“We’re lucky to have been born in Sweden”: Eleven-year-olds’ meaning-making on human rights in two Swedish classrooms

Abstract

The study, which draws on didactics, addresses the content in 11-year-old pupils’ meaning-making on human rights after being taught about them. The aim is to clarify: i) why the pupils think they should learn about human rights and ii) what they say they have learned about human rights after the teaching. The study is a sub-study of a three-month period of fieldwork in two comprehensive school classes and is based on interviews with the pupils. The results show that the pupils’ meaning making is dominated by three content themes: rights and democracy, bullying and violations and children’s different life conditions. Four main conclusions are drawn: the meaning-making of rights are cognitively weak, the rights are mainly treated as a question related to ”the other”, the rights are treated as a question of bullying and violations, and the teaching of rights and democracy needs to be problematised.