Newsletter Spring 2009 - Earli

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Newsletter from EARLI SIG 13 Moral and Democratic Education – Issue # 3EARLI 2009 CONFERENCErights. Human rights education is a part of education guaranteed by the right to education(see article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Education shall be directedto the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect forhuman rights and fundamental freedoms.”). Through human rights education studentsare empowered to claim their own rights, to respect the rights of the others and to claimin solidarity the rights of others. Human rights education can contribute to the teachingof science by reflecting on the goals and limits of science, discussing the right to freedomof opinion and expression as constituent for scientific discourse, and discovering therelevance of scientific progress for the furthering of the implementation of human rights.Secondly, these examples give an understanding of the reciprocal benefits for differentsubject matter and for human rights education. They are an example of moral and democraticeducation within the teaching of language, mathematics, and science that goesbeyond teaching mere subject matter. In this way, moral and democratic education willnot be misunderstood as an isolated subject which can be taught, learned, and tested andwhich will then be followed by another subject. Instead, it will be recognized as an aspectwhich accompanies the process of learning beyond the boundaries of individual subjects.It will play the role of a leitmotif for teaching of subject matter. Human rights educationleads to positive results when students learn about human rights in a learning environmentthat models human rights.Thirdly, the discussion of this way of teaching subject matter beyond mere language,mathematics, and science leads to the discovery that the inclusion of human rights educationin subject matter teaching corresponds more authentically to its own idea and goals.In this case, human rights education has its starting point in the content of the teaching oflanguage, mathematics, or science. Therefore it takes very seriously one of the principlesof human rights education, namely, to start in the concrete context of its addressees andfrom the perspective of their real-life experience. It begins in the middle of the context ofthe students, in their context of learning language, mathematics, or science. Human rightseducation will thus find a way, thanks to these content-based links between subject matterand moral and democratic issues, to introduce not only the knowledge about humanrights, but also attitudes, values, and responsibility alongside learning different subjectmatters.36
Newsletter from EARLI SIG 13 Moral and Democratic Education – Issue # 3EARLI 2009 CONFERENCETitle of the Future& Vision Session:Authors:Affiliations:New Trends in Morality, Learning and Moral EducationCees Klaassen* & Jean-Luc Patry*** Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands** University of Salzburg, AustriaABSTRACTIn the first Future & Vision symposium of SIG 13 a discussion will be held about theimportance of morality in education, the relation between moral values and authenticlearning and the importance of moral education. In this conference for practical reasonswe concentrate ourselves on the moral domain and in the next conference we will dealwith the other related domain of this SIG, the domain of democratic education.After the presentation of the above mentioned paper a panel-discussion will be heldand an open discussion with the members of this session about the new pathways inour research field. Aim of this discussion is to explore the different ways teachers copewith moral values in educational practice. Special attention will be paid to the differentmotives and reflections teachers bring forward for their daily actions in this respect. In thepaper the question is discussed why it is necessary and fruitful for educational practice toresearch the moral values that are embedded in the educational goals, the pedagogical orreligious mission of the school, the learning process, the subject content, the interactionsand the school as a communityThe paper ends with a series of questions that are important as topics for future research.EXTENDED SUMMARYIn the present paper we aim at a discussion of morality in education and at the importanceof moral education. This is one of the two domains of the SIG 13. The other half, democraticeducation, is closely related with it, but will be dealt with in the next EARLI convention.Although morality and moral education are topics whose importance is acknowledgedamong all people involved in education, relatively little is being done in this regard inpractical teaching. For this there may be several reasons:• Teachers claim that they have not enough time to deal with these issues because they• have to satisfy the curriculum, which is increasing in size and depth of the subject• matter to be taught.• They claim that they do not want to interfere with the parents values systems that might• be different from their own and in any case differ from family to family under• postmodern influences so that it is impossible to satisfy the needs of all parents and their• children simultaneously.• They often also claim that everyone should have his or her own values and that it is not• justified to try to change these values (relativistic position).• Further, they say that they think it very difficult to teach about values and do not have37
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Newsletter Spring 2009 - Earli

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