Human Rights Education in the curriculum: teaching and learning through portfolios

Abstract

This article presents a documental analysis of a corpus consisting on 95 portfolios prepared in a Human Rights Education (EDH) course offered in a postgraduate course. Portfolios were used as a methodological strategy to approach contents related to Human Rights (HR) in interdisciplinary and transversal perspective, prioritizing the perception of these rights from reality. At the beginning of the course, for 5 consecutive weeks, the students prepared portfolios in response to the proposal to bring some Human Right that they encountered using a vehicle chosen by them, for example: news, music, movies, images, among others. This is an applied research with a qualitative approach, whose objectives were: to analyze the HR present in the portfolios; identifity the vehicles used in portfolios. The analysis of the material was carried out through the categorization of Human Rights and vehicles. The results show that most of the portfolios analyzed, 65%, refer to civil and political rights. In 24% of the portfolios refer to economic, social and cultural rights. The third group, with 11% of portfolios, highlights diffuse and collective rights that are characterized by being aimed at a specific group, category or set of people who have some kind of bond, something in common. The most present vehicle among the analyzed works were those that publish news, with 44% of portfolios; then, art-related, such as images, music and poems with 38% of portfolios. The use of portfolios supported the perception and discussion of Human Rights in a contextualized way, also indicating the different vehicles that can contribute to the approach of these contents in the classroom.