Primary Source Exemplar: Human Rights, Conflict and Social Change

The culminating performance task for this unit allows students to demonstrate literacy skills, understanding, perspectives and the specific domain knowledge necessary to grapple with the essential questions. This can be an individual task or a collaborative performance task; along with individual tasks that contribute to the collaborative task, so that the teacher can evaluate individual performance.

Outline of Performance Task

The final performance task will be a formal argumentative speech written by the student regarding a current human rights violation. The speech should include reference to the specific Article or Articles of the UDHR being violated as well as evidence to support the argument that the UDHR is being violated. Additionally, the speech should address the issue of the competing notions of human rights that led to this conflict. Students will need to conduct research in order to gather their evidence. The argument should use traditional argument structure and should include a concession as well as claims and sub-claims. Finally, the speech should include at least 3 literary or rhetorical devices that impact the overall tone of the speech.