"Primary Source Exemplar: Human Rights, Conflict and Social Change” by
Catherine Hart under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0
www.oercommons.orghttps://www.oercommons.org/authoring/5483-primary-source-exemplar-human-rights-conflict-and-
they know who fought against these human rights violations. The teacher might also ask how
these people fought against human rights violations and guide students to an understanding of
the significance of argument and speech in fighting human rights violations. Using their ideas
and filling in as necessary, the teacher should tell students that they are going to look at an
apartheid speech given by Nelson Mandela. Students should read the text first for an
understanding of its overall argument. Then the teacher should guide the class in a discussion
of the connection between the speech and the UDHR. In other words, how did Mandela use
the UDHR to support his overall argument?
If desired, the teacher can next use this text to review structure of argument and argument
analysis/evaluation, and students can be asked to analyze Mandela’s speech just as they
analyzed Roosevelt’s speech. Additionally, the teacher can ask students to write and submit an
overall evaluation of Mandela’s speech.
Model and demonstrate desired learning
The teacher should ask students what makes a speech different than other forms of texts, such
as declarations. Students should be encouraged to compare/contrast the structure of a speech
as compared to the structure of the UDHR.
The teacher should introduce the idea of literary non-fiction and ask students what makes a
speech memorable.
The teacher should choose a small portion of Mandela’s speech (2- 3 paragraphs) and ask
students to look for elements that make the text literary non-fiction. The teacher should be
sure to emphasize the use of literary devices, the use of repetition and other rhetorical
strategies, and the connotation of significant words.
The teacher should guide students in a discussion of literary and rhetorical elements used in
the speech and the impact they have on the meaning and tone of the speech. This discussion
should be driven first by what the students noticed on their own. After exhausting those
elements the students discovered for themselves, the teacher should guide students to discover
more through questioning. For example, if the teacher chooses to model this type of literary
analysis as it is applied to non-fiction using paragraphs 3 and 4, the teacher might ask
questions such as the following:
What is the significance of the word “crime” in the 3rd paragraph?