A Human Rights Lens Helps To Make Sense Of The World

Hugh Starkey is Professor of Citizenship and Human Rights Education at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, London. His most recent book (2021), co-authored with Lee Jerome, is Children’s Rights Education in Diverse Classrooms: pedagogy, principles and practice (Bloomsbury).


I am delighted that the Steve Sinnott Foundation has launched a competition to encourage children to explore human rights. I am deeply impressed at the quality of the resource the Foundation produced to support teachers wishing to engage with this project. It is called Creating Change – The World I Want to Live In and I think this is a very exciting way to approach human rights at a time when children across the world have been in the forefront of campaigning for climate justice and race equality.


I’ve been involved with human rights education over many years because I’ve found that a human rights lens helps to make sense of the world. It helps us to name both the features of our vision of a better society and manifestations of discrimination and injustice. As a teacher, I am always looking to the future. The purpose of any education is to help individuals develop knowledge and skills that they can use in society. Globalization situates us in a web of relationships that includes people who are geographically distant but with whom we can communicate easily through our smartphones.

 

The World I Want to Live In is an invitation to think about our values and what is worth living for. The challenge of Creating Change is to devise creative ways to work with others to achieve the features of the world we want to live in. Fortunately, we don’t have to start from scratch. We have texts, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child that present a vision of a better world and provide principles and guidance to help achieve it. This vision is a utopia where ‘human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want’. This inspires us to work for change.

 

This vision and these principles have universal application. Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the Commission of the United Nations that drafted the UDHR, asked: ‘Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home… they are the world of theindividual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works’.

 

This reminds us that human rights are not just an issue for those in contexts where they are severely repressed. Commitments to human rights underpin our daily lives. Building on Eleanor Roosevelt’s observation, I like to ask my students to think about various places in their communities and write against each of them human rights which may be associated with that place. Schools enable the right to education but may sometimes be associated with violence and degrading treatment; the town hall is associated with democracy; bus stops help freedom of movement; places of worship require freedom of belief; parks symbolise the right to rest and leisure; police stations, prisons and law courts must be regulated by rights to fair trial and justice; hospitals deliver rights to health. Such places exist in communities across the world and children interact with them daily. They may enjoy the facilities, but they may also experience discrimination, as children, as minorities, because of their gender or sexuality. The Foundation’s competition invites children to identify rights issues associated with their experiences of these institutions and to imagine them as more fully rights respecting.

 

The pack includes an activity examining rights in schools. It emphasises the power of stories and encourages artistic and cultural projects. Participation in the competition is fun, exciting and a contribution to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.



First published in Engage 24.

HUGH STARKEY • August 29, 2022

36 Bicycles. Countless Futures in The Gambia.

By Ann Beatty • May 20, 2026
How a simple act of practical solidarity is transforming the journey to school in The Gambia’s Central River Region North Policies have been written. Schools have been built. Yet for many children in The Gambia’s Central River Region North, access to education is still measured in kilometres, not opportunity. 

Education for Hope in Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous Times

By Laura Griffin • May 13, 2026
‘In a single hour vast tracts of shaded woodland became a jumble of torn trees and upturned soil, exposed to the glare of the summer sun. Such land-clearing events are rare, but forests exhibit remarkable resilience in the face of disaster. I’m told that the Chinese character for ‘catastrophe’ is the same as that which represents the word ‘opportunity’. And, the blowdown, while catastrophic, presented opportunities for many species.’ (Wall Kimmerer, 2003: 89). In the context of a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world (Stein, 2021) what kinds of education for hope might support children’s and young people’s critical engagement in local and global issues? In the spirit of exploring the possibilities of hope further, this short article focuses on the area of global citizenship and sustainabilityrelated education. It will briefly open by sharing commonalities across pedagogical approaches that take up the concept and act of hope more critically, and close by offering reflective questions for educators, with suggestions for further reading. Perhaps it is a kind of hope that is grounded in the present, in future reimagining(s), in ethical solidarity, and an acknowledgement of our deep entanglement with the living metabolism of planet earth 1 our singular home (UNESCO, 2021); a hope that engages with complex root causes and lived realities of multiple overlapping crises in critically reflexive and contextually relevant ways. As McCloskey notes, ‘Hope can fire our collective imagination and critical consciousness as a mainspring to activism and intervention in the world.’ (2025: 3). Commonalities across critical pedagogical approaches to hope include: Acknowledging the context of a ‘seamless single story of progress, development and human evolution’ (Andreotti, V.D.O., 2021b Relating to social and ecological justice and the wellbeing of people and planet Using participatory, action-orientated and inquiry-based learning processes Exploring diverse worldviews and perspectives Practising grounding in the present with opening up possibilities for change (relational, embodied, response-able 2 ) Experiencing ‘struggle’ in different forms (dialogical, selfreflexive, open-ended) Engaging individual and collective agency, action and activism Looking for lifelong and life-wide learning and unlearning. 1 See ‘Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness’, in Machado de Oliveira Andreotti. 2021a 2 See ‘Crossing Borders’ in 2 Depth Education “Depth Education and the Possibility of GCE Otherwise, 2021b. Source: Andreotti, V. 2021a & 2021b., Atif, A. (2025)., Bourn, D. 2021., Bryan. A. and Mochizuki,Y., 2024., Giroux, H.A. 2025., Meade, E. 2025. Whilst engaging in the concept and act of hope more critically reflect upon: What kinds of education for hope might you explore further and why? How might you provide generative spaces for engaging in diverse worldviews and perspectives? In what ways can you facilitate individual and collective agency? How might you support learners’ practice grounding in the present in order to relate differently? In what ways can you support learners in navigating complex root causes and lived realities of local and global issues? As Chief Ninawa Hini Kui affirms, ‘The future depends much less on the images we project ahead than on our capacity to repair relations and build relationships differently in the present.’ (Andreotti et al, 2023: 73. An invitation for further reading: Transformative Learning for a Sustainable Future . d’Abreu, C., Belgeonne, C., Bourn, D. and Hatley, J. (2025) ‘Transformative Learning for a Sustainable Future’. DERC Research Paper 24. London: UCL Institute of Education. Hospicing Modernity: facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism. Machado de Oliveira Andreotti, V. (2021a) ‘Hospicing Modernity: facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism’ , London: Penguin Random House. Development Education and Hope . McCloskey, S. (2025). (ed) ‘Development Education and Hope’. ‘Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review’ , Vol. 41, Autumn. Centre for Global Education, Belfast. Link to and download the full reference list here

I heard it said today by a friend that “You learn a language best when you use it to speak and write about things that are important to you. ”

By Susan Piper • May 6, 2026
This summed up to me about why I volunteer for the Hands Up Project. HUP is a charity trust which, through its network of volunteers, connects children around the world with young people in Palestine. By means of online interaction, drama and storytelling activities, it enables the use of creativity and selfexpression to promote mutual understanding, personal growth, and the development of English language skills. I joined HUP in 2020 during COVID. After going to Palestine in 2017, I wanted to get more involved in working with Palestinian children in schools. HUP gave me the opportunity to link up with schools in the West Bank and Gaza. Every week I’d tell them stories from all over the world, then we’d discuss it, play games and I’d get them to retell it. Sometimes we would work from their coursebook English for Palestine’ in mutual team teaching sessions with their teacher. The simple act of telling a story became much more than entertainment. It became connection, healing, and a bridge to the world beyond their immediate reality to help them improve their language skills, and to give them a platform to speak about their lives in a language that connects them to people everywhere. I loved it, every week, seeing their smiling faces on the screen and building long lasting friendships with their teachers. I even went to Gaza in 2023 and met some of the kids I’d only seen on Zoom. It was a beautiful experience and something I will never forget. As hostilities escalated, I lost contact with everyone. I thought about where the kids were and what had happened to them. As I watched schools being bombed, universities flattened, and people killed in their thousands, I thought about where the kids I’d met were and what was happening to them. I kept in contact with many of the teachers I knew and heard daily news of displacement, destruction, hunger and bombing. Recently, I’ve started to link up again with children in Gaza, and it feels wonderful to be back helping them learn after being denied an education for over two years. Connecting with children in Palestine is more than just words. When a child in Palestine confidently tells their story to someone on the other side of the world, bridges are built, empathy grows, and the world gains a fuller picture of childhood in contexts far from peace and privilege. My work with these children is rooted in the belief that education and voice are inseparable. Through storytelling and English language learning, I witness children not just learning new vocabulary, but reclaiming their narratives, believing in their potential, and finding human connection in a world they perceive has abandoned them. And more than anything, this work reminds us all that children — everywhere — deserve to learn, to speak, and to be heard. Links to HUP information, books and resources: The Hands Up Project BY SUSAN PIPER Susan Piper is currently an ESOL teacher in Oldham, Greater Manchester and has worked in education for over 30 years. She is also a volunteer for the Hands Up Project and is the International Solidarity Officer and President of her NEU district. She believes in quality education for all and aims to make her lessons creative and inclusive so that effective language learning can take place.