(2012) Critical citizens or neo-liberal consumers? Utopian visions and pragmatic uses of human rights education in a secondary school in England. In: Politics, Participation & Power Relations: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Critical Citizenship in the Classroom and Community. (pp. 119-136).

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Abstract

© 2012 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. This chapter presents the findings from a research project that explored a partnership between human rights non-governmental organisation (NGO), Amnesty International, and a comprehensive state secondary school in London to implement whole-school human rights education (HRE). We explore the types of opportunities, challenges and understandings of both the NGO and school in partnering to deliver whole- school projects, in the context of a neo-liberal educational climate based on what Apple (2004) calls conservative modernization. This climate encourages schools to use the voluntary sector to give students enhanced choice in the curriculum. However, there is potential conflict between neoliberal objectives and the aims and purposes of more critical and progressive forms of education promoted by NGOs. Amnesty International promotes a perspective informed by concern to protect human dignity and oppose abuses of state power. Its concern with solidarity and critical politics contests the premises of a neoliberal, personalized concept of education. This chapter explores the forms of pragmatic uses of school partnerships envisaged and enacted by schools. It investigates ways in which NGO-school partnerships affect and are affected by ongoing school development processes within traditional school structures. The chapter provides evidence of the varied understandings of human rights by school community members. It highlights key challenges of implementing whole-school projects with external agencies, particularly the tension between the operational and political transformation envisioned by NGO stakeholders and the neoliberal results-driven imperatives placed on schools by official policy.

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