Browsing by Author "Kares, Eeva"

The aim of the study is to explore teachers' perceptions of cooperation with civil society organisations (CSO) in human rights education. Teachers' perceptions are a relevant subject of research because the CSOs can do school visits only if invited by teachers. Teachers' experiences of cooperation may influence how they include human rights education in their work. The study also scrutinises teachers' motives to cooperation with CSOs. According to the international human rights conventions, human rights education is a human right and states are responsible of its implementation. In Finland, human rights education is included in the national core curriculum. Finnish studies and reports on human rights education have shown that human rights education is too much on the responsibility of civil society organisations and individual teachers. The realisation of human rights education also depends much on personal commitment of individual teachers. The target group of the study were primary school teachers who had participated in "Lapsen oikeuksien kymppi", a human rights education project organised by Plan Finland. The research data consists of thematic interviews of five teachers working in the Capital Region of Finland. The analysis was conducted using discourse analytical approach. As motives for their participation in the project, the teachers emphasized the importance of the content and the connection to the core curriculum. However, it seems that the teachers had been and still were quite unaware of aims of the project. The teachers tended to highlight the practical impacts of the project whereas they seemed to avoid speaking about cognitive impacts. The data also demonstrated that the teachers' content with the systematical handling of the themes of human rights education. The teachers showed interest in participating in the project or using the materials produced by Plan Finland in the future. However it seemed that the teachers had not included the human rights education in their teaching during or after the project. Teachers frequently explained that the hectic daily life in schools hinders the realization of human rights education. Talk about expertise was often present in the interviews. Teacher perceived the school visitors as experts with both cognitive and affective expertise and also reflected on the sufficiency of the professional skills of their own.