Democracy, feminist pedagogies and human rights education: an experience of collective learning with women in Chile

The article addresses a central problem in human rights education (HRE): how to foster critical democratic engagement in contexts shaped by neoliberalism, patriarchy, and masculinised trade union cultures, where women’s experiences of inequality may be characterised as individual rather than structural. It draws on a HRE experience in the School of Trade Union Training, considering how feminist pedagogical processes might contribute to a reinterpretation of workplace inequality and the construction of rights-based political agency among women union leaders and workers, designed to enable participants to name their lived experiences of inequality as expressions of broader structural inequalities. The School aims to foster a collective grammar of rights, strengthen critical consciousness, and collective agency, and enable resistance. The authors reflect on tensions involved in implementing feminist critical pedagogy within institutional settings, arguing that feminist HRE makes an important contribution to democratic learning by linking lived experience, collective reflection, and political action.