Social Work Education and Human Rights A Comparative Study of Learning and Teaching of Human Rights in University of Gothenburg, Sweden and Makerere University, Uganda

Abstract

Human rights have been acknowledged internationally as part of the social work profession and important element of social work education. This research therefore aimed at exploring the teaching and learning of human rights in social work education in Gothenburg and Makerere Universities. The objective was to explore if and how human rights is taught in social work education in universities of two different countries found within the developed and developing countries categories of the world, hence the comparative design. It addressed questions of how social work students understand human rights; the importance of teaching and learning human rights; how students are familirised with human rights knowledge in social work courses; challenges of teaching and learning human rights in social work courses, and the similarities and differences in the human rights education within social work education. The universities were selected because they had good reachability, and 11 face-to-face and telephone interviews were conducted in which programme coordinators, teachers, and Bachelor’s Degree students were participants. These participants were selected through multiple methods of purposive, convenience, and snowball sampling. Professional identity and social constructionism perspectives were used in the research to help in interpreting the findings of the study. The findings indicate that human rights are taught in Bachelor’s Degree social work programmes of Makerere and Gothenburg universities. Both universities incorporate human rights into the core social work courses as an attached frame of reference. Of the courses that are said to incorporate human rights some are optional while some are mandatory, and the teacher is given the leeway to determine the extent and methods of delivering course content. The issue of standardisation has therefore been identified as the main challenge in how human rights is taught in social work, because there is no standard of measurement used to account to if indeed human rights is taught in the programme courses. In overall remarks, social context plays a role in how human rights is taught in social work education in the two universities, and the similarities and differences that emerged from the findings could be largely attributed to that.