On July 29, 2016, Illinois became a New Voices state when the Speech Rights of Student Journalists Act (HB 5902) became law. The Illinois Journalism Education Association was elated at the bill’s passage, but we also recognized the responsibility that this legislation necessitated to both understand and nurture our state’s scholastic media advisers and staffs in this new era.

Therefore, in order to provide direction, context, and support to scholastic journalism advisers in our state, the Illinois Journalism Education Association has created this curriculum to use with your journalism students and media staffs.

How to Use This Curriculum

The curriculum is built to be flexible. It can be used in any increment that fits your needs – from one to five days in length (or even 10 days, if all reading is completed during class and extra project ideas are used). Please note that no strictly objective assessments are included in this curriculum because those materials are available through the Journalism Education Association Curriculum and other textbook or open educational resources. Instead, we hope that you formatively assess throughout this project-based, experiential curriculum in order to benefit your student journalists and media staffs personally and directly. Also, each day is tied to Common Core State Standards.

Regardless of how you use it, we ask that you both push and allow your students to dive deep into the law and ethics that both protect and hold accountable their work as scholastic journalists.

As much as possible, we also ask you to share the materials and writings students create with the various stakeholders for student media – administrators, school boards, school colleagues, local media, community members, and the like. We want to reinforce the concept that the students in our newsrooms are journalists — with all the power and responsibility that designation confers.

Scholastic Media & Law Ethics Curriculum in New Voices Illinois <– Download Here

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact Amanda Bright, IJEA Co-Secretary and At-Large Board Member, at [email protected]. Also, feel free to share stories of success, adaptation, or other anecdotes about how you’ve implemented the curriculum with your student media staffs with Amanda or in the comments section below. We’d love to hear from you!