Since the beginning of public education in the United States, there has been a strong tradition of viewing schools as the mechanism for preparing young people for their role as citizens in a democratic society. Moreover, citizenship education has held a foundational place in social studies classrooms. However, despite this central focus of social studies education, educators cannot seem to agree on what citizenship education should look like nor what a "good" citizen is. An additional layer to the complexity of teaching social studies is that teachers in this field are increasingly being called on to teach human rights topics which underpin cosmopolitan citizenship. Cosmopolitan citizenship stands paradoxical to nationalist ideologies of citizenship that are traditionally embedded in social studies curriculum. Given the tensions and challenges outlined above, the field of social studies education can benefit from additional scholarship to uncover how teachers and department chairs understand the relationship between DCE and HRE and the potential influence on their teaching. To this end, this dissertation asks: 1) What do social studies teachers tasked with teaching human rights and department chairs who oversee these teachers identify as the purpose of human rights education? 2) How do these teachers and department chairs conceptualize the relationship between democratic citizenship education and human rights education? and 3) In what ways are these teachers' and department chairs' conceptualizations of citizenship reflected in both human rights education curriculum and instruction? This study uses a qualitative comparative case study approach across a horizontal axis to answer the research questions. Findings suggest human rights educators are thinking about and enacting citizenship education in complex, sometimes overlapping ways with human rights education, and human rights educators are unintentionally developing citizens who carry a human rights lens. This study presents rich, descriptive qualitative data depicting how citizenship education is being though about and carried out in human rights classrooms. Implications for human rights education, social studies education, citizenship education, and future research are explored. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]