Students live in an age of increasing global inequity and moral ambiguity, raising concerns about the purposes of education in schools (Biesta, 2020). Shifting demographics exacerbate social, political, and economic disparities, creating contexts of disadvantage for certain members of society. Iceland and Lutruwita/Tasmania, Australia are both island communities characterised by increasing cultural diversity in schools. In Iceland this has been the result of a rapidly increasing migrant population. Migration is also a factor in Lutruwita/Tasmania, in addition to assertion of indigenous identity and culture. Additionally, the role of religious studies in state school programmes, one of the main contributors to values formation in the past, has declined (Evans, 2008; Gunnarsson, 2020; Poulter et al., 2017). In Iceland and Lutruwita/Tasmania there have been discussions about how best to address diversity and the moral development of students through schooling (Aðalbjarnardóttir, 2011; Gunnarsson, 2020; Kristjánsson, 2001; Walker et al., 2012) with attention being paid to multicultural, inclusive and citizenship education. 

In this paper, we argue that addressing cultural diversity is interrelated to the debate on schools as a place to foster socio-moral development. We call for social justice pedagogies that engage with the social, economic, cultural, civil, and political dimensions of lived realities in response to the the risk of drawing on particular philosophical or religious beliefs and principles which are culturally specific. We propose an education framework which is transcendental in the sense that it is universally recognised and pays attention to the intersecting moral, legal and political dimensions of life.  Although applicable internationally, we focus on the Icelandic and Lutruwitan/Tasmanian school contexts to answer the question: How can human rights education assist lower secondary school students to form values and apply them to make decisions in their own lives and about communities at local, regional and global levels? 

HRE is a new field in the school contexts of Iceland and Australia, implemented in fragmented and ad hoc ways dependent on committed individual teachers (Burridge et al., 2016; Gollifer, 2022a, 2022b). Despite democracy and human rights being one of the six fundamental pillars in the general section of the Icelandic national curriculum guides for all levels of schooling, HRE is not a compulsory part of teacher education. Democracy has a longer history in Iceland than human rights, as is the case in other Nordic countries where democracy and human rights tend to be understood as synonymous with national values (Osler & Lybæk, 2014; Strømmen Lile, 2019; Vesterdal, 2016).  

In Australia, individual states manage their own state school systems informed by national government curriculum guidelines. The Lutruwita/Tasmanian Department of Education has adopted the Australian National Curriculum for lower secondary students (Yr. 7-10). The Civics and Citizenship strand of the Humanities and Social Science subject area focuses on Australians’ legal and constitutional rights and the parliamentary/democratic process and how they underpin a socially cohesive society. In Year 9 and 10 students look beyond Australia but with a strongly Australian perspective (ACARA, n.d).  

The disparate ad hoc approach to addressing social justice and moral concerns in schools through preservative pedagogies that favour national perspectives can dilute attention towards opportunities for students to critically and holistically form value-based beliefs. We propose a HRE conceptual framework that emphasises the core cosmopolitan principles of universality, indivisibility, solidarity, and reciprocity as relevant to multiple country contexts, irrespective of distinct historical and cultural backgrounds. 

This conceptual essay is the first of two papers. It proposes a HRE framework that will inform a small-scale case study on how cultural diversity and socio-moral development are addressed in Iceland and Lutruwita/Tasmania. Guided by the research question How can human rights education assist lower secondary school students to form values and apply them to make decisions in their own lives and about communities at local, regional and global levels?, we seek to create new HRE knowledge by building on carefully selected sources of information which we discuss in relation to previously developed pedagogical concepts and theories (Hirschheim, 2008; Jaakkola, 2020). We are two educators with extensive experience working in diverse socio-cultural and political country contexts and who now reside in Iceland (author one) and Lutruwita/Tasmania (author two). The commitment to explore the role of education as a means of addressing social and moral concerns led to our collaboration. Our choice to work with two island communities with distinct historical and cultural backgrounds allows for an international HRE perspective. Furthermore, it provides an opportunity to discuss the tensions between the universality of human rights and calls for contextualised and decolonised HRE responses (Zembylas & Keet, 2019). Tasmania, the most southern, and only island state of Australia, and Iceland share small populations. Both have diversifying populations in terms of culture, language, ethnicity and socio-economic status and colonial pasts that raise questions about the impact of dominant power structures and discourse on groups at risk of being marginalised from mainstream society. We start by identifying common pedagogical approaches by drawing on and adapting existing social-justice education typologies to categorise pedagogy into conservative/preservative; liberal/progressive; critical/emancipatory; critical/transformative (see Gorski & Parekh, 2020; Tibbitts, 2017). We then draw on Biesta’s (2020) subjectification; critical pedagogy (Freire, 1996); Adami’s (2014) conceptualisation of rights as relational and decolonial ethics (Zembylas, 2020) to argue that HRE can offer a framework where the moral, legal and political intersect to create opportunities for subjectification. These three dimensions encourage cosmopolitan understandings that emphasise the need for plurality in the context of diverse life narratives and highlight a set of ethical orientations that question conventional assumptions about culture and values formed through colonial logic and Eurocentrism. As stated earlier, our intention is to use the conceptual outcomes of the paper to guide an empirical case study conducted in a small school sample in both Iceland and Lutruwita/Tasmania.

We conclude that learning about cultural diversity and socio-moral development in lower secondary schools tends to reflect liberal/progressive pedagogies. Critical forms of pedagogy that seek emancipation and/or transformation require opportunities for students to become actively engaged with questions of how they are in the world as opposed to who they are. Biesta (2020) argues for three domains of education. Qualification refers to the transmission of knowledge and skills while socialisation explains the representation of values, norms and practices through the educational process, implicitly or explicitly. The third domain, subjectification, is used by Biesta to explain how education can impact the student by enhancing or restricting individual capabilities. Subjectification is the freedom to act, or not act. Biesta (2021) argues that while all three domains of education are important, schools place more emphasis on qualification and socialisation at the expense of subjectification. We suggest that Biesta‘s notion of ‘subjectedness’ can be enhanced through forms of HRE that emphasise the legal, moral and political dimensions of human rights in contexts of lived realities. Dialogue and transformative praxis informed by content and contexts of diverse life narratives provide a cosmopolitan understanding that emphasises the need for plurality. Irrespective of distinct historical and cultural country contexts, transformative HRE places human dignity at its core, underpinned by universal values, indivisible rights contexts, and critical content. Addressing subjectedness through intersecting moral, legal and political dimensions of human rights has great potential to assist lower secondary school students to form values and apply them to make decisions in their own lives and about communities at local, regional and global levels. This conceptualisation contributes to scholarly work on relevant HRE pedagogies in a world of global inequities and moral ambiguity.

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