Scope and challenges of Education in Human Rights in the formation of occupational therapists, from the perception of students

Abstract

The purpose of this text is to describe the scope and challenges of Human Rights Education in the career of Occupational Therapy at Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile, based on the perception of first-year students of the 2018 race. For this, a mixed research is developed, with a descriptive phenomenological approach, a questionnaire is used to produce the information, which is analyzed through descriptive statistics and semantic content analysis. Participants 277 students from the cities of Viña del Mar, Santiago and Concepción, which studied and approved, during the first semester of 2018, two subjects that include content of Human Rights in their study programs. The main results indicate that Human Rights Education allows students to develop a broader and more complex perspective, displaying a critical view of themselves and of the social reality; At the same time, it provides them with an understanding of their future professional practice, as a possibility to create a more just, dignified and supportive community and society. The challenges are to incorporate contents and methodologies to professional training that allow relearning the conditions of neoliberal capitalism that produces social injustices, seeking alternatives for their improvement, among them feminism, decoloniality and community sovereignty. And at the same time, to rethink human rights as the foundation of other possible ethics, in the understanding of these, from an intercultural perspective for the construction of a democratic citizenship.