What are teachers supposed to teach and students supposed to learn about human rights? The international community, nations, and teachers widely support the idea that children and young people should receive human rights education in school. Several studies have, however, shown that alongside this strong support, there is widespread uncertainty about what this education should consist of – or phrased in another way: what the educational content of children’s human rights education should be (Parker, 2018‚ Quennerstedt, 2022). This paper maps and analyses the educational content in children’s human rights education examined or advocated for in previous research.

There is currently no established term for human rights education given to children and young people. In this research, children’s human rights education – CHRE – is used inclusively for other terms for educating children about rights. The overarching aim of human rights education is to promote respect for and observance of human rights, and to empower people to contribute to the building of a universal culture of human rights (UN, 2011). The 2011 UN Declaration for Human Rights Education and Training launched the now-established tripartite definition and conceptualisation of HRE. It is to include education 

• about human rights: knowledge and understanding about the norms, principles and values, and the mechanisms for their protection, 
• through human rights: teaching and learning in a rights-respecting way, and 
• for human rights: empowering learners to enjoy and exercise their rights and respect and uphold the rights of others. 

The UN conceptualisation emphasises that what is learned and how this learning occurs are vital and intertwined aspects of HRE – learning about rights requires certain educational surrounding and relations.

When the UN’s definition is to be translated to concrete education, a content selection must be made – it is not possible to teach everything. The selection of educational content is not a representation of truth but is always normative, resting on the culture and views of a particular society (Willberg, 2015). What knowledge students should be able to acquire at school therefore needs to be considered by each society (Young, 2013). In many countries, there is a division of labour between the state and the teachers concerning the selection and delivery of educational content: the state prescribes the main topics of instruction (an intended curriculum), while the planning and enactment of the concrete teaching are left to the teacher (the enacted curriculum). Content and pedagogy are thus drawn apart. This may be problematic in the case of CHRE, with its’ bearing idea of content and pedagogy as a whole.

The theoretical backdrop to our analysis is two perspectives on whether content and pedagogy are separable. Traditional curriculum theory assumes that this separation is possible and also needed to ensure that qualified knowledge content is maintained when disciplinary knowledge is transformed into school knowledge (Young, 2013). Didaktik theorising, on the other hand, emphasises a close connection between subject matter and subject meaning and argues that the meaning does not reside in the matter but emerges in the teaching situation. Therefore, content and pedagogy are entangled (Hopmann, 2007). Awareness and consideration of these two countering views form the analytical gaze in this study.

The analysis presented in this paper demonstrates how education about, through and for human rights appear in research publications as intended,enacted or suggested educational content of children’s human rights education.

This study analysed research publications that address the educational content of CHRE. 140 articles published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals in English, French, Polish, Spanish or Swedish during 2013-2022 were identified as potential publications. In two screening rounds, the publications were checked for the inclusion criterion that they must more than very marginally address educational content in children’s human rights education. After these screenings, 71 publications were selected for further analysis. A coding scheme was constructed to support the analysis. To identify educational content of different types, we drew on the analytical distinctions made in earlier curriculum analyses between the curriculum that precedes concrete education (Porter & Smithson, 2001; Seitz & Hill, 2021) and the one that takes form in the educational situation (Pilz et al., 2014). We labelled two types of content intended content (i.e. formulated by educational authorities or educators) and enacted content (i.e undertaken in practice). As we had noticed in the selection process that the primary endeavour of many publications is to argue for specific content, we added a third type: suggested content. The UN tripartite education about-through-for rights was then used to form analytical questions for each content type. The 71 publications underwent full reading and coding. During this, another 13 publications were excluded, leaving the final number of analysed publications at 58. Of these, 45 are published in English, 5 in Polish, 2 in Spanish, and 2 in Swedish. The data underwent deeper analysis to identify and describe content patterns in the following analytical step. Drawing on thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2019; Peel, 2020), we developed and undertook a four-step condensation and abstraction analysis as follows: 1. Meaningful units of data were identified and noted. 2. The meaning units were condensed into unit categories. 3. Themes were generated by scrutinising the unit categories. Some categories became themes, while others were merged to form a theme. 4. The themes were named and described.

The analysis demonstrated that enacted content was slightly more addressed (26 articles) than intended and suggested content (19 and 18 articles respectively). Educational content aiming towards the education of children about rights was addressed most in all three types of content. Content seen as vital to educate the child about rights often included: - philosophy of rights, concepts, discourses and values; - main documents and organisations; - historical aspects of human rights; - rights of specific groups (children, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ people or workers in the Global South), - rights violations. Legal knowledge that would enable students to identify and reflect on rights violations was found only as suggested content. Educational content aiming towards education through rights was mainly presented as activities or situations that give rise to two kinds of rights-educating experiences: - experiencing respect for one’s rights – e.g through a rights-respecting school atmosphere or participating in decision-making, - experiencing rights violations – either one’s own or other people’s. Experiencing respect for rights as a way to learn through human rights was found in all three content types, while experiencing rights violations was only visible as enacted and suggested content, never as intended. Educational content aiming towards education for rights often focuses on activities that develop children’s capacity to take action for human rights. This included ability to - yourself respect and promote human rights, - act against rights violations in one’s own environment or elsewhere, - seek appropriate legal means. Also, activities that develop the capacity to cooperate and communicate with others, seek information and engage in discussions about HR were seen as important educational content in the education for rights. Importantly, some articles explicitly presented education for rights as connected with education about rights: knowledge is needed to take informed action to protect rights or address violations.

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