Safe Spaces Human Rights Education in Diverse Contexts

CORNELIA ROUX
important, because our interaction in the present will define powerful
implications for the future. The argument exposed the conflict between different
stances of rights and practices. It triggered the idea to explore within school
environments the level of conflict between some traditional practices and the
internalization of social justice and human rights education in schools and
curricula. Secondly, a need was identified to explore further the notion whether
research can contribute to establishing sustainable societal clusters that will work
towards the enhancement of respect for the individual rights of girls in a
communal society, where cultural and religious traditions are possibly not being
questioned.
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HUMAN RIGHTS AND NARRATIVE ENQUIRY
The research draws on two main notions of enquiry: human rights from a moral
perspective and narrative enquiry as methodology.
In the book Human Rights and Narrated Lives – The ethics of recognitions,
Schaffer and Smith (2004) explained that human rights have become an
integral part of the moral vocabulary of governments and policies of
democratic political structures. In this regard one should question the
willpower of multi-cultural democratic governments to impose legislation on
their communities with powerful traditional cultural practices and religious
rituals. Dunne and Wheeler (1999:7), on the other hand, regard human rights as
a “matter of opinion, where one community’s story can oppose the other’s
story.” In oral cultural traditions, storytelling and narratives have been a
primary mode of passing on knowledge about culture and religions. Booth
(1999:7) states that it is the “exclusivity of cultures on the grounds that (it)
privileges traditional values at the expensive of emancipatory ones” and I argue
that human rights education in diverse cultural and religious environments
brings the complexity of learners’ voices and factors of their social contexts
into classrooms (Donald, Lazarus & Lolowana, 2002). Learners’ narratives and
perceptions must give rise to similar or different understandings as held by
teachers, parents, their guardians and policy makers.
Narratives have been used in social sciences to connect events into a whole, so
that the significance of each event can be understood through its relationship to that
whole (Abbott 2002; Elliot 2006; Hutto, 2007; Andrews, Squire & Tamboukou,
2008). Narratives can also be defined as discourses with a sequential order which
provide a connection of events in meaningful ways. Narratives also offer insights
into the world and/or people’s experiences. I argue that there is a true and authentic
voice through which the team could gain access to understand the epistemology,
processes and reasons with results where experiences, fear, judgments and an
appreciation for circumstances can be communicated (Elliot, 2006:9; Andrews,
et.al., 2008). We took the view that sociological insights can be gained from the
narratives and can also elaborate on the social context in which these stories were
produced and reflect on the processes involved (Elliot, 2006:39; Song, 1998:104).
In reading and analyzing the narratives, we adopted the approach that the social