Teaching Database
This online database provides teaching activities and tools to support the integration of human rights into any school or university classroom as well as the creation of interdisciplinary introductory human rights courses. Human Rights have certain meanings within particular frameworks and disciplines. Often, we are only familiar with our own one. As teachers and researchers of human rights, it is our explicit aim to move beyond our disciplinary constraints.
We envision this resource as reflective of the Connecticut School of Human Right’s interdisciplinary approach to teaching human rights. The core of our methodology is the belief that human rights is not the province of any one academic discipline, and thus interdisciplinarity is necessary to provide a robust multifaceted understanding of human rights. Only by studying human rights from the multiple and intersecting perspectives evolving within and between the disciplines, can we present students with a complex, yet accessible appreciation of human rights.
Our database offers college teachers the opportunity to add topics and activities to their classroom that come from a range of disciplines and use a variety of methods, enhancing interdisciplinarity and a broader understanding of human rights. Teacher can choose to include selected activities to complement their courses or create an interdisciplinary introduction to human rights course.
This database brings together teaching resources that present human rights as practical, present-day orientation and action knowledge, not as a topic tied to one historical period. The guiding assumption is that human rights are not a fixed checklist, rather, their interpretation, scope, and priority shift with changing social conditions. In this sense, human rights are not “fixed, unchanging principles,” but high-priority claims whose diversity and acceptance evolve over time.
Accordingly, the database follows a synchronic approach (a cross-section of the present): materials are organized around current fields of practice and conflict (discrimination, migration, social participation, the environment, and digital public life). Historical examples are used where they support understanding, but the primary focus remains on human-rights challenges and applications today.
For structuring, the database draws on the “generations” model of rights:
- First generation: civil and political rights
- Second generation: economic, social, and cultural rights
- Third generation: intergenerational rights—linked, for example, to claims that future generations are entitled to a livable and intact environment.
- Fourth generation: rights in digital lifeworlds and at the interfaces with AI.
A dedicated emphasis is placed on digital contexts because in “digital lifeworlds … increasingly more activities are captured as data and stored, sorted and processed” (Risse, 2021). This creates new human-rights questions around privacy, access to reliable information, and how algorithmic systems classify and influence people along with a growing need for competencies that make these rights teachable and actionable in everyday settings (Risse, 2021).
The Teaching Human Rights Working Group was established in 2012 at the University of Connecticut’s Human Rights Institute. As an interdisciplinary group, we seek to provide a forum for conversation on the pedagogy of human rights and to answer larger questions related to teaching in the field, such as: What does interdisciplinary mean in relation to undergraduate teaching? And how do we integrate multiple disciplines’ perspectives on human rights in our own classrooms? Guided by the questions, we embarked on developing a database of various teaching activities that could be used by instructors around the country who similarly wanted to bring diverse disciplines into conversation within their own courses.