Previous Connecting Europe through History Project: 2007-2008: Human Rights

Human rights are clearly critical in explaining the evolution and growth of Europe. Teaching human rights and accompanying values in the classroom is therefore very important. Yet the year long Europaeum- EUROCLIO Project exploring this dimension has uncovered not only huge variations in the way questions related to human rights are tackled, but also great variations in the significance attached to human rights in different countries. Nor is there any easy correlation between the teaching and the importance given to human rights and those countries where such issues have been of recent, national significance, and other countries such as the Netherlands, or Great Britain, where they may be taken, to a large extent, for granted.
This has probably been the most significant finding of a project that took in events across 23 countries over a 10-month academic year cycle. But these variations are also revealed in the differing approaches used in terms of curriculum emphasis; classroom time available for focusing and discussing such issues;
the usefulness of textbooks available to support such learning; and the scope for teachers, to find time to develop their knowledge andteaching approaches to tackle such issues.. During the project over 900 History Educators have been involved in over 22 seminars in different countries.

Below the final publication of this project is accessible.