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CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND HUMAN
RIGHTS EDUCATION
Valerie Miller, August 12, 2002
What a wonderful conversation! Thank you Abraham and everyone
else. Your paper and the subsequent comments by others make
me think of a quote by the
Chilean poet Pablo Neruda that has always inspired me.
"If we want the darkness to flower, if we want to
establish lands of dignity and integrity,
lands where people can live in light and justice, then
our guiding stars must be struggle and hope."
Pablo Neruda, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
The struggle around human rights education that everyone here
seems engaged in gives me new energy. I want to add a few comments
from my own work and
that of colleagues -- some are very practical and others more
theoretical. I come to this conversation as a human rights activist,
popular educator, and
researcher from the United States. My sense of stubborn hope
usually tempers my fears about the planet's growing inequities
and hatreds, although lately a
sense of urgency overwhelms me especially in light of the current
world situation and the responses of the Bush administration.
Engaging with you
helps me reconnect with those guiding stars of Neruda and their
potential light. So thank you.
My work comes out of a variety of educational and political
experiences - from liberal democracies to dictatorships to revolutions
-- from the formal
system of teaching at primary, high school, and university levels
to the informal or community level working with NGOs and grassroots
groups around
the world focused on economic and social justice. My involvement
in human rights education began more than 25 years ago trying
to educate and mobilize
the U.S. public around our government's role in human rights
violations in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Argentina,
and Uruguay. Those
concerns expanded over the years to other countries and to work
on gender, literacy, women's rights and child poverty.
Where to enter the conversation? My experience with human rights
education has not always revealed the direct link to a critical
or empowering pedagogy
that Abraham describes. In that sense, I agree with the questions
that Chris Cavanagh raises. A vision of critical empowerment
and pedagogy is one I
aspire to but in practice I have seen something else. I think
it is important to clarify these differences, understand the
background and various
streams that encompass human rights education and see where
our experiences differ and converge and what insights we draw
as a result.
As a way to begin let me focus on my own human rights education
experience starting in the 70s in international solidarity work
and later in
anti-poverty and women's rights efforts. In those areas at that
time, much of what was defined as human rights education was
shaped principally by lawyers.
(This still holds true today in many situations although it
is changing with the new vision of rights-based development,
the expanding focus on economic,
cultural and social rights and the entry of new actors into
the field of human rights education.) Because lawyers and policy
experts knew the
intricacies of the legal system, donors often provided them
with considerable funds to do education and capacity-building
programs in the field of human
rights. These lawyers and advocates were (and are) courageous
committed professionals trying to address the terrible human
rights conditions in their
countries. Their work usually focused on the most egregious
state violations related to assassination, torture, political
imprisonment, and rape.
Occasionally people with adult education or popular education
experience became involved in these efforts but without the
same clout, except perhaps
in peace education and some activist church circles and women's
organizing initiatives. Not surprisingly, on a practical or
methodological level, this
often led to a focus on the law and a formal discussion of rights
as the entry point to human rights education using traditional
formal
teacher-centered education methods.
As adult/popular educators and community development organizers
and activists slowly joined the field, another entry point was
identified -- one that began
with people's own experience and their identification of a common
problem - learner-centered, as some educators call it. Rather
than start with the law
or rights per se which were very abstract, it was found to be
much more effective to start with people's felt needs or concerns
- a basic principle of
community development and adult education. Through dialogue
around a specific problem, people eventually moved to a discussion
and analysis of
rights and the law and, in some cases, to action. Popular educators,
influenced by people like Paulo Freire, Antonio Gramsci and
Adam Curle, added
the emphasis on power, organizing and critical consciousness
that inspired Giroux and others. Later on women's movements
and thinking on gender and
power further deepened the analysis (although not always the
practice). Educators and rights activists such as Dian marino,
Malena de Montis, Lisa
VeneKlasen, John Gaventa, Naila Kabeer, Srilatha Batliwala and
Marge Schuler engaged and challenged educational and political
theories, working to make
practice more creative, critical and useful to social movements,
and catalyzing new thinking from those experiences. They looked
at visible and
invisible mechanisms of power as well as its intimate, personal
and public dimensions and interactions.
As suggested by others, I too have found that human rights
education often has been divorced from building social movements
and also devoid of a
comprehensive analysis of power. This has weakened its ability
to contribute to effective long-term social transformation that
benefits the poor and
marginalized and changes power relations. However, this conversation
leads me to believe that there is more critical thinking going
on about these
concerns than I was aware of -- which is encouraging. Yet most
efforts I have seen tend to be focused on understanding and
changing visible structures
and practices of power without a full appreciation of how power
operates invisibly to deny people their rights or how it can
operate positively to
enhance people's ability to defend and advance their rights.
In my experience, one of our greatest challenges, as activists,
educators, donors and researchers, is how to develop comprehensive
education and change
strategies that more effectively incorporate our knowledge and
experience of these interrelated dynamics and disciplines. How
to build bridges between
the different theoretical and practical streams of rights, development,
peace, law, politics, power, gender, adult education, and movement
building.
As my colleague, Lisa VeneKlasen says, if we hope to promote
real transformation, how do we go beyond the boxes. My concern
is that through
our own disciplines and backgrounds, whether activists, academics
or donors, we have tended to keep ourselves in those boxes.
How do we learn from one
another and challenge one another to think and act more critically
drawing from our contradictions, questions, synergies and lessons?
This discussion certainly offers that space to question and
learn and break out of our boxes so let me stop here so that
others can continue the
conversation.
Valerie Miller
Just Associates
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