Honors Program
Date of this Version
5-2023
Document Type
Article
Citation
Greff, P. (2023). Teaching the Criminal Amendments of the United States Constitution: A lesson plan for college instructors in Nebraska. Undergraduate Honors Thesis. University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Abstract
In order to mitigate situations where students are unprepared for interactions within the criminal justice system, this project seeks to provide college instructors with a standardized curriculum to educate college students in Nebraska in regard to their Criminal Amendment rights (the rights found in the 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution) and how to apply those rights. While the curriculum focuses particularly on preparing students for police interactions, the curriculum also includes material pertaining to student interactions with the courts. Although the ideal would be for every college student to simply take Criminology and Criminal Justice 101, it would ultimately be too burdensome to have every college student take an additional 3 credit hour class to graduate. Therefore, it was decided through research and reason that the most effective way to implement an applied knowledge project is by having all college students in Nebraska take a standardized four-week course on what their Criminal Amendment rights are and how they can confidently apply them. The material chosen for the lesson plan was based off a much-abbreviated version of Criminology and Criminal Justice 101 classes. Multiple concepts and teaching methods were extracted from criminal justice classes. All efforts were made to obtain permission and give credit to the teachers whose concepts or teaching methods were used in the creation of this lesson plan.
Comments
"Copyright Peter J. Greff 2023"