3. How to Use My Rights and Responsibilities
This activity aims for students to learn ways to be responsible based on their rights.
Discuss
You have learned about some of your rights, and these rights come with responsibilities. These rights and responsibilities matter to you and how you live your life every day. Knowing your rights and practicing your responsibilities helps you advocate for yourself and what you want. Let’s learn more about our responsibilities.
After watching this video, who can share a way they have advocated for themselves? Is it easy or hard to do? What helps you when you need to advocate for yourself?
Review
The Rights Scenario Cards contain various situations that you may have experienced before, you may experience in the future, or you may never experience related to your disability rights. The challenge is knowing what to do if you or someone you know ever faces one of these situations. Review these scenarios to explore, discuss, or debate various ways to handle the situation using self-advocacy skills. There are multiple ways to handle these situations so there is no right or wrong answer.
- Instructor Assisted: Instructors can select scenarios and demonstrate how to think through the situation. Ensure students are able to follow discussion and provide prompts to support engagement.
- Guided Activity: Instructors can review a scenario to help students understand the purpose. Students can then work together or individually to read through scenarios and then share ideas on how to handle the situation.
- Independent Activity: Students can work independently or in groups to explore the situation and talk through their ideas. Instructors can have students share their discussion on how they would handle the situation.
Reflect
Now that you have learned about rights and responsibilities, complete the Rights and Responsibilities section of the Self-Evaluation Worksheet.
Extending the Conversation
If you have a developmental disability, you learned about additional rights in Activity 2 of this lesson. It is helpful to know about your rights because you have many rights to make decisions for yourself. It is also important to know that with your rights come responsibilities.
Review
In a small group or individually, students will use the Knowing My Responsibilities Worksheet that lists each of the rights they learned about in the Bill of Rights video in Activity 2. Learners will review a right listed and then fill in their responsibility related to that right in the empty bubble. Based on time, do as many as you can. There is an example on the first page.