Developing Human Rights Didactics for Young Children in Teacher Education

Abstract

What is Human Rights Didactics in preschool and early years of primary school? What kind of content and what kind of processes should be in focus? How can student teachers learn about and develop Human Rights Didactics? The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (abbreviated CRC) was adopted by UN twenty years ago and although Sweden already in 1990 started to implement CRC in pre-school and school, it is still an ongoing process. The implementation is a matter for all higher education, especially for professions like teacher education (Hägglund & Thelander, 2003). Taking a self study approach (Loughran et al., 2004) from my own practice as a teacher educator as well as examples from my research as the point of departure the aim of this paper is to reflect on how student teachers learn and develop human rights didactics through CRC. Three different ways to implement CRC will be presented and discussed. The first ex-ample is a group work assignment where student teachers study CRC and develop didactic suggestions for content in preschool and school. The second example presents a mentoring scheme where student teachers encounter a child on a one-to-one basis. The third example is an assignment where student teachers in an essay present a study of children’s perspectives on specific subjects within the area of Social Sciences subjects.