Using child rights education to infuse a social justice framework into universal programming

System entry, phases 1–3

The primary purpose of phases 1–3 are to gain system entry, to identify key stakeholders, to build an understanding of the culture and context, and to build an understanding of stakeholder’s personal theories and beliefs (Nastasi et al., 2004). The university researcher (first author) gained system entry through an already established partnership between the university and the participating school. The university researcher first met with the school principal to gain a better understanding of the school’s organizational structure, and then met with the fourth grade teachers. Over the course of the next three months, meetings were conducted with key stakeholders, specifically teachers and students, to discuss their needs. The university researcher also reviewed school materials such as the school handbook and curriculum development materials and standards unique to the school.

Important aspects of the school context were discovered. First, the school is a certified International Baccalaureate (IB) school, meaning that curricula are globally focused. As part of the IB environment, teachers are tasked with the integration of transdisciplinary themes and concepts, including understanding personal responsibility, emphasizing student led inquiry into environmental and social questions, and using reflective processes to guide understanding of self, personal beliefs and values, personal, physical, mental, social and spiritual health, and human relationships broadly. In this phase of the PCSIM consultation, teachers expressed an interest in collaboratively developing a curriculum to support student’s behavioral development in the classroom while applying the transdisciplinary themes, concepts, and teaching strategies of the preexisting general curriculum. Through consultation discussions, teachers expressed feeling that there was little time within the academically rigorous curriculum dedicated to discussions regarding behavioral, social, and emotional development.

The university researcher presented CRE as a potential avenue for supporting student behavioral, emotional, and social development through a lens that would align with the school’s international focus and with curricular language regarding rights and responsibilities. The team continued to refine ideas until consensus was met regarding structures of lessons, the type of materials used, and how and when specific rights from the UNCRC would be integrated. An example of identified child rights, along with associated responsibilities and skills, presented in lessons is included in Table 2. Early in the project, teachers and students identified two social domains of focus: situations that involved students interacting with new students and situations that involved working with each other through conflict.

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Table 2.

Example lesson rights, responsibilities, and focuses for discussion and activities.

Lesson number	Child rights	Responsibility to uphold right	Discussion and activity focus
1	The right to know your rights.	Understanding the rights of others.	An understanding of what child rights are, overview of all rights.
2	Right to education (access to quality education).	Identify and perform roles and behaviors that contribute to personal and classroom learning.	Work together to develop class wide rules that everyone can follow.
4	Right to find out things and share what you think with others as long as it does not cause harm.	Respond respectfully to others and constructively share your own thinking.	Learning key things to say when you agree or disagree.
6	Right to information from different sources, and adults should help you understand this information.	Be a learner.	How to access reliable information, from a variety of sources.
8	You have the right to practice your own culture, language and religion—or any you choose. Minority and indigenous groups need special protection of this right.	Respecting those who are different from you.	Showing respect for those who might be different.
19	You have the right to an identity—an official record of who you are. No one should take this away from you.	Understanding who I am and supporting others as they better understand themselves.	Being able to define what an identity means, and how many different people might have different ways of identifying.

Model development, phases 4–6

In these phases, teachers and the university researcher began to refine the goals of program development. Through a multimodal process, including the administration of focus group sessions and surveys, the researcher collected information about student needs from teachers and students. All formative data were shared with the core team of teachers. Several themes emerged from an informal review including students reporting anxiety regarding current political contexts and implications of political rhetoric in the media on their families and neighborhoods, difficulty initiating new relationships, and struggles negotiating situations with peers when there was a disagreement. First, students reported feeling a sense of helplessness in the face of community violence and mentioned the 2016 U.S. presidential elections as a source of worry regarding family deportations and the status and treatment of Black Americans. Additionally, students reported being unsure how to react when they felt things in the classroom were unfair. Several students referred to the use of Hokki stools, or moving stools, as unfair since only a handful of students could use them. Teachers independently reported the impact of these student concerns on classroom functioning and reported feeling as if they did not have the right language to address these emerging issues of concern.

These formative data informed the development of the core CRE program. Six pilot lessons were collaboratively developed. Relevant books and other media were pulled that matched student developmental levels such as the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child in Child Friendly Language, and specific videos and illustrated books made by Child Rights groups and UNICEF. This mirrors other CRE programming efforts which often draw on a wide array of media created to teach youth about their own rights (Wallberg & Kahn, 2011). Stakeholders also identified developmentally appropriate discussion techniques and activities. Teachers and the university researcher met weekly to review strengths and challenges of conducting each lesson and continued to collect data to help refine the program and improve the structure of lessons. Students were also asked to complete reflection sheets after each lesson, which included questions about the particular day’s lesson (e.g. “Is it important to listen to and consider opinions that are different than yours?”) and how they might apply the information learned in the future (i.e. “How would you use the information you learned today in the future?”). Researchers and teachers reviewed these reflections in discussions of program development and used this information to further refine lessons and brainstorm new lessons.

Program development and implementation, phases 7–9

In the first six months of the partnership, the team piloted the six developed lessons at the whole class level and modified the lessons and lesson structure based on feedback from teachers and students. Over the summer months (months 10–12 of the project), the team used the preferred lesson structures and topics to create a 32-lesson CRE program which included the initial six lessons. As the scope of the lessons were extensive, the team worked to pare the curriculum down to the 25 lessons the teachers and students identified as the most salient. This included teachers and the researcher going through the lessons and identifying any lessons that felt redundant or not in line with original project aims. Teachers also expressed that reducing the number of lessons would provide time to repeat lessons if needed.

All lessons followed a similar format with five elements: (a) naming a child right and a corresponding responsibility to uphold that right for self and all children (Table 2); (b) reading a book or watching a video clip to which teachers and students could refer to when discussing how the right may be applied to a situation; (c) participating in a group discussion guided by predetermined questions; (d) completing an activity to practice the identified child right including the creation of videos, art pieces, and posters or engaging in a game; and (e) responding to wrap-up reflection questions and surveys. It is important to note that although responsibilities to uphold rights guided curriculum development, stakeholders focused lessons on child rights and helped students develop links to responsibilities through discussions and activities (Howe & Covell, 2010).

For example, lesson 2, titled The Right to Education, covers the right of each child to a quality education (Article 28). For lesson 2, a teacher identified responsibility was having students brainstorm roles and behaviors that allow all students to access classroom learning. Teachers read two books aloud to students, one regarding Ruby Bridges, an African American student who played a pivotal role in school desegregation in the U.S., and a book about Malala Yousafzai, a young Pakistani woman who champions access to education for girls around the world. Students then participated in a group discussion comparing these two stories, and then comparing and contrasting their own access to education. Discussion in this lesson included prompts such as what does it mean to have a right to education, whose responsibility is it to make sure that children have a right to education, and how can we make sure that everyone can access a quality education. The discussion was used to create a list of classroom behaviors and broader actions students could engage in to respect this right. Students then completed a reflection activity. Students reported enjoying this lesson, and later used what they learned to create videos about their right to education and their right to a quality education in their music class.

Each lesson was designed for a 25–30 minute class period and aligned with the school’s character goals for students, which the school called Attributes and Attitudes. Many lesson activities were designed to be posted around the classroom or hallways once completed. For example, one activity involved a “poster walk,” as part of which different posters with an identified child right were provided to students; students reacted to the child right by writing their thoughts down on the related poster. These student-created products were then posted in the hallways and classrooms. Teachers also reported incorporating aspects of the CRE lessons and specifically CRC language into Social Studies, discussion of current events, and Language Arts lessons. For example, several teachers used CRC language in helping students reflect on school shootings in Parkland, Florida in the U.S., and subsequent student protests taking place in schools across the U.S. Reflection sheets promoting students to think about rights and responsibilities were used when students engaged in problematic behaviors with peers. These reflection sheets asked students to note what happened, and ways they could use their knowledge of child rights to change the situation.

Phase 9 of PCSIM is concerned primarily with data collection for program evaluation. As part of the early development of this program, stakeholders identified key changes they hoped to see in the first year of program implementation (year 2 of the project). This included an increase in student knowledge of child rights and use of this knowledge in peer interactions. Thus, during Phase 9, pre- and post-surveys were administered assessing child rights knowledge and social skills in areas regarding peer interaction. The pre-survey was conducted the week before lessons started, and the post-survey was conducted after the final lesson was completed.

Program acceptability was assessed using a survey at the end of the year and through weekly, informal check-in discussions held throughout program implementation. On an ongoing basis, teachers wrote brief notes on a shared online document regarding which lessons they had completed, what aspects of the lessons were helpful, and what questions and challenges arose during the implementation of the lesson. The researcher also observed lessons at several time points across the course of implementation. Teachers reported completing 60–70% of the lessons. Teachers sometimes took two weeks to review a single lesson or were unable to teach a lesson due to testing schedules or field trips. Overall, teachers moved sequentially through the lesson scope and sequence throughout the year. However, on two occasions lessons that were seen as redundant in the topics that they covered were skipped. Additionally, the team consulted during weekly meetings regarding whether lessons seemed redundant or whether lessons required repetition to further student understanding of the presented concepts.

Student knowledge of child rights

Researchers created a 9-item Child Rights student survey to assess student knowledge of child rights before and after program implementation. Three items were open-ended questions asking students what they believe child rights are, why child rights are important, and who they believed was responsible for promoting and protecting child rights. These questions mirror important goals of CRE (Covell & Howe, 2005) and are in line with questions posed in other CRE evaluation work (Covell et al., 2008). The final six questions were aligned with questions discussed in lesson content, and asked students to respond true or false to a series of statements about child rights such as “I have the right to play video games as much as I want” or “I have the right to be safe.” Assessing student’s knowledge of child rights, in contrast to being able to freely engage in activities a child might want to do but might not explicitly connect to rights (i.e. playing video games), has also been a part of assessment in other research around CRE (Covell et al., 2008). Teachers reviewed the measures for readability, and the measure was run through an online readability software to ensure that it matched a fourth grade reading level.

Student skills in SEL competencies

Teachers identified related SE skills of forming and maintaining relationships as important to their school and classrooms. Students were asked to complete a 4-item Likert scale survey (4 indicating very easy to perform the skill to 1 very hard to perform the skill) assessing these domains both in the beginning of the school year and again at the end of the school year. Students were asked two questions regarding their ability to make new friends, and two questions regarding communicating with other students effectively during disagreements. These items were chosen by accessing a freely available bank of SEL questions, then choosing items that mapped onto social skill domains teachers and students reported as important to them. At the time stakeholders accessed this database, items had been used across several school districts and tested for readability and usability (Crowder, Gordon, Brown, Davidson, & Domitrovich, 2019; Davidson et al., 2018). The bank from which these items were originally retrieved was primarily utilized with 5th–11th grade students (Davidson et al., 2018); therefore, teachers reviewed the items for readability, and the measure was run through an online readability software to ensure that it matched a fourth grade reading level.

Teacher reports of program acceptability

Teachers were asked to complete 10 survey items and 5 open-ended short answer questions regarding the program. Teachers were asked questions about program acceptability (e.g. “This would be an acceptable intervention for improving classroom behavior”) and broad questions concerning their opinions of the program as well as strengths and suggested changes. Survey questions asked teachers to respond on a 5-point Likert scale indicating whether they strongly disagreed (1), disagreed (2), were neutral (3), agreed (4), or strongly agreed (5). Questions for the survey were adapted from the Acceptability factor of the Behavior Intervention Rating Scale (BIRS; Elliot & Treuting, 1991). The BIRS consists of three factors, Acceptability, Effectiveness, and Time to Effect (Elliot & Treuting, 1991). Overall, the measure has strong reliability and construct validity (α = .97), as does the Acceptability factor (α = .97; Von Brock & Elliot, 1987).

Teacher report of program acceptability

Across the survey responses regarding program acceptability, teacher responses on all questions ranged from agree (4) to strongly agree (5), with averages for each item ranging between 4 and 4.75. Thematic coding was used to review the qualitative data across the four respondents (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Semantic themes included strong curriculum fit with school values and goals, favorable reaction to program structure, and time as a barrier to lesson completion.

All teachers reported that the curriculum fits well with their school values and goals. For example, one teacher wrote: “[The child rights curriculum] is easy to use with our IB curriculum.” When asked their opinion of the program broadly, all four teachers responded positively and noted that the lessons helped students understand why certain rules exist and gave students language to self-advocate and advocate for their peers. For example, one teacher wrote:

Having the language and the lens to let students take hold of the underlying meaning behind our rules and procedures. It hits directly at why we are doing these rules, and gives them the reasons to act with, not just the rules to live within.

Teachers also responded favorably to the structure and logistics of the lessons. One teacher wrote the following: “Structure of the lessons and ease of understanding the lesson plan format was a plus. Reflections are also useful when addressing individual student needs.” Another wrote: “Students really catch on to the vocabulary and use it when they need to express themselves.”

Furthermore, ability to make time for lessons was identified as a salient barrier to comprehensive implementation. One teacher reported the following: “Schedule inconsistencies and grade level changes have made it hard for me to make it a priority.” Another reported: “Time and planning. We had that idea of making the planner for our grade, and then due to unforeseen circumstances, we had a few things change to that planner.”