From moral narratives to pedagogical closure: human rights education and child poverty in EFL textbooks

This article examines the role of action-oriented approaches within human rights education (HRE) and their implications for foreign language education. While such approaches are widely valued for promoting ethical engagement and learner agency, they may also contribute to premature pedagogical closure – the narrowing of interpretive space through pedagogical certainty about appropriate responses. Drawing on moral psychology, narrative theory, and political theory, the article explains why moral urgency tends to privilege rapid alignment over sustained reflection. It argues that action-oriented approaches can unintentionally marginalise independent judgement when moral positions and responses become implicitly prefigured. An analysis of German EFL textbooks illustrates how representations of child poverty are coupled with affective and action-oriented tasks that guide learners towards predefined responses. The article concludes that the challenge for HRE is not whether to foster ethical engagement, but how to do so while preserving interpretation, plurality, and independent judgement.