I spent quite a lot of time thinking about independence this year. It isn’t that I hadn’t considered the Declaration of Independence through the lens of equality and inequality before, but a recent PD session at Academy for Teachers helped me think about independence in a historical way that I’d not really considered. The idea of using primary sources that echo the Declaration of Independence in our Declaration unit was born.

To begin this unit, the students and I did a group-read of the Declaration of Independence. Because they are in 8th grade, I still like to model how to read a primary source, so I modeled reading the preamble with them by showing them how to “chunk” and how I take margin notes on primary sources. They read the grievances together in pairs or groups of three, identifying which grievances are “abuse of power,” “lack of representation,” and “acts of war.” They also took margin notes connecting the grievances to the evidence they used in their causes of the American Revolution essays they had done a week or so prior. For the resolution part of the Declaration… we sang Taylor Swift’s “Never Getting Back Together.” (I couldn’t help myself. Thanks to Bernadette Bacaro for that idea!)

During our conversations about independence, the students made observations about who was in the room voting on independence. They had extensive experience with the process of getting to independence while watching 1776, so they were well prepared. Students noted the class (wealthy), race (white), and gender (men) of those in the Continental Congress as well as their status as enslavers or not. They discussed equality and who “all men are created equal” applies to- and they determined that was a very small group. Cue in the evidence to prove them right.

Students had a choice to read either the Declaration of Sentiments or What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? as their primary source investigation began. Because they don’t have much background knowledge of the time periods, 1848 and 1852, respectively, I chose two articles, one from Time and one from NEH, that I found appropriate to give them context before choosing a document. [You can find the articles in the lesson plan link below.] Once students chose the document that meant most to them personally or simply piqued their interest, they practiced their primary source reading skills again in pairs and answered the questions included about each document. I pulled What to the Slave is the Fourth of July and the corresponding questions from tolerance.org and the Declaration of Sentiments and the corresponding questions from NEH. My colleague, Thea, edited the questions to make sure they helped build their reading and analytical skills in an appropriate way.

Once students read, annotated, and answered questions about their documents, the real conversation began. First, we debriefed as a whole class to determine that we all understood our documents and ask for clarification about any part of it. Then, students worked in mixed-document groups and talked about what they read. They had to talk to each other about one takeaway, one line that stood out to them, what the document meant to them personally, and how it called upon the words of the Declaration to demand equality. The students really grappled with this, as they understood their Fourth of July celebrations to mean one thing, but that there was also hard history behind it.

The assessment for this unit (again, thanks, Thea!) is a blackout poem using one of the documents. Students are creating poetry using a page from the Declaration of Independence, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, or Declaration of Sentiments to express their feelings about equality, freedom, and liberty either in a historic context OR how they feel equality or inequality affects them personally.

To see the lesson plan (though, be aware that I deviated from it when necessary, hence this post explaining my method), click here.