Expanding the First Amendment: State Laws and Student Voice
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Description: This lesson is intended to help students gain a better understanding of how state laws may expand student press rights beyond the First Amendment, as limited by Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier. Students will use SPLC.org to research their state’s status to see if it already has a New Voices law or an active New Voices campaign. All students will explore SPLC’s New Voices FAQ to learn more about New Voices and evaluate how press freedom might change or impact their educational experiences. If they live in a state with a New Voices law, they will read it and evaluate the extent to which their experience of press freedom aligns with that law. If they do not live in a state with a New Voices law, they will pick a NV law to explore. All students will reflect on what they have learned from this process by evaluating the legality of their current press freedom and discussing next steps for personal action.
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Description
Regardless of how much you have touched on student First Amendment rights in class, get your students competing to test their knowledge of specific laws, court cases that shape their speech and publication rights at school and the resources available to them. Additional suggestions are provided for discussion and applying the concepts to your specific school.
- Students will demonstrate knowledge of the First Amendment rights available to them at school.
- Students will assess their knowledge of the history of student press rights and its application
- Students will apply knowledge of relevant laws and history to their own publication policy.
Protest and the First Amendment
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Description:
This lesson is intended to help students gain a better understanding of the legalities that protect the right to protest as outlined in the First Amendment, and to appreciate the importance of journalism in accurately covering protest. Finally, students will be able to review examples of protest coverage, best practices for covering protests, and will be able to apply their knowledge to a variety of protest coverage scenarios.
Objectives:
- Students will be able to define protected forms of protest as defined in the First Amendment.
- Students will articulate the importance of journalism in accurately covering protest.
- Students will discuss best practices for covering protest in various scenarios.
Know Your News
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Description
With the election year upon us, it’s getting harder for students to find factual, unbiased news. This lesson focuses on teaching media biases through the scope of identifying and analyzing media coverage.
Objectives
• Students will gain a deeper understanding of how to analyze news sources and determine their own biases.
• Students will further develop their own media literacy, allowing them to understand the biases of the news they read in everyday life.
• Students will analyze, dissect and classify news articles by political bias to create thorough and elaborate interpretations using textual evidence to justify rationale.
Working to develop ethical fitness
It’s the perfect storm as Covid-19, questions of police brutality and subsequent violent protestor response mix into an already seething atmosphere of political unease. Each of these issues alone could deeply stress scholastic journalism’s ethical framework.
Together, these and many other questions and incidents, will provide scholastic media students with challenges as they strive to become ethically fit as they bring national issues into local perspective.
Mark’s presentation dealt with legal rights and rules when covering protests. Ethical questions are more like whether students should report the incident. How report it? What if….
Information in this blog is created for a presentation to scholastic teachers, advisers and students Aug. 5 through remote connection to an AEJMC workshop. Please feel free to use it. Links are stories illustrating or about the ethical issue.
Law is “will;” ethics is “should.”
Ethical decisions likely will have varying possible solutions, with few rights or wrongs. Ethical thinking is often about the process as much as the decision.
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