Human Rights Education in Taiwan: Three Case Studies in Multi-Racial Classrooms

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Although the Taiwanese government has clearly adopted human rights as the foundation of how to run this country, education on human rights and related issues have not been correspondingly implemented in Taiwan’s fundamental education. The official educational reformation does include the education on human rights into the Nine-Year Compulsory Curriculum; however, a gap, resulted from the pressure of acquiring diplomas or higher education entries strongly exists in Taiwan’s compulsory education, which attaches great importance to discipline-related proficiency instead of teaching students to protect their own rights & interests as well as respect other people’s rights, and such drawbacks have caused quite some problems within the campus and the society.
The study examines the experiences and works of three teachers in different age and cities apply their human right education in the classrooms in Taiwan. Interviews, classroom observations, and human rights education curriculum design and practice were collected as sources of data.
The teachers highlighted several factors that motivated them to implement their human rights education, and that included policy improved，study inspired , gender equality , human rights organizations , education entries, self-bias and underprivileged students. After analyzing the data, four central influence of human rights education in the classrooms are revealed. Human right education increases students’ awareness of their human rights, encouraging right social activism, connected students’ lived experiences to promote critical thinking, putting a class into practice. There are specific methodologies that effectively facilitate the content of human rights education, and those are directly didactic instruction, cooperative learning, creative instruction, media instruction. And the challenges of human rights education are limiting curriculum, student non-interest, contradictory nature of human rights education, lack of a human rights community, and teacher and cultural-bias.

Stream: Equity, Social Justice and Social Change; Community, Culture, Globalisation

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

I am a doctoral student in National Chiayi University in Taiwan. I'm now interested in multiculture education, and my research are focuses on gender and multiracial education problems.

My name is Kai Yuan Ho, my friends call me Benimaru, now I focus on English learning. My hobbies are very extensive, I like singing, movies, and take exercise. My favorite exercise is racing game. In fact, I used to be a racing car player several years ago. It’s very interesting and exciting. I enjoy speed a lot.

Associate Professor, Department of Education, National Chiayi University