“Human rights pedagogy means that we are all responsible for injustice and we all have a role to combat it daily — in both small and substantial ways. The creation of a human rights pedagogy, based on interwoven liberation, requires a transformation of the classroom space beyond the four walls in a room to analyze and think about injustice in all forms” (Falcón & Jacob, 2011, p. 31). 

So begins an important and provocative article in this fall’s Partnerships: A Journal of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement. As the piece proceeds UC-Berkeley’s Julie Shackford-Bradley – whose work in restorative justice has included community involvement in California, Northern Uganda, and elsewhere – makes the case for integrating human rights and service-learning in the United States.

Shackford-Bradley writes, “My contention is that, while human rights is often framed as a top-down, legalistic approach to solving problems at the local level, in practice, it works through a local/global dialectic, where people in local communities and students working with them can tap into an international network of principles, knowledge and discourse, and strategies for activism within their own local or national contexts” (p. 138).

Writing of students participating in service-learning courses, she says, “When students experience the incapacity of organizations to address the larger issues, but do not know how to contextualize this experience, they often end up blaming the organizations themselves,  the poorly paid people who work at the organization, or worse yet, the people who access its services. Such experiences can be ‘miseducative’ (Bringle & Hatcher, 1999, p. 114), in the sense that they can reinforce negative stereotypes and push people away from public service in general. Fortunately, these problems can be partially or even mostly alleviated when the service experience is analyzed through ‘critical service-learning’ or engaged scholarship paradigms” (p. 142).

Quoting Australian rights scholar Jim Ife, Shackford-Bradley directs us to consider the ways in which community activism intersects with rights discourse, “Rights thus require a society where people are drawn together by mutual obligations… recognizing each other’s rights and the responsibilities they entail and working for their collective benefit; and that is not a bad definition of ‘community'” (Ife, 2003, p. 6) (p. 144).

Shackford-Bradley, as she works through human rights and critical service-learning as areas of theory and practice, also shares some of her own pedagogical techniques to advance student understanding of rights in local and distant contexts. She sees a parallel between developing Mitchell’s “authentic communication” to support critical service-learning and Ife’s human rights skills of “facilitation, education, communication, consciousness raising, building solidarity, inclusiveness and activism” (p. 151).

Integrating engaged scholarship with human rights education results in “a holistic learning experience that aligns with the overall mission of human rights pedagogy, which integrates the following: development of understanding, empathy and tolerance for difference; values clarification (critical exploration of values and their articulation in contemporary society); knowledge acquisition of the “substantive provisions of the UDHR and other human rights instruments [and] promotion of attitudes of solidarity through which information, strategies and tools for advocacy and change are shared among communities” (Meintjes, 1997, pp. 69 – 70) (p. 158).

As Shackford-Bradley closes she writes, “Peeling back the historical layers, it becomes clear that these two movements are intertwined on multiple levels …. Both fields are also met with some skepticism because of their openly political perspectives, even as they are based on principles that few people would reject on moral grounds at least. It is thus in their interests to be mutually supportive, beyond exclusive disciplinary enclaves” (p. 159).

This is a small representation of some of the provocative arguments and insights contained in the article, which is available in full and for free here. In short, I recommend it.

– Eric Hartman 

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Eric Hartman is Co-founder and Editor of criticalservicelearning.org. He recently received the Early Career Research Award from the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement. He was also awarded the 4 under 40 Impact Prize from the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, recognizing his work developing evidence-based curricula to advance global citizenship and for his leadership as Executive Director of Amizade Global Service-Learning from 2007-10. He is a Visiting Professor of Global Studies at Providence College.