Felisa Tibbitts

Felisa Tibbitts is Chair in Human Rights Education in the Department of Law, Economics and Governance at Utrecht University and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University. She is also UNESCO Chair in Human Rights and Higher Education. Her research interests include human rights and (global) democratic citizenship education; curriculum policy and reform; critical pedagogy; education and social movements; and human rights and higher education transformation. She was a Fulbright Fellow at Lund University, Sweden (Fall 2014) and a Human Rights Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (2011-2013). She was a full-time Lecturer at Teachers College of Columbia University between 2016 and 2022.

 

Felisa has published practical resources on curriculum, program development and evaluation on behalf of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, UNICEF, UNESCO, OSCE/ODIHR, the Council of Europe and non-governmental organizations, such as Amnesty International and the Open Society Foundations. Dr. Tibbitts is widely read in the field of human rights education and her scholarship has appeared in numerous books and journals including the  Comparative EducationTeaching and Teacher EducationJournal of Peace ResearchIntercultural Education, Prospects: Quarterly Review of Comparative Education and the International Review of Education.

 

Previously she was an adjunct faculty member at the Harvard School of Education and the UN-Mandated University for Peace and she remains affiliated with the Nelson Mandela University in South Africa. She co-founded the NGO Human Rights Education Associates (HREA – www.hrea.org) in 1996, which she continues to direct. Felisa received her bachelor degree and two masters (Public Policy, Education) from Harvard University and her D.Phil in Political Science from the Otto-von-Guericke Universität of Magdeburg.