Digital Age Innovation Project
Part I:
I intend to encourage students to research and learn their civil rights both in the classroom and outside of school. I want students to know when their teacher comes up to them and asks that they hand over their phone whether or not it is their legal right to say no and keep a firm grip on it. I want students to know about the restrictions on their freedoms of speech and expression on campus. I want students to know exactly how rules at school and legal precedent relate to one another. The idea is not to create rebellious little monsters but to bring students out of the dark. A vast majority of adolescents have no idea what rights they have on campus let alone the rights that they are lucky enough to enjoy outside of school. The research, experimentation and reflection that students do on their rights at school will get them thinking and familiar with where to get information on their civil liberties. They will track down landmark cases, seek legal opinions and analyze hypothetical situations that could turn into a reality at some point in the future. In the digital age, all of this information is archived in various electronic spaces from the gargantuan legal archives of LexisNexis and Westlaw to the more navigable digital content put out by the ACLU.
To introduce students to the idea of civil rights on a high school campus I will present them with several landmark cases taken to various levels of litigation. These cases will be selected purposefully to capture the attention of the class and get them thinking about issues of civil rights that have no clear answer. Our lesson will involve an interactive introduction to the legal rights of young people. We will create mock conflicts where each student has a part to play that must be researched and recorded thoroughly through digital resources. These conflicts will begin small, for example the situation where a teacher asks for a student’s phone. As we manage to find more information and broaden the knowledge of the class these conflicts will be elevated, for example a situation where a police officer suspects one of the students is an accessory to a criminal act. Students will research ways to preserve their civil rights in the face of adversity. Their findings will be shared and reviewed online with peers. Ideally students will uncover for themselves that not knowing their civil rights is literally dangerous even to a person that may honestly intend on spending their whole life without ever breaking a law.
Part II:
In my Digital Age Project, Part I, students were asked to research one of several roles in a confrontation between a young person and an authority figure. After using technology to research several cases that involved the rights of young people they were asked to implement that research in developing a defense or persecution in a hypothetical situation.
Students were first given a hypothetical situation that roughly corresponded to an actual case that the students had been instructed to brief. The reading of the cases and any notations made on the case were done electronically. Then they took on a role of one of the parties within that situation. For example, in one situation I had a student that allegedly jaywalked across the street onto his high school campus, which turned into a confrontation. I turned this into a five person assignment. We had the accused jaywalker, a city police officer that claimed the student jaywalked, a bystander/fellow student that witnessed the events, the assistant principal of the school who was unable to see the actual event but arrived after the fact to discuss the conflict and the lawyer of the person who jaywalked. Each party then had to play their role but could not break any law or protocol in defending or persecuting the alleged jaywalker. The first time we ran through the scenario the students were able to use any device to look back on specifics of other cases we had accessed and the rulings made there. However when we ran through the hypothetical a second time, only the lawyer and bystander had access to technology. They were able to use that technology to support or refute the claims of the alleged jaywalker and the police officer.
At the conclusion of the mock conflicts, students shared their experiences on an online forum and were asked to vote on which methods of defense or persecution within the stipulations of the law were the most effective. Because some of the situations involved blaming young people of a crime they did not commit, students were able to see the danger in being ignorant of their basic civil liberties. In several of these situations I told the students that they were entirely innocent beforehand so they did not need to worry too much about researching their part. This had the intended consequence of putting these students into the conflict without the tools necessary to ensure fair treatment.
Each member of the team left the lesson with a better understanding of not only what their rights were but also how to access information about these rights and how use them as a defense in a situation where they are being legitimately or wrongfully accused of any misdoing.
Part I:
I intend to encourage students to research and learn their civil rights both in the classroom and outside of school. I want students to know when their teacher comes up to them and asks that they hand over their phone whether or not it is their legal right to say no and keep a firm grip on it. I want students to know about the restrictions on their freedoms of speech and expression on campus. I want students to know exactly how rules at school and legal precedent relate to one another. The idea is not to create rebellious little monsters but to bring students out of the dark. A vast majority of adolescents have no idea what rights they have on campus let alone the rights that they are lucky enough to enjoy outside of school. The research, experimentation and reflection that students do on their rights at school will get them thinking and familiar with where to get information on their civil liberties. They will track down landmark cases, seek legal opinions and analyze hypothetical situations that could turn into a reality at some point in the future. In the digital age, all of this information is archived in various electronic spaces from the gargantuan legal archives of LexisNexis and Westlaw to the more navigable digital content put out by the ACLU.
To introduce students to the idea of civil rights on a high school campus I will present them with several landmark cases taken to various levels of litigation. These cases will be selected purposefully to capture the attention of the class and get them thinking about issues of civil rights that have no clear answer. Our lesson will involve an interactive introduction to the legal rights of young people. We will create mock conflicts where each student has a part to play that must be researched and recorded thoroughly through digital resources. These conflicts will begin small, for example the situation where a teacher asks for a student’s phone. As we manage to find more information and broaden the knowledge of the class these conflicts will be elevated, for example a situation where a police officer suspects one of the students is an accessory to a criminal act. Students will research ways to preserve their civil rights in the face of adversity. Their findings will be shared and reviewed online with peers. Ideally students will uncover for themselves that not knowing their civil rights is literally dangerous even to a person that may honestly intend on spending their whole life without ever breaking a law.
Part II:
In my Digital Age Project, Part I, students were asked to research one of several roles in a confrontation between a young person and an authority figure. After using technology to research several cases that involved the rights of young people they were asked to implement that research in developing a defense or persecution in a hypothetical situation.
Students were first given a hypothetical situation that roughly corresponded to an actual case that the students had been instructed to brief. The reading of the cases and any notations made on the case were done electronically. Then they took on a role of one of the parties within that situation. For example, in one situation I had a student that allegedly jaywalked across the street onto his high school campus, which turned into a confrontation. I turned this into a five person assignment. We had the accused jaywalker, a city police officer that claimed the student jaywalked, a bystander/fellow student that witnessed the events, the assistant principal of the school who was unable to see the actual event but arrived after the fact to discuss the conflict and the lawyer of the person who jaywalked. Each party then had to play their role but could not break any law or protocol in defending or persecuting the alleged jaywalker. The first time we ran through the scenario the students were able to use any device to look back on specifics of other cases we had accessed and the rulings made there. However when we ran through the hypothetical a second time, only the lawyer and bystander had access to technology. They were able to use that technology to support or refute the claims of the alleged jaywalker and the police officer.
At the conclusion of the mock conflicts, students shared their experiences on an online forum and were asked to vote on which methods of defense or persecution within the stipulations of the law were the most effective. Because some of the situations involved blaming young people of a crime they did not commit, students were able to see the danger in being ignorant of their basic civil liberties. In several of these situations I told the students that they were entirely innocent beforehand so they did not need to worry too much about researching their part. This had the intended consequence of putting these students into the conflict without the tools necessary to ensure fair treatment.
Each member of the team left the lesson with a better understanding of not only what their rights were but also how to access information about these rights and how use them as a defense in a situation where they are being legitimately or wrongfully accused of any misdoing.