Josh Cass, FoRB in Education Case Studies
Freedom of Religion or Belief has been articulated and protected as a human right, first within the Universal Declaration and latterly through a range of international instruments and national legislation. With the emergence of Human Rights Education as a distinct mode of education, the papers in this series taken together make the case that FoRB Education must be considered and understood within HRE frameworks.
In doing so, two modes of understanding HRE were presented: the Compass triad and Felisia Tibbetts’ three models of HRE. Central to the Compass approach, as developed by the Council of Europe, was the development of the ‘learning about / through / for’ HRE triad. Tibbetts, meanwhile, proposed a different typology focussed on particular target groups and strategies for societal change and human development, identifying three HRE models: values-and-awareness, accountability, and activism-transformation.
Having presented these different framings of HRE, this series then proposed the key features of FoRB Education and explored how four organisations in different parts of the world had developed programmes of work to promote and protect FoRB in schools.
A full discussion of how each of these four organisational approaches aligns with the key principles and modalities of HRE is beyond the scope of this short paper; nonetheless, it is clear that each in its own way does align.
By working upstream of the classroom to build RE teachers’ capacity to embed FoRB principles in existing institutional practice, rather than delivering new content directly to pupils, Culham St Gabriel’s approach aligns with Compass’s learning-through dimension and Tibbetts’ accountability model.
By pairing rights with a workplace skill, Dare to Overcome explicitly builds learners’ capacity to apply and advocate for rights beyond the classroom, aligning with Compass’s learning-about and learning-for dimensions and Tibbetts’ accountability and activism-transformation models.
The train-the-trainer approach taken by Hardwired, coupled with its emphasis on classroom simulations, aligns with Compass’s learning-through dimension and Tibbetts’ accountability and activism-transformation models.
Leimena, meanwhile, builds both individual educators’ competency and a wider multifaith, multi-stakeholder ecosystem, through direct contact between teachers of different faiths and structured visits to places of worship, aligning with Compass’s learning-about and learning-through dimensions and Tibbetts’ accountability model.
In other words, there is a close alignment between existing approaches to FoRB Education and the principles of human rights education. Moreover, it is possible to suggest that successful models of FoRB Education can be described as participatory, focussed on capacity-building, and oriented toward action, whatever context they are applied in, rather than toward pure knowledge transfer.
Finally, it is worth returning to the considerations which emerged at the end of the first paper in this series. That paper highlighted the need to consider partnership and collaboration on one hand, and capacity development on the other, in the future trajectory of FoRB Education. With those considerations in mind, the vignettes begin to suggest how to move forward on both. Specifically, this could include identifying partners with an established track record of aligning with Compass’s learning-through and learning-for dimensions, while also prioritising those familiar with Tibbetts’ accountability and activism-transformation models. Furthermore, when thinking about capacity development, there is a need to be mindful of successful approaches which have been action-oriented and utilised participatory approaches to learning.