Beyond compliance, incorporation creates a unique opportunity to transform pedagogy. Embedding children’s rights as a lens through which we design curricula, shape relationships, and structure learning environments which enhance inclusion, improve wellbeing, and strengthen educational outcomes. The webinar will connect the legal framework with everyday educational practice and invite discussion on the role we can all play in improving children’s lives through rights-based education.

(i) the UNCRC is a ‘catalytic’ discourse that calls into question power asymmetries that prevent just relational configurations within which children and young people might thrive;

(ii) children’s rights are evental: it is within specific occasions that rights-informed potentialities are actualised, within circumstances that are always unprecedented;

(iii) for this to take place, the legal text of UNCRC articles must be translated – into state law, educational policy, professional standards, pedagogical practice, and children and young people’s lived horizons of concern, etc.

But what if an educational milieu, where these rights are to be translated, has itself already been translated into a discourse that is other than educational in the fullest sense? I will argue that a genealogy of education reveals that the current discourse of learning and teaching reduces quite radically, education’s actual and virtual complexity: it substitutes a language and grammar that is largely bureaucratic, primarily concerned with governance, and that is, in consequence, of little help when it comes to negotiating new thresholds of understanding, aporias of practice, and becomings that are the issue of rights. As such, it might be said that the present discourse as instituted within schools, colleges, and universities, is neither sufficiently educational nor especially hospitable to the incoming of rights.

How, then, might this be remedied?

I will argue that a poetics of education that can acknowledge the often hesitant, uncertain, and affective dimensions involved in taking rights seriously is desirable and will explore ways in which a concern with felicitous tropes, figurations, and heuristics might further both an educational sensibility and the mobilisation of rights within educational settings.