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Know Your News
Return to Front cover Constitution Day 2020
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.
Voting, Voice and the Constitution
Return to Front cover Constitution Day 2020
Description
The American Constitution did not originally afford everyone the right to vote. In fact, the Constitution itself did not specify who was allowed; states set the rules and they mostly only allowed white, land-owning males to vote. This unit introduces the 15th and the 19th amendments to the United States Constitution, amendments that respectively afforded black men and all women voting rights. The activities provoke analysis of primary documents (including historical newspapers), challenge students to consider voting rights in contemporary contexts, and encourage them to consider relationships between voice, activism, the press and voting.
Read MoreProtest and the First Amendment
Return to Front cover Constitution Day 2020
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.
Protecting student voices trivia
Return to Front cover Constitution Day 2020
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.
Expanding the First Amendment: State Laws and Student Voice
Return to Front cover Constitution Day 2020
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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