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Human rights promotion continues to elude Nigeria, despite the many human rights instruments ratified and the various human rights initiatives taken. The key question behind this paper is: Why is human rights behaviour poor and human rights violations high despite numerous measures to address these issues? To examine this, the study investigates teachers’ awareness of curriculum contents and pedagogies for cultivating human rights, drawing on a survey of 170 social studies teachers in Enugu State. We find challenges to teaching for human rights, including teachers’ poor knowledge of human rights content; a lack of awareness of human rights pedagogies; a reluctance to engage in activism; and little engagement with participatory pedagogies. We explain these challenges with reference to conservative teacher education, entrenched patriarchal values, a strong nationalistic-oriented curriculum, and authoritarian school structures. We recommend transforming Nigerian social studies teacher education programmes and policies to enable social justice and human rights.

There is evidence that teachers encounter more stress than people in other professions. Stressors in teaching include students' misbehaviour, excess workload, and time pressure among others. Teachers in developing countries like Nigeria encounter additional stressors outside common job stressors. Stressors peculiar to teachers in developing countries include transportation issues, cultural challenges, and delays in payment of salary. High level of stress in teaching results to health problems, burnout, absenteeism, attrition, and students' behavioural and academic underperformance. Stress management is necessary to reduce or escape stress consequences, and rational-emotive behaviour therapy (REBT) has been widely applied to stress management and behavioural issues across contexts. This review presents the finding of a study that clinically applied Rational-Emotive Health Education Intervention (REHEI) Programme, developed from the perspective of REBT principles for stress management in teachers. The finding shows that many teachers undergo a high level of job stress and REHEI significantly reduced stress and irrational beliefs causing stress among teachers. Implications for the study for policy and future studies were pointed out.

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This study investigated the attitudes of university students toward political participation, as well as four other selected democratic values – freedom and liberty, human rights/human rights protest, corruption resistance, and separation of powers in Nigeria. A descriptive survey design, with a tool entitled ‘Attitude towards Democratic Values Questionnaire (ADVQ)’, was used to collect data from randomly selected 250 undergraduate students (male = 120; female = 130) from a university in Nigeria. Six research questions were answered using descriptive statistics in guiding the study. The results showed that university students reported an unwillingness to protest human rights violations as well as the tendency to accept bribes and campaign for a wrong political candidate for financial gains, despite general findings that indicated positive attitudes towards all selected democratic values among university students. The result of the variance analysis conducted to ascertain the influence of gender on attitudes towards democratic values showed that female students scored significantly higher than their male counterparts in all measured democratic principles, excepting human rights and separation of powers. Implications of findings for a critical democratic education that emphasises critical consciousness, spatial voting, and socio-political resilience are discussed.