Exploring the Freedom Dreams of Past Generations: Culminating Lesson

About This Lesson

In this lesson, students choose three or four primary source documents encountered throughout their year-long study of US history in order to analyze how the individual or groups in the documents pursued their freedom dreams. Students will use these examples to envision the kinds of positive change they would like to see in their own communities, the nation, and the world, and reflect on the tools they need to enact such change.

Essential Question

How can I make real the ideals of freedom and democracy?

Guiding Question

What freedom dreams have people pursued throughout US history?

Learning Objectives

Students will analyze primary sources in order to explore the freedom dreams of past generations and the lessons they hold for us today.

Lesson Plan

Activity 1: Review Learning from the Previous Day

Provide students with the opportunity to review their learning from the previous day. Ask students to revisit the working definition of “freedom dreaming” they created in the opening activity of Lesson 1, and give them the opportunity to add any new ideas to their definitions based on their notes and learning from the previous day.

Activity 2: Complete a Freedom Dreams Graphic Organizer

In the next activity, students will select three or four primary source documents that they have encountered throughout their year-long study of US history in order to analyze the freedom dreams individuals expressed at the time, the power that they had to express or achieve their freedom dream, and the obstacles that stood in their way.  

Divide the class into table groups of between three or four students, and give each group a folder with six primary source documents (see “Teaching Note 1” for more information about selecting sources.) Then pass out the Freedom Dreams Graphic Organizer and read the directions aloud to students. 

Model the activity by sharing the example provided in the first line of the graphic organizer, which uses the document “What the Black Man Wants” from an 1865 speech by Frederick Douglass that appears in the 3-week unit on Reconstruction.  

Regroup and ask volunteers to share summaries of their small-group discussion, especially their responses to the following prompts from the graphic organizer:

• Identify levers of power for this individual or group. (Who or what helps/helped them enact their freedom dream?) 
• Identify limits on the power of this individual or group. (Who or what stands/stood in the way of their freedom dream?)

Activity 3: Discuss the Lessons of the Past

Return to whole group and discuss the following questions as a class: 

• What can we learn from the past efforts of Americans to secure their rights and freedoms in the United States? What can we learn from the opposition they faced? 
• What tools have these individuals and groups left for us to pick up as we try to achieve democracy and freedom today?