Thomas C. Leaf
The First Amendment of the Constitution is the most widely invoked and well known Amendment; however it is not until American High School students take Civics class that they grapple with this Amendment. Indeed it is assumed by most that this Amendment is the best understood of all twenty-seven amendments. Furthermore the First Amendment is primarily dealt with as a legal text which does not encompass all of the possible forms of speech and written expression that the First Amendment protects and more importantly does not protect. The First Amendment also needs to be closely studied and practiced by High School students as it is one of the Amendments which is limited within a school building. Many students are not aware that their First Amendment rights are curtailed within a school and students need to understand why their rights are not fully endowed within the classroom.
To expose students to the First Amendment and illustrate it in practice, students need to work out their own understanding of the Amendment’s language and apply this language to bodies of text. To achieve this I propose students apply the First Amendment as it is understood outside the classroom and inside the classroom and in relation to literature. Specific texts for poetry, short fiction and song lyrics would prove to be easy texts to use in class for response writing and discussion. There are also pertinent cases which have to do with student expression that will be used as a primary text for the unit.
The cases that will be used as primary documents for this case will include two important Free Speech Cases that were directly connected to a high school environment. The first case that will be used is Tinker vs. Des Moines School District. In this case students contested their right for peaceable protest of the Vietnam War by wearing black armbands in school and during class. This was upheld as protected free speech as it did not interfere with the proceedings of class or the school day. The Hazelwood et al vs Kulheimer et al case illustrates what is considered to be protected free speech and what is not. In a school newspaper, students printed an article about teen pregnancy and a separate article about divorce and how it affects teens. The pregnancy article was censored due to its sexually graphic nature and reference to birth control. There was also a fear that students could be identified through the article even if their names were withheld. The divorce case sited a quotation from a student about the student’s father and his behavior. The objection to this aspect of the article was that the father’s name was used without consent and he was not given a chance to tell his side of the story. This case is very fascinating and pertinent to high school students as it connects to the use of the school newspaper and differentiates a school newspaper from a privately published newspaper. This case also illustrates a school faculty’s ability to editorialize student produced work in the context of the school news paper.
I am using these two cases because they show two distinct interpretations of the First Amendment and they also are used as a precedent for further adjudication over the First Amendment. These cases will be used in abbreviated form for the sake of class length and readability, but I will leave the text in tact so that students can see the language as it is used in courts and legal documents.
This unit will be closed by a major writing project. This writing project will also be an extension of the text rendering techniques employed during the unit. One of the key components of text rendering is student sharing. When students share their reactions and ideas in written form and receive reactions from their classmates there is a greater degree of ownership of ideas and enhancement of ideas by the process of sharing and reacting. At a key juncture in the writing process, students will be asked to peer edit each other’s rough drafts. This is a simple practice but can greatly enhance each student’s writing if they are able to freely exchange and evaluate each other’s work without fear of embarrassment. It may seem silly and doomed to failure, but there are quantifiable positive results to these practices that have been shown by the Connecticut Writing Project upon which NHBOE English Language Arts Standards are largely based.
