Simpson, P. (2021) Current Issues in Comparative Education (CICE), Volume 23, Issue 2, Special Issue 2021 What Can Decolonial Critiques & Critical Pedagogy Teach the Field of Human Rights Education? Peter Simpson Teachers College, Columbia University Foley Jr., W.J. (2021). Suggestions for critical awareness, accountability, and transformation in human rights education. Current Issues in Comparative Education, 23(1), 77-89. Keywords: Human rights education, transformation, participatory, democratic citizenship, community engagement Introduction Human rights education (HRE) is a practice that endeavors to fully develop the human personality and strengthen respect for fundamental freedoms (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948). Despite the prevalence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) however, William Foley offers a critical reading of the human rights field and its underlying assumptions, motivated by participatory and transformative critiques. These critiques identify gaps and slippages that frequently undergird contemporary approaches to human rights education. In doing so, Foley challenges students, scholars and practitioners to consider the mass dissemination of human rights in privileging Western ideologies and practices. He argues for critical pedagogy to be more thoroughly embedded in the teaching of human rights education, allowing for the reimagination of the field as we currently know it. In this review, I offer an overview of decolonial critiques and critical pedagogy and apply them to the field of human rights education. Engaging with these critiques provides an alternative understanding of mainstream approaches to human rights and its teaching. Doing so also offers several possibilities for the reenactment of human rights that counter the dominance of the field’s predication on asymmetrical power relations and Western epistemologies. Given the underutilization of critical and decolonial critiques within the field of Comparative and International Education, Foley’s piece is a welcomed edition. His work similarly builds on the work of additional scholars including Keet (2014a, 2015, 2017), Tibbitts (2015, 2017) and Tibbitts and Fernekes (2011), all of whom provide concrete examples of how critical human rights education (CHRE) can be implemented in a variety of educational contexts. Foley also criticizes the universal application of human rights as espoused by the UDHR, offering readers a starting point to make human rights education more participatory and present in informal and semi-formal schooling environments. His interventions are particularly relevant to the Current Issues in Comparative Education’s 2021 special issue because it allows a wider number of community members such as students and parents, to develop and enact a critical consciousness in favor of social change. © 2021, Simpson. CC BY 4.0 Current Issues in Comparative Education 23(2), 201-206. https://https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en Simpson Current Issues in Comparative Education 202 Human Rights Discourses Foley’s first section provides a useful overview of human rights and their relationship with the wider field of Comparative and International Education (CIE). His critical evaluation of HRE begins with an analysis of where it is taught, noting that despite their universal nature, human rights are not ubiquitously applied in practice (78). Authors such as Anderson-Levitt (2012) and Garnett Russell (2016, 2017, 2018) concur with Foley, noting that stakeholders often simultaneously interact with local and world cultures, adapting how universal discourses, including human rights, are applied in local contexts. Foley goes on to highlight that critical pedagogy and practice are central to disrupting long- standing approaches, redressing asymmetrical power structures, and extending access to practitioners outside of formal academic contexts. I use Tibbitts’ transformational model (2017) as a starting point, which allows for the questioning of the UDHR as the fundamental source of knowledge (Keet 2014a) and underscores the embedded cultural and historical frameworks the UDHR takes for granted. Although the second section of Foley’s text focuses on Tibbitts’ two additional models of human rights education, awareness and accountability respectively, the final model, transformation, is most closely aligned to Freirean critical praxis. This alignment empowers learners to understand their unique role in helping or hindering human rights, and how this is directly related to larger systemic social change. More specifically, transformational human rights education interrogates the foundation of the field, challenging its universalized adoption, which mirrors conversations in the wider field of Comparative and International Education focused on world culture theory and loose coupling (Carney, Rappleye & Silova 2012). Thus, although world culture acknowledges the local enactment of world-level phenomena (such as HRE), assumptions that similar values and understandings undergird human rights, often minimize the wide divergences within the field. Foley’s myriad examples including the Zinn Education Project (2019), the Teaching Tolerance (TT) project, and the organization, Facing History (2019), offer the field salient instances of human rights that are embedded and localized to specific cultural and historical contexts, countering the tendency to globalize human rights education. Collectively, these three organizations provide a space for competing epistemological views to develop through the promotion of community engagement practices and democratic citizenship. Foley’s focus on El Puente’s project-based learning approach to education is another example of participatory-based education, community engagement, and the deployment of global human rights discourse in a local context. In so doing, Foley severely expands the possibilities of advancing critical human rights and the central tenets of democratic citizenship beyond the classroom setting alone. Doing so similarly underscores the role community engagement plays in transforming power relations and the context and structure of schooling. In particular, El Puente is aided by the active involvement of non-academic stakeholders such as community members and practitioners, who increase equity in the decision-making and implementation processes of curriculum and pedagogy. Thus, participants understand the relevance of human rights in their own contexts. Critical International Education Research In addition to Foley’s focus on the field of human rights, my review has relevance for other education sectors and how professionals engage discourse around higher and international education research and practice. Foley’s multiple examples use a critical and power-conscious lens to understand emergent actors, namely non-academic stakeholders, within the field of HRE. Criticality as a framework emphasizes the deconstruction and What Can Decolonial Critiques & Critical Pedagogy Teach Current Issues in Comparative Education 203 critique of social institutions and the transformation of institutions for the outcome of social justice (Crotty 1998). Critical research also promotes transforming the status quo, rectifying injustices, and inequalities, and understanding power relations to illuminate exploitation and marginalization (Crotty 1998, Giroux 2011). Foley also builds on the work of critical scholars such as Tikly and Bond (2013) and Stein and Andreotti (2017), who assert that criticality is manifested through explicit references to colonialism and by an alignment with postcolonial and decolonial thought. His piece is thus, a steppingstone towards transforming and reorienting the field of human rights education. Given the action-oriented nature of Foley’s writing, he calls for social change, greater equity in educational systems, and more symmetrical power structures. This is a rarity in the wider field, where concrete action steps for engaging in recommended practices are often not thoroughly delineated. Furthermore, given the critical, transformative, and purposeful contributions of Foley’s work, I include specific and comprehensive starting points. For example, Dache et al. (2021) argues that Black and Brown neighborhoods created a street pedagogy (Calle) that relies on community spaces such as recreational facilities, bodegas, and churches, to employ activist strategies and identity formation beyond the campus walls (2). These often academically overlooked places of knowledge formation and dissemination challenge long-standing discourses that invisibilize learning outside of academic centers. Drawing specifically on community cultural wealth, Dache et al. reject higher learning in college and universities as the only way forward (8). Instead, calle allows for the reimagination of a future within the limitations of current cicumstances. El Puente functions using calle, situating itself as a site for public resistance, and an avenue toward decolonial imaginaries with community members at the forefront. Criticality also allows us as informed students, researchers and practitioners within the field to ask new questions surrounding how to deepen relationships between higher education institutions and the surrounding community, and how to utilize institutional resources to learn from the community. These questions underscore the salience of decolonial and critical critiques to both the field of human rights and wider field of education. These fields continue to grapple with the kind of interventions that may be adequate to address today’s myriad challenges. Climate change, the coronavirus (COVID- 19) pandemic, and increasingly stratified societies, are prompting the field to both acknowledge and respond to these rapidly changing conditions. Thus, going forward, we will have to contend with the gap between questions raised by decolonial and critical critiques and more long-established questions that predominate the fields of human rights and international education. Nonetheless, how we engage in research related to these topics can allow us to maintain measure with these challenges. Research Implications As members of the Comparative and International Education field mark the one- hundredth anniversary of Paulo Freire’s birth, international educators need to reimagine ways of helping students fundamentally connect their lived-experiences to our field’s wider knowledge base. William Foley’s seminal writing brings issues related to critical pedagogy, human rights, and participatory education to the forefront of the field. Collectively, the examples highlighted provide a lens into equity-oriented approaches to education and a deeper understanding of how to conceptualize these reforms. Foley’s work additionally demonstrates narrow discourses surrounding the field of human rights, underscoring the need for deeper dialogue and engagement of new perspectives. Going forward, education scholarship can be better utilized by non-academic stakeholders by deepening collaboration between scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and research participants. Design thinking (DT), espoused by Lake, Flannery and Kearns Simpson Current Issues in Comparative Education 204 (2021) offers powerful insight into stakeholder engagement practices, arguing that DT facilitates working in teams to recognize diverse contributions and engaging in active listening in order to find shared meaning. The iterative, relational and context-responsive process enables for the development of valued and viable responses to challenges through the capacity building of all stakeholders. Stein et al. (2021)’s Developing Stamina for Decolonizing Higher Education: A Workbook for Non-Indigenous People, is a timely resource that allows readers to balance the imperatives of intellectual, affective and relational approaches to decolonization. By moving beyond the inherent limitations of institutional and non-institutional spaces, the co-authors gesture towards approaches that map our responsibilities to Indigenous communities alongside what is feasible in each of our contexts. Ultimately, design thinking and Developing Stamina, prepare us to face the inherent complexity, uncertainty, complicity, and paradoxes within the fields of human rights and education. Peter Simpson is a master’s student at Teachers College, Columbia University in the department of International and Transcultural Studies. His research and professional interests include international higher education and the third mission of colleges and universities. What Can Decolonial Critiques & Critical Pedagogy Teach Current Issues in Comparative Education 205 References Anderson-Levitt, K. M. (2012). Complicating the concept of culture. Comparative education, 48(4), 441-454. Carney, S., Rappleye, J., & Silova, I. (2012). 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