Enhancing History Teaching Through a Human Rights Perspective

Abstract

Education for human rights has been identified as a requirement for all children in Europe (Starkey, 1991). In Britain the cross-curricular theme of Education for Citizenship was a means of introducing such issues but its absence from the recent Dearing review indicates that citizenship education may become marginalised. Some opportunities are provided within the history curriculum, but these are not obvious to the inexperienced teacher. In Holland, however, the new history curriculum has issues of citizenship and human rights as central and the teacher is required to make links between past and present. This article describes the author's work within an Erasmus curriculum development project, Education for Citizenship in the New Europe: Teaching about democracy, human rights, social justice and global responsibility, with student teachers in both Holland and the UK. It describes the responses of students to an active learning approach where they were required to examine their understanding of citizenship...