Consequences considered

“There is a world out there 

that shapes and constrains 

the consequences of the concepts 

we employ to understand it” 

(Hekman 2007:109).

The image above (drawn on my iPad using iPastels) illustrates an eye viewing the teaching process. The colander contains spaghetti that is squeezing through, and out of the container. Initially the pasta is neatly packaged in straight lines. In the cooking process, it transforms and then becomes slippery. It can be difficult and tricky to eat especially in the company of others.  There seems to be a link with education. Perhaps the colander is the idealized framework of the curriculum, also more broadly, of human rights education.  The straight, linear progression is changed to a complex mix of entanglements that become unpredictable.  Loris Malaguzzi (2006:6) uses this concept (at the Reggio Emilia School for Early Childhood Learning) to refer to a philosophy of knowledge that resembles a “tangle of spaghetti”.

Human rights and consequences go hand in hand. Yet the teaching of human rights frequently keeps a focus on the principle of universalism through the coded legal instruments rather than the broader relational aspects. How do our students relate this teaching to their future practice and to their responsibilities to promote social justice? This questioning was the catalyst that originally inspired my innovative teaching methods and this research.

All our undergraduate medical students are exposed to the same curricular content for certain core themes such as human rights. Like other topics, it is threaded through the curriculum In a spiral and segmented manner with different approaches. My earlier evaluation of human rights teaching in the Faculty in 2007 demonstrated how varied this teaching was - strongly influenced by the educator’s own conception of human rights. Similarly the uptake of the learning and knowledge by students seems to vary enormously. While assessments do indicate these differences to a certain extent, there are broader issues that become apparent when we engage more deeply with the students.  

There are criticisms relating to how human rights education is delivered especially when it is conceived in an uncritical way such as identifying rights violated and those realized in different case scenarios. A human rights approach is complex. Hoover (2013:953) claims that we need to “think agonistically about rights”. Rather than seeking commonality, we need “a generation of space for contesting existing identities and sites of political authority”. The need to engage with the plurality of human rights is taken further by Zembylas and Bozalek (2014) who assert that we can benefit from a broader perspective by drawing on theories of posthumanism and the affective turn. Through critical posthumanism and affect we can de-centre the human and recognize the relational ambiguities that lead to social, political and economic consequences - expressed as “a productive perspective to creatively re-imagine human rights” (2014:44).

How much do medical undergraduate students understand about their professional responsibilities and their powerful role that they can play in advancing rights? When I ask students in an introductory classroom session in the middle of their third year to write down in a sentence what they know about human rights in terms of women’s health, there is an astonishingly wide range of answers.  This variation highlights the different meanings associated with human rights. Like a bowl full of pasta, we all taste it in different ways. I wonder how we can better engage with these differences and use them in an affirmative and constructive way.

Thanks to Assoc Prof Karin Murris for introducing me to the Philosophy of Children

Hekman, S. 2006. Constructing the ballast: An ontology for feminism. In Emerging models of materiality in feminist theory.  Material Feminisms (Eds) Alaimo & Hekman. Indiana University Press. Bloomington & Indianapolis.

Rinaldi, C. 2006. In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia: Listening, Researching and Learning. Routledge. New York.

Zembylas, M. & Bozalek, V. G. 2014. A critical engagement with the social and political consequences of human rights: The contribution of the affective turn and posthumanism. Acta Academica. 46:4:29-47.