Introducing human rights education within a memorial museum framework: the challenges and strategies of Taiwan's National Human Rights Museum

Human rights museums have flourished in the postwar era. Within Asia, a number of these museums reflect upon the histories of dictatorship after WWII and memorialize the victims of related human-rights violations. As providing human rights education (HRE) becomes an increasingly important focus of human rights museums, many challenges must be overcome to achieve the dual goals of memorializing victims and implementing HRE. These challenges are particularly complex for museums that have been established on ‘difficult heritage’ sites.The National Human Rights Museum in Taiwan (NHRM) was selected as a case study to investigate how a museum can balance the dual functions through a consideration of the very naming process of the museum, its curatorial strategies, and its pedagogical orientations. The proposed pedagogy of listening and dialogue, which focuses visitors’ attention on victims’ personal stories and intergenerational dialogue, brings both consolation to survivors and learning opportunities for visitors. This paper argues that in order to fully realize the functions of HRE at NHRM, the meanings of traumatic memories should be explored, testimonies should be linked to an examination of the mechanisms used by the totalitarian regime, and discussions of contemporary human rights issues should be appropriately addressed.