A few suggestions on how to celebrate Constitution Day

Thursday is Constitution Day, and there’s no shortage of ways for journalism educators to celebrate it.

The Colorado Student Media Association, for example, suggests spending 15 minutes discussing this article by Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark: “Hey, what’s the big idea — about journalism?” The discussion would focus on why we do journalism and how those reasons tie into our rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

JEA’s Scholastic Press Rights Commission, meanwhile, offers seven different lessons that journalism teachers can use. These range from a daylong, schoolwide Constitution Day celebration to a discussion of prior review vs. prior restraint to a series of activities focusing on censorship and broadcast video.

As a last-minute addition, here are four of my own suggestions, based on my belief that spirited debate should be the norm in any healthy journalism class. Any one of these activities can be done in a day, or they can begin on Constitution Day and stretch over a number of class sessions:

1. Have students read the entire Constitution and its amendments, not just the First Amendment.
Then ask them to discuss their reactions candidly. Is the Constitution what they expected? Why or why not? Did their eyes glaze over when they were reading? If so, where and why? Is it possible that all the admirers of the Constitution are wrong — that it’s not a great document and, in fact, might be severely flawed in places, even after 27 amendments? What can be said in its defense?

2. Have students identify key rights, protections or guarantees they believe are still missing from the Constitution.
Ask: Why should those rights, protections or guarantees be there? What might explain their absence? What does that tell us about our society? Challenge them, and have them challenge each other.

3. Have students write an amendment for something important they believe is still missing from the Constitution.
Then have them devise a realistic strategy for getting the amendment approved by Congress (two-thirds of both the House and Senate) and ratified by the required number of states (three-fourths).

4. Read the original Constitution side by side with the Confederate constitution.
Ask: How do they compare? What do the differences say about the Confederacy and its aims? What do the differences say about our own republic?

Then, regardless of which activity you’ve chosen, ask the students who had the most heated disagreements to expand on their arguments by writing opinion columns for your student newspaper or website. A point-counterpoint format would be fine, but don’t feel limited to that.

Here’s the key point. In all likelihood, by the end of the activity your students will have become intellectually engaged while discussing the fundamental legal document of our country. A text that may have seemed dry as dust to them at the beginning will have turned into a source of vigorous debate. They’ll have understood why the Constitution matters.

Believe it or not, this is how good journalism works. Good journalists routinely take important but forbidding (sometimes boring) subjects and turn them into something compelling for their audience. If everything goes right on Constitution Day, your students will get to do that for themselves.