Introduction to a Roundtable on Teaching Human Rights History

Abstract

When participants in the Revisiting Human Rights workshop gathered at the London, Ontario campus of King’s University College in early May 2022, the atmosphere felt celebratory. For many of us, it was our first in-person conference since before the COVID-19 pandemic. But the workshop was also a celebration of the growth of human rights history as an academic field of inquiry and instruction. This growth is reflected in the newly launched Human Rights Studies program at King’s, where the workshop was held. This new co-disciplinary program was conceived to combine historical-political studies of human rights with philosophical-ethical and literary-cultural perspectives. In Ontario alone, ten universities now feature some form of interdisciplinary human rights program, with varying levels of historical content and expertise. In addition to these programs, an increasing number of history departments across Ontario now include faculty who research, publish, and teach on human rights. Despite this remarkable growth, the literature on teaching human rights history and the pedagogical networks between educators in the field are underdeveloped. Publications and online resources on Human Rights Education (HRE) tend to be geared toward primary and secondary education as opposed to university-level teaching or programming (Cargas and Mitoma 2019, 276). Given the focus of HRE on individual empowerment in the present and change in the future, its historical component has at times been minimized or relegated to mere background status. As a result, some human rights educators consider history to be an “optional” element of HRE (Mihr 2015, 537–40). Nonetheless, recent efforts to develop a critical pedagogy of human rights in higher education have acknowledged the important roles that historical approaches and content can play in critiquing and improving the modern human rights regime (Kingston 2018; Cargas 2019). Some publications have focused more specifically on the pedagogy of human rights history: a team of German and American educators have outlined an approach that seeks to integrate history learning and HRE in secondary, postsecondary, and public settings (Lücke et al. 2016); and The Routledge History of Human Rights concludes with a chapter on teaching human rights history in an American undergraduate classroom (Frazier 2019). Seeking to add to this emerging literature on the pedagogy of human rights history in a higher education context, this roundtable discussion offers a Canadian perspective. As part of the Revisiting Human Rights workshop, the Roundtable on Teaching Human