This paper examines teaching processes of children’s human rights for young people, 14-15 years.

Education has been pointed out by the UN as the most important instrument for developing children’s human rights and to let children grow as right holders. This is especially stipulated in the UNCRC and it’s article 29. In this work, the content in national policy and curriculum together with educational processes as teaching and learning play important roles. Specific central actors in this work are teachers and their students. For teachers, the assignment to teach about children’s human rights consist of various didactical choices to be made concerning,the content (what) which form will be used when teaching (how) and what is the purpose of the teaching (why). Here, and from the perspective of viewing children’s human rights as a subject field (Brantefors & Thelander, fortcoming), the content and how the content is elaborated in the teaching processes will be analyzed and presented in this paper.  Consequently, focus in this presentation will be on teachers and teaching which in turn opens up for discussions about what is possible to learn within this specific frame.

The paper is part of a broader project in which the role of education for children’s and young people’s development as rights holders is investigated. More specifically, the project examines how teaching and learning within early childhood education and school give possibilities or constrain children’s and young people’s growth as holders and practitioners of human rights. In this paper the specific focus is on the older children, 14- 15 years old children in school.

By examining on-going teaching and learning of children’s human rights the study seeks to answer the question:

What is the content in teaching and learning in, through and about children’s human rights?

The project draws theoretically on a combination of rights theory, sociology of childhood and the educational philosophy and theorising of John Dewey. First, rights for children are understood as included in the human rights, which means that human rights vocabulary is used to categorise and discuss rights. Second, the project views children as competent and knowledgeable persons with full human value and dignity in the present. Further, childhood is regarded as a political phenomenon included in societal power structures, which influences adults’ perceptions of and relations to children. Third, with inspiration from Dewey, education is regarded as a process of growth. The aim of education is with this view not to prepare the child for the future, instead educationis constant process of reconstruction and reorganisation of knowledge, with the inherent being growth through reconstruction of experience.

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