Abstract:

Education should support the development of agency and empowerment of youth so they are able to fully thrive in life. The right to education for all children is acknowledged in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) (1989) as well as regionally through complementary documents such as the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (1999). Additionally, expressed within these documents is the right for children to learn about their rights. However, throughout the world child rights education is lacking, especially within the classroom context, with the result that few children are formally educated about their rights. We posit that child rights education should be implemented universally, but that it must intentionally and meaningfully respond and adapt to specific contexts to best support the empowerment of youth. In response, our 5-year (2022-2027) project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada - involving a total of 20 schools, 40 teachers, NGOs, parents, community members, and over 2000 children in three locations in Uganda, and one in Canada - engages a decolonizing, participatory, action research methodology committed to learning about and responding to the diverse cultural, economic, geographical, linguistic, political, and ecological realities, needs, and societal goals of communities, and congruently supports the children’s understanding and exercising of their rights within their own community contexts. Cognizant that colonial, neoliberal knowledge and 'progress' narratives within educational contexts have privileged particular kinds of power, knowledge, and conceptions of progress and success based in the Global North and undervalued and even undermined knowledge, culture and experiences from the Global South, we argue that dialogic, participatory processes that involve children and their communities are needed to support and realize quality, meaningful rights-based education. Through our project, teachers from the different sites exchange ideas and experiences with each other about child-rights based issues within the communities in which they live and work, ways in which child rights education can support the development of agency and empowerment of the children they work with, how local knowledge can inform the teaching of child rights, ways in which local resources can be adapted to create educational opportunities and materials to support the teaching of child rights, how dialogue between schools, parents, and community members can support the promotion and realization of child rights in their communities, and how to overcome challenges associated with implementing child rights education, This paper will communicate early findings from educators in the Ugandan and Canadian contexts pertaining to opportunities and challenges with respect to developing and implementing child rights education in their diverse contexts taking into consideration factors such as: formal curriculum; available resources; class size and composition; and responsiveness of parents and communities to child rights education. We will also discuss how global partnerships can facilitate meaningful dialogue to improve and inform our understanding of foundational, universal principles and criteria for quality child rights education to better consolidate the original aspirations of the UNCRC and support children’s agency and empowerment throughout the world.

Keywords:

Child rights education, participatory action research, Uganda, Canada.