Empowering and Promoting Children’s Rights by Implementing Skills Labs Using Engaging Learning Activities

Despite the efforts to advance children’s rights’ protection, many children’s rights are still not respected in many places. This makes it more necessary than ever to raise the awareness of children’s rights and prepare new generations of students to protect children’s rights via empowering them to engage in activism. Drawing upon human rights education (HRE) models in conjunction with UNICEF’s methodologies, and the theory of planned behaviour (TPB), the current conceptual article suggests that by designing theoretically based engaging and meaningful learning activities, teachers can address the goals of HRE by raising the awareness of children’s rights, fostering accountability, and encouraging students to engage in activism to protect children’s rights. First, this article outlines a conceptual framework for designing meaningful and engaging learning activities within an adapted HRE model, combining the elements of HRE and UNICEF. Next, the educational innovation of Skills Labs in Greek education is introduced, and the TPB’s foundation on designing learning activities is briefly explained. To clarify our proposal, three sample Skills Labs with example learning activities are presented, adhering to the three main HRE objectives of gaining knowledge–taking responsibility–taking action to protect and consolidate children’s rights. Finally, this article explains the mechanism of how the TPB can support the effectiveness of this proposition and concludes with some important implications for practice.