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Classroom Activities

Below you will find some suggested activities for the classroom -- and beyond -- that can help you become a more active citizen-scholar. Along with this website as a whole, these activities are intended to encourage you to think and talk with others both on campus and beyond about why all of us need to know the Constitution more intimately, both as engaged citizens and as members or prospective members of specific disciplines and professions.

 

Share your ideas for classroom activities in specific courses at our Constitution Day web log. Contributing to this website will help sustain Constitution Day not only across the curriculum ... but also throughout this year and subsequent years.

 

Have students read the U.S. Constitution regardless of the subject matter you teach (the Constitution takes roughly one hour to read, including Amendments). You will find the Constitution in several different print and digital formats on the "Learn about the Constitution" page of this website.

Discuss the Constitution in class and ask students where they found passages that made them think of the subject of this class or their prospective discipline or profession.

Discuss what a constitution does: What does it mean for a piece of writing "to constitute" a political entity? What documents "constitute" us as individuals or as members of groups?

 

After reading and discussing the U.S. Constitution, have students read and discuss "founding documents" of your discipline or profession. A few examples include:

• The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Modern Language Association
• Association for Information Systems
• American Marketing Association
• American Guild of Organists

In addition to discussing the specific founding documents of your discipline or profession, talk together about how these documents compare and contrast in intent and substance with the U.S. Constitution. How does a professional code of ethics, for instance, differ from a constitution?

 

After reading and discussing the U.S. Constitution, have students read and discuss the constitution of another country. You will find links to several other constitutions on the "Citizenship Resources" page of this website.

 

After reading and discussing the U.S. Constitution, find a current news or opinion article that describes a constitutional issue relating to your discipline. The University Libraries offers many excellent search engines where you or your students can find such articles. And Penn State's newspaper readership program gives students the opportunity to find such articles in their everyday reading.

Have students post to a course listserv or blog about the issue, or invite them to give short in-class speeches about the issue or to debate it in class. Student speeches don't have to take up class time; they can be recorded and podcast either on ANGEL (an intranet) or, with students' permission, on public internet sites.

Finally, consider assigning students to write letters to the editor of professional publications, magazines, or newspapers about current issues of public concern in their fields that relate to the Constitution. Such activities help students learn that their academic and professional expertise can and should transfer into public forums. Students writing about professional issues of public concern in their hometown newspapers can be particularly powerful.

 

Find other ideas for in-class and beyond-class activities on the "Constitution Across the Curriculum" page of this website.