High School Workshops

Would you like a guest speaker or workshop facilitator to help explain the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to your classes? Our Civil Liberties in the Schools program provides free workshops in courses including Civics, Law, English, Family Studies, Social Justice, Equity, History, Indigenous Studies and other social science classes. We help teachers deliver curriculum on law, civil liberties, human rights, and the Charter, using a wide variety of resources including real legal cases and stories from the morning news. Workshops can be facilitated for classrooms, keynote addresses, student conferences, or school-wide events.

Through a combination of full-class discussion, smallgroup cooperative learning, and individual critical thinking strategies, students explore social justice issues and learn to ask questions that may not have easy answers. With resources and programming developed and delivered by certified teachers, academics, and lawyers, our program supports and fulfills curriculum expectations in many subject areas including Civics, Law, History, and Politics.

CCLET believes in a value-balancing approach that allows students to examine and debate legal and ethical dilemmas from multiple perspectives. Using principles that inform the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, CCLET provides teachers and students with a simplified framework for questioning many current and historic issues of fairness. Workshop leaders introduce an array of case studies for classroom discussion, from Supreme Court cases, to morning headlines, as well as students’ concerns within their own communities.

Should police be allowed to use dogs to conduct random searches in schools? Should a high school student be permitted to wear a t-shirt that has a controversial political slogan? Students explore these issues with a focus on identifying what is a reasonable or fair limit to the specific rights or freedoms raised by each case. Each year CCLET reaches over 10,000 primary to graduate level students, from a wide range of public, separate, and private educational institutions. And the demand for our programming continues to grow each year.

Please note that we require 3-4 weeks lead time to process workshop requests