Negotiating human rights: citizenship education in South Korea

This study investigates how human rights education (HRE), a global movement and citizenship education model based on universal personhood rather than nationality, is presented and negotiated in relation to national citizenship discourses in South Korean middle school moral education and social studies textbooks. Using qualitative methods of textual analysis, I identify four recurring approaches consistently used in textbooks to educate students about human rights: (1) distinguishing between universal human rights and national constitutional rights, (2) emphasizing duties to the national community, (3) accommodating both global and national identity through a discourse of achieving harmony and (4) demonstrating continuity between universal and national moral values. These findings contribute to the existing empirical literature on Korean citizenship education by investigating the interaction of global and local citizenship narratives.