Differential Rights Consciousness: How Teachers Differentiate between Students’ Privacy and their Own Privacy in the Surveillance School

The talk will describe a project exploring the role of law in school CCTV surveillance, focusing on a study that examined how teachers perceive students’ privacy. Findings indicated that almost all teachers noted the importance of their own privacy, and their justifications echoed privacy theories, but some of them dismissed the importance of students’ privacy.  We term this phenomenon differential rights consciousness––a situation in which individuals having the obligation to promote others’ rights consider their own rights while disregarding their subordinates’ rights. The conclusions offer explanations for this phenomenon, relying on the study of rights consciousness, perspective-taking and privacy.

Dr. Lotem Perry-Hazan is Head of the Educational Management Program and the Centre for Jewish and Democratic Education at the University of Haifa, Israel. Her research interests include children’s rights in education and the intersection of law, religion, and culture in education. Dr. Perry-Hazan is a graduate of NYU School of Law (LL.M., 2006) and the University of Haifa’s Faculty of Law (LL.B., 2004; Ph.D., 2011). She was a visiting scholar at the European Association for Education Law and Policy at Antwerp University (2012), Harvard University Graduate School of Education (2014), and Melbourne University Faculty of Education (2018). For her recent studies, Dr. Perry-Hazan was awarded research grants from the Israel Science Foundation, the Israel Ministry of Science, and the Rothschild-Caesarea Foundation.