mainland China has seen great improvement, although it also has its own characteristics and has had problems during its development. The ideas about and approaches to human rights education development in mainland China should be adjusted. Ensuring and promoting the respect of human rights in society is the main goal of human rights education. Balanced development, independent development, the encouragement of and investment by the government and society in the subject and the high quantity and quality of available human rights teachers are the guarantees for a sustainable model of human rights education in mainland China.

This paper studies the history and current situation of human rights education in mainland China, summarizing its characteristics and existing problems completely and objectively. This paper states that human rights education in mainland China should change its theories and its approaches to development.

The global Clinical Legal Education (CLE) movement transcends borders as law teachers worldwide try to inculcate law students and future legal practitioners with social justice values. One method of achieving this is through developing reflective practitioners. Kolb, finding common ground in the work of Lewin, Dewey, and Piaget, formulated the four stages in the experiential development of concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experiment. Although Kolb’s model is used in legal education literature, students may not be provided with the relevant conceptual tools required to engage in reflective practice. This often results in students providing subjective analysis of their work, which fails to fully contribute to their educational experience. One of the reasons for omitting analytical tools is that reflective practice suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity. According to Kinsella, the “concept remains elusive, is open to multiple interpretations, and is applied in a myriad of ways in educational and practice environments”. A further issue hindering reflective practice relates to Donald Schön’s critique of the positivist approach adopted by law schools.

This chapter will apply a human rights framework to CLE to develop reflective practitioners. The two main reasons for this are, first, human rights as formulated by the Universal Declaration on Human Rights are universal, interrelated, and indivisible and, second, reflection based on these universal human rights values will benefit cross-jurisdictional societies in assisting vulnerable clients affected by emerging implied and direct human rights challenges.

From labor conditions to public health and environmental justice, globalization has created an increasingly complex web of issues surrounding human rights. Research in social studies education points to adolescents’ intrinsic curiosity when engaged in these multiple issues, as well as their idealistic thirst for involving themselves in social progress campaigns. Many students desire involvement and believe in the importance of human rights education within the formal educational setting, especially within social studies curriculum. We report the findings from a qualitative study conducted during a two-week intensive summer institute on human rights and genocide studies in western New York in the summer of 2011. In our study, we found while student participants felt empowered by the institute and their desire to take action was heightened during the experience, they questioned the disconnect between the genocide and human rights education in the Institute and the human rights education they experienced in their social studies classrooms. In comparing the two, they wished there were more authentic learning experiences and a higher level of academic rigor in their social studies classes. Although the New York State curricula, at the time of the study, included human rights education related topics, the interviewed student participants did not recognize its presence and felt human rights education is not a prevalent part of the enacted public school curriculum.

This paper aims to report findings of a service evaluation using a human rights-based approach in the training and education of staff in palliative settings.

A non-randomly sampled, uncontrolled, pre- and post-test design. Data was collected at three points over a six-month period during the period April 2017 to September 2019. As a service evaluation no ethical approval was required. Consent was implied by self-completion and submission of questionnaires. In total, 1,402 people attended the training, 480 completed pre- and post-training questionnaires (146 completed the questionnaire at six months), with 86 completing a questionnaire at all three data collection points.

Findings show increased levels of self-reported knowledge and confidence at two weeks and six months post-training. Implementing human rights in the workplace is complex. Difficulties maintaining knowledge and keeping up to date with changes in legislation and traditional ways of working were cited as barriers to service users’ human rights.

More evaluation is required to ensure the positive elements in this evaluation can be applied more widely.

Human rights education has a contribution to make in supporting staff to manage the challenges involved. It may also increase the complexity of decision-making. Training needs to incorporate systems wide approaches and its benefits measured.

The aim was to provide staff with the knowledge to make objective and proportionate decisions about personalised care. The assumption was this would help improve the experience of end of life care.

This is the first evaluation in the UK that we are aware of that has examined the impact of human rights education on end of life care.

This practitioner article uses human rights education (HRE) to frame issues of social justice, particularly anti-Black racism, depicted in the film Till. Teachers cognizant of the need to address racism in American history often struggle to find resources that are accessible and meaningful for their students (Howard and Navarro, 2017; Vickery and Rodriguez, 2022). Furthermore, the use of film in social studies instruction can be an engaging way for students to develop conceptual knowledge and grapple with sensitive issues in history education (Stoddard, 2012).

Till (2022) is a powerful film that teachers can use to pursue anti-racist goals in their classrooms, and HRE provides an approach to analyze a horrible manifestation of racism in American history as well as frame larger systems of injustice. By using widely accepted standards of human dignity, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, teachers can address dimensions of oppression and inequality with a more “neutral” or objective approach.

Given the current political climate that instills fear in educators who teach about racism, HRE can empower social studies teachers to engage students in analysis of a dominant force in American life.

The lesson plan offered in this article includes a film viewing guide, enrichment opportunities and an activity that connects themes in Till and the Civil Rights Movement to human rights concepts.

This chapter will now focus on humanity’s response to the seismic contextual changes brought about by globalization at the cusp of the twenty-first century. The signature feature of this response is an enrollment explosion. Other features are four driving policyscapes (that aligned to capabilities theory, neo-liberal economics, the Creed of Human Rights, and social justice), education for sustainable development, managerialism, decentralization, Global, Citizenship Education, Multicultural and Intercultural education, Multilingualism and the rising importance of English as international lingua franca, Human Rights Education, from STEM to STEAM education and a reappreciation of the social sciences and the humanities, the divergent calls for relevance, new ways of production and packaging of knowledge, a shift from teaching to learning, new learning theories, and the rise of international testing regimes. In many ways, these responses are incomplete and still searching for the perfect fit in each context. It is in this regard where the value of Comparative and International Education comes to the fore.

Comparative education has typically focused on differences across countries and sought to explain these differences as a function of differences in historical legacies, in societal prerequisites (as in variants of functionalist analysis), or in internal patterns of competition and conflict across social classes and status groups. In these studies the independent and the dependent variables of interest are endogenous characteristics of national societies. The latter are presumed to operate mostly as “closed systems” with their past trajectories (think path dependencies) and their present states (think present system needs or current power configurations) shaping the educational outcomes of interest. These endogenous characteristics may depict properties of the economy, e.g. degree of industrialization, the polity, e.g. democratic versus authoritarian regimes, the culture, e.g. Confucian group centric versus Protestant individual oriented, etc. or the educational system itself, centralized versus decentralized. The latter, of course, may be viewed both as a dependent variable influenced by the degree to which the polity is centralized or decentralized as well as an independent variable, influencing the growth of enrollments. In the classical Collins (1979) formulation the comparatively greater growth of post-primary enrollments in the United States was an outcome of status competition which itself was made more likely by a decentralized educational system. The latter in turn reflected and was shaped by a decentralized political system.