Teaching With Source Documents: The Declaration of Independence

Without a knowledge of the Declaration of Independence and its ideals, students have little hope of understanding American rhetoric and literature. Provide your advanced students with the opportunity to read the Declaration of Independence and debate its ideals.

(My opinions on the importance–and pitfalls–of teaching English and American culture from source documents are forthcoming and will be linked here.)

Skill Level:
Advanced students.

Materials Needed:
Individual copies of the Declaration of Independence for each students.
I’ve uploaded a bilingual English-Chinese copy of the Introduction & Preamble to the Declaration of Independence in .pdf format. Please feel free to use it in your class.
I found it to be very helpful to let the students refer to the translation for words they couldn’t find in their dictionaries; you may want to consider providing a translated copy for your students.

Instructions:
When I’ve taught the Declaration we’ve first gone through the Introduction and Preamble sentence by sentence to talk about the meanings of the words and what the ideas in the document are. Afterwards, we usually discuss the following:
1. The Declaration calls “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” “unalienable rights”. Do you agree that they are rights? What other rights do you think are (or should be) unalienable?
2. What parts of the Declaration do you especially like? What parts do you dislike?
3. The difference between ideals and reality. (Is America living up to the ideals of the Declaration?–This is something my kids love to get to talk about.)

That’s usually more than enough material to fill up an hour long class.

The Declaration is nuanced, so you might want to check out some of the following resources before teaching it.

Teaching Resources:
High-resolution images of the Declaration are available from the National Archives.
An annotated copy of the Declaration on Wikipedia gives good general information about the document’s structure.
SparkNotes provides useful notes on & questions about the Declaration.