Looking for engaging civil liberties teaching materials? CCLET offers lesson plans, know-your-rights guides, and A.Alan Borovoy’s booklet “The Fundamentals of our Fundamental Freedoms” for use in high school classrooms. These materials help augment and deliver curriculum in many high school social studies courses. They can also assist teachers in covering controversial or difficult human rights and civil liberties topics. All of these resources engage people in critical thinking and weighing the importance of competing democratic values.
Please feel free to try out these resources in your classrooms and tell us how it went; or if you have a lesson plan or resource of your own that you would like to share with us, we’d love to hear from you! Simply email us at firstname.lastname@example.org.
Making difficult decisions about justice and fairness in a democracy requires the ability to balance conflicting rights and freedoms.
CCLET’s Acorn Test
Rules and laws are important but are they always fair? The Acorn test was developed by the CCLET as a tool for helping individuals decide whether or not a rule that limits rights or freedoms is reasonable. The Acorn Test is so named because it is a simplified version of the Oakes Test – a legal analysis established by the Supreme Court of Canada to assess the reasonability of a limitation on a right or freedom found in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Is it fair to place age limits on voting rights? Click here to apply CCLET’s Acorn test to help you decide.
The Fundamentals of our Fundamental Freedoms
The Fundamentals of our Fundamental Freedoms is an excellent primer on civil liberties and democracy written by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s former General Counsel, A. Alan Borovoy. This guide, written in easy to follow language, is a great foundation for students wanting to learn more about their rights and freedoms.
LGBTQ Rights in Schools
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association and Education Trust have created a guide to LGBTQ rights in schools. This resource will help students, allies, and teachers better understand students’ rights, and how to take positive action toward making schools a safer place for all. Click here to read the full guide.