Human Rights Education in India: A Multilevel Case Study of Policy, Pedagogy, and Practice

Monisha Bajaj

In the past two decades, the United Nations and over 100 of its member states have officially declared their interest in the promotion of human rights education (HRE) and its incorporation into national curricula. This multilevel case study will examine human rights education in India to determine how differentiated motivations for, conceptualizations of, and initiatives towards HRE operate at the levels of policy, curriculum and pedagogy, and practice. At the local level of practice specifically, this project seeks to examine how caste discrimination is addressed by HRE programs in southern India and the extent to which notions of caste identity are renegotiated by students, teachers, and alumni of such training programs. Caste discrimination has been an entrenched feature of Indian society and intersects with the extreme income disparities among the nation’s one billion residents. While political, economic, and social inclusion of low- and out-caste individuals and communities in the Indian nation-state has been a salient theme for the past six decades since Indian independence, the tacit goal of many HRE initiatives is the orientation towards a global rather than national sense of citizenship. As such, this project explores HRE at multiple levels and will provide important information for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers on the relationship between human rights education, citizenship, and democratic participation.

About Monisha Bajaj

Monisha Bajaj is Assistant Professor of Education in the Department of International and Transcultural Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research and teaching interests include peace and human rights education, and educational policy and practice in diverse international and U.S. contexts such as Zambia, India, the Dominican Republic, and New York City. Dr. Bajaj received her doctorate in International Educational Development from Teachers College and her Master's Degree in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from Stanford University. She is the editor of the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Peace Education and the author of a Spanish-language teacher training manual on human rights education (UNESCO, 2003), which she wrote while carrying out research as a Fulbright scholar in the Dominican Republic. Her most recent research has examined the impact of HIV/AIDS and poverty on secondary school students in sub-Saharan Africa and articles on this research are forthcoming in Compare, the Journal of Asian and African Studies, and the International Review of Education. She plans to utilize the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship to initiate a new project to study human rights education programs for Dalit or untouchable children in southern India and the impacts of such programs on conceptions of citizenship and democratic participation.