To Örebro University

Children’s entitlement to education about their human rights is affirmed by various United Nations treaties and emphasised in scholarly literature. However, the field of rights education for children is hindered by fragmented research and inconsistent terminology, resulting in conceptual confusion that obstructs the development of effective rights education practices. This article tackles these challenges by presenting an innovative theory of Children’s Human Rights Education (CHRE) along with a systemic model. By integrating principles from children’s rights, human rights education, and insights into educational processes, the CHRE theory presents a systemic framework that consists of six interconnected components: aims, ends-in-view, the learner, the educator, content and educational processes. This article outlines the development process and interdisciplinary foundations of the CHRE theory and presents a visual systemic model along with a detailed explanation of each of its six components. The conclusion assesses the theory’s contributions, emphasising its potential to promote conceptual clarity for scholars and practitioners, fostering a more comprehensive and impactful approach to CHRE. The theory also holds the potential to identify research gaps and point to several new research paths, ultimately enhancing the effectiveness of CHRE in supporting children to learn about, through and for their human rights.

Children's right to express their views under article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is commonly referred to as 'participation'. How this term is used in scholarship, policy and practice, however, varies enormously across linguistic and national contexts. This article reports and discusses four complexities associated with translating and comparing the term participation that were identified from a series of international workshops on children's rights in education. We conclude that further empirical, interdisciplinary research is required to examine these complexities in further depth.

The article examines Swedish early childhood education teachers’ conceptions of children’s rights and their understanding of the role and assignment of early childhood education in relation to rights. The study also investigates how understandings have changed over time as teachers were interviewed in two different rounds ten years apart. Four conceptions of what children’s rights entail in early childhood education were identified: children should be respected, children are entitled to feel safe, learning is a right, and rights for children need to be adapted. Each of these centres a specific right or rights aspect, in turn pointing out a particular task for early childhood education. The four rights conceptions appear at both interview times; however, a higher proportion of the teachers express them in the second round of interviews, and the reasoning around the notions is more elaborated at this point. The findings consequently indicate a high stability over time in early childhood teachers’ basic understanding of children’s rights and what the role of education is. At the same time, teachers’ awareness and knowledge of children’s rights have evidently increased over time.

This chapter examines the role of curriculum in the realisation of human rights education (HRE) in formal schooling. Drawing on text analysis of the Swedish national curricula, the extent to which distinct goals and subject content can be found is presented. The analysis focuses on the HRE elements knowledge, values and action capacity, and whether the curricula promote or obstruct the realisation of these. The findings show that the curricula contain direction for all three elements, and accordingly promote a full HRE in a general sense. However, troublesome differences between the formulation of goals and content for knowledge on the one hand, and for values and action capacity on the other, are found. These differences concern level of concretion and progression, achievement requirement and clear identification of responsibility for HRE. The Swedish curricula thereby promote a HRE that leans towards the knowledge element and obstruct education aiming towards development of values and action capacity.

There is strong support for educating children and young people about their human rights, but there is also widespread uncertainty about what this education should consist of-what the content of children's human rights education should be. This article maps and synthesizes what previous research has identified as the main content areas and suggests a terminology for talking about content in education about, through and for rights. Drawing on two theoretical perspectives on educational content-the powerful knowledge approach and Didaktik theory-a vocabulary for identifying different kinds of content was generated and used to analyze intended, enacted or suggested content displayed in earlier research. The findings show that high attention is paid to content in education about rights, which is demonstrated in almost all publications in a well-elaborated and detailed manner. In contrast, content in education through rights is found to be little addressed and elaborated in the analyzed research. Meagre elaboration is also the case for content in education for rights, although this is displayed in a higher number of publications. Content themes for education about, through and for rights are identified and described, and these are suggested to serve as a basis for further research.