Prof. Audrey Osler, one of the world leading experts in Citizenship and Human Right Education was invited by the Centre for Citizenship and Moral Education to give a short course at BNU on May 14th to 16th. The course focuses on the theme of ‘Learning to Live Together in Multicultural Societies’, which covers 8 sub-themes, such as social justice, moral education in a global age, narrative and dialogue in education, student identity, teachers' voice and children's rights. The short course was hosted by Dr. Lin Ke, and Prof. Tan Chuanbao. About 40 students from the Faculty of Education, including postgraduates and undergraduates, participated in the course.

Prof. Osler is now working in University of Leeds (UK) and University College of Southeast (Norway). Employing Human Right as her framework and methodology to conduct her researches, she explained that universality and recognition were the two challenges of human right, where all human beings should have the same rights and the ‘right to narrate’ and ‘to be heard’, regardless of their gender, age, race and class etc. The method of storytelling and drama-playing was then used to help students understand the ‘right to narrate’ and to fully participated in the narrative-based class, which has shown a creative approach of teaching.

The students also read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with the guidance of Prof. Osler,  connecting all those Articles with their daily life, so that they could better understand how it was closely related to each person. What was more, Prof. Osler took her family as an example to illustrate how people could live in diversity.

The last section of the short course was specially designed for undergraduates, when Prof. Osler illustrated that children were actually citizens with full human rights, other than ‘citizens-in-waiting’. Students were also encouraged to elaborate the ideal school in their mind.

All those detailed instructions and diversified activities enabled students to build up a wider picture of Human Right and Human Right Education, and Prof. Olser highly appreciated the participation of the students.

Centre for Citizenship and Moral Education

Faculty of Education

2017-05-22