Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review (Oct 2017)
‘They Should be Grateful to God’: Challenging Children’s Pre-Conceptions of the Global South through Human Rights Education
Abstract
This article proposes the value of using human rights as a foundation for exploring development issues in the classroom. The article draws on research exploring children’s engagement with issues of global justice. The research was conducted with seven to nine year olds in three school settings in the Dublin area. The research explored children’s responses to photographs set in different global contexts and to the concepts of money, fairness, decision making and the environment. The findings highlight a tendency amongst the participant children to characterise poverty as extreme deprivation, to marry their understandings of poverty and of developing countries so that one is synonymous with the other and to perceive the relationship between Ireland and developing countries principally in charitable terms. The findings further indicate that, for some children, there was an expectation that people living in developing countries should show gratitude where they have basic facilities, perceiving these facilities as exceptional in developing contexts. Human Rights Education (HRE) provides a basis from which to address these problematic assumptions and perspectives. Promoting universal entitlement to civil, political, cultural, social as well as economic rights, it provides a premise against which these preconceptions can be challenged. This article proposes that HRE might be used to re-orientate children’s conceptualisations of ‘developing countries’, advancing perspectives rooted in solidarity and universalism.
