I’m writing to offer a warm welcome back to school from OJEN, and to provide an update on some of the school-based programs, new and old, that we’ll be offering this year.
OOCMT
All of our criminal mock trials (ojen.ca/oocmt) will be back in full force this year! Headed up by OJEN’s OOCMT Program Manager, Amelia Berot-Burns (aberotburns@ojen.ca), this year’s mock trial will focus on criminal harassment.
Charter Challenge
This year marks the exciting return of the Charter Challenge – Ontario’s only mock constitutional appeal for high school students. Stay tuned for the announcement of this year’s topical case scenario, to be unveiled in the coming weeks.
Courthouse and Classroom visits
It’s with great excitement that we introduce you to Antoine Fougère-Ramsamooj (afougereramsamooj@ojen.ca), our new Francophone project leader. You can read about Antoine’s experience here! While you can book a courthouse or classroom visit through our website, if you are experiencing delays or have any questions about the process, he will be happy to point you in the right direction.
Apps for Justice Challenge
This initiative, piloted in 2023 and renewed in 2024, is set to resume this spring. A time-flexible program, the Apps for Justice Challenge is a creative, collaborative way to explore access to justice (A2J) issues, as well as fundamental legal concepts and areas of law, through the lens of technology.
Poster Challenge
While the pandemic saw this program shrink in scale, we had many submissions last year, enough to warrant a full-fledged re-engagement across the province for Grade 5 students! Don’t miss out on the great opportunity this fall to work with your students to introduce them to core concepts of justice in Canadian society.
Resources
While we’ve produced a lot of new Steps to Justice workshops for teachers in the last few years, this year we’ve spent our time developing a podcast, putting out our annual classrooom-ready copy of the Top Five Cases of the Year, as well as revamping some fundamental family law resources.
You can access our new podcast, Law Syrup, here!
The Top Five, as delivered by Justice Lorne Sossin of the Ontario Court of Appeal, are here.
The revamped suite of family law resources will be available for you on our website in the coming weeks.
That’s it from Educator Support for now. As always, we welcome your emails, ideas for collaboration, and questions.
Best of luck this semester, and I’ll speak to many of you soon!
Bryn (brieger@ojen.ca)
and the Educator Support team at OJEN