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Pluses and Minuses of a Secondary School World History Text
Ane Lintvedt
McDonogh School, Owings Mills, Maryland
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OUR DEPARTMENT has been using World History: Patterns of Interaction by Roger Beck, Linda Black, Larry Krieger, Linda Naylor, and Dahia Shabaka, published by McDougal Littell (Evanston IL, 1999), as the text for a two-year, freshman- and sophomore-level, regular (as opposed to honors or Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate) high school World History course.1 We have tried to construct our course along the themes, topics, and eras of the new global approach to world history,2 and this text was the best fit we could find, taking into consideration student ability-levels, but it is not a perfect fit. It contains a great deal of material from World History: Perspectives on the Past (D.C.Heath) by Larry Krieger, Kenneth Neill, and Edward Reynolds. We used the Krieger text for a dozen years, in several editions, for teaching European history, but we felt it was too Eurocentric to be useful in a world history class. The new World History: Patterns of Interaction (which I will call "the Beck text") makes several large strides toward becoming a useful text for world history classes, although it still retains a Eurocentric/West-and-the-Rest structure as it gets into more modern times. |
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The Beck text comes with a large array of printed and technology-based support materials.3 We have found that these supplements require widely-varying student ability levels. The booklets of primary and secondary documents, called "In-depth Resources," have been very useful in our classes. They provide accessible primary- and secondary-source documents, and can be adapted to class discussions or to homework assignments. The authors have made laudable efforts to include women's voices and experiences in the document selections, but there are very few lower-class voices, male or female. One significant flaw is that the authorship of the documents is sometimes not noted, and that can lead to some very skewed readings.4 Particularly noteworthy are "Guided Reading" charts that are provided for each section of each chapter as part of the "In-depth Resources" booklets. They have been tremendously effective tools to help visual learners and weak readers, as well as strong ones, learn how to find and take notes on the major ideas in a text. |
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The four video tapes, with appealing titles, such as "Trade Connects the World: Silk Roads and the Pacific Rim," are inadequate and disappointing. Each video cassette has two lessons (each in English and Spanish), but they are only ten minutes long, and are narrated at a very basic level. The "Geography Skills and Outline Maps" booklet is slim, with only eight skills worksheets, but containing twenty-eight outline maps which teachers may find useful. It won't replace an atlas, however. The "Lesson Plans" are very basic, and generally repeat suggestions in the Teacher's Annotated Edition. |
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The "Formal Assessment" booklet contains section quizzes and chapter tests in basic and advanced forms, all of which can be supplemented by the Mac/PC disks of the Test Generator kit. The questions that assess specific data, such as the multiple choice, matching, map and chart work are quite good. The short-answer ("critical thinking") questions are of uneven quality. They frequently rely on the "what-do-you-think" format and students are most often instructed to "answer briefly." These directions are not likely to produce a well-developed, analytical response. |
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Bells and whistles aside, the Beck text is a combination of strengths and weaknesses. Its strengths lie in the well-written prose, the thoughtfully constructed section and chapter assessments, and the lavish (if sometimes distracting) illustrations. The authors avoid the sin of "writing down" to high school students: they present some very sophisticated ideas in language well-suited to the developing minds of adolescents. Unfortunately, in the need to be concise, sometimes the ideas are presented without adequate supporting evidence or explanation. This is something that the teachers need to watch: classroom elaboration is almost always necessary. The chapters are usually divided into four sections of about three to four pages in length, and one section is an appropriate length for an overnight homework assignment. |
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My favorite part of the Beck text is the section assessment.5 After each section, there are "terms" to define, a "taking notes" exercise, an "evaluation question," and a "critical thinking question." The questions are marvelous reviews as well as thought-provoking. They cannot be answered with a sentence lifted directly from the reading: the information must be synthesized. Assigned as homework, used as discussion or group work topics, or used as test questions, these reviews are a wonderful way to teach students how to read a text. |
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The Beck text makes good use of illustrations, including maps and charts, and usually makes sure these are referred to or integrated into the text. There is also a curricular-wide attempt to highlight science and technology, which is interesting to students and teachers alike. In the Teacher's Annotated Edition, there are marginal notes about how to use these and other illustrations to enhance the themes of a chapter. For schools that follow a block schedule, there are always suggestions about how to work on building a portfolio, as well as many other research as well as cooperative activities. |
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The weaknesses of the Beck text lie
primarily in its not-very-distant past as a "West-and-the-Rest"
style world history book, and for this and several other reasons,
it is difficult to use with a global approach. In the second unit,
entitled "New Directions in Government and Society, 2000 B.C.–A.D.
700," for example, Classical Greece and Ancient Rome and Early Christianity
receive as much text space as India, China, all of Africa, and the
Americas combined.
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For a European/Western Civilizations class, this is a boon, but
not for a world history class. We had to cut-and-paste reading assignments
in order to emphasize an interconnected Eurasia that did not, in
fact, revolve around Greco-Roman cultures. My students did not need
a section on the Peloponnesian Wars, for example, but they did need
to understand how a Roman noblewoman could acquire a silk toga,
when only the Chinese could produce silk cloth, and yet there was
no direct trade between the Roman Empire and Han China. |
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This Eurocentrism becomes more extreme
in the last four units of the book: 1500–1900 (Absolutism to
Revolution); 1700–1914 (Industrialism and the Race for Empire);
1900–1945 (World at War); 1945–Present (Perspectives on
the Present). The non-European world is often reduced to sideline
status as European powers (and later, the United States) democratize,
industrialize, colonize, and fight. There is no denying that European
powers dominated world affairs from ca. 1750 to 1914, but the way
the Beck text is organized, students come away with the concept
that Europeans dominated world affairs for 450 years. This being
said, there are significant discussions about non-Western reactions
and resistances to European incursions. In order to emphasize a
less-Eurocentric approach, it is possible to "cut and paste" reading
assignments and weave together a more global interpretation assuming
that the teacher knows what the global themes are, and where to
find guidance from other materials. |
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In states which require world history competency exams that emphasize the "civilizations" approach – comparing who ruled, types of laws, types of economies, wars, etc. – it seems to me that this book would work particularly well.7 It will not, however, be appropriate for an Advanced Placement class, both because of its 9th and 10th grade level of discourse, and because the AP exam will be constructed with the global approach to world history scholarship in mind.8World History: Patterns of Interaction is not easy to use with a global approach to world history, and yet, it works better than any other high school text I have seen, if one is willing to do some creative reordering of reading assignments and a little supplementing from other sources in order to play down the Eurocentrism. There are a great many things to like about this textbook; in particular, its fit with 9th and 10th grade reading and analytical abilities, and its emphasis on developing good history reading skills. |
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Notes
1
The authors' names do not appear on the cover of the text, and are not mentioned until the 34th page of the introductory materials in the Annotated Teacher's Edition. Within the teaching community, people are referring to this text as "the McDougal Littell text". I prefer to give credit to the authors, so I will refer to it as the Beck text.
2
The "global" approach to World History is one that emphasizes the connections and interactions between human communities across major eras, rather than the "parade of civilizations" approach that goes through each civilization one after another. The global approach also strives to remove European or Western-centric, teleological approaches by reworking standard chronologies and some terminologies.
3
There are Spanish translations for almost every supplementary booklet; we do not use them, and I do not read Spanish, so I am unable to evaluate them. We have not used the chapter summaries on audio-cassettes, either.
4
For example, there is an excerpt of the misogynist biography of the Chinese empress Wu Zhao (In-Depth Resources, Unit 3) for which no author is noted, nor is there any explanation given of why the author would be so critical of her policies and personality. Yet with a simple explanation of the Neo-Confucian biographer's distaste for the empress's Buddhism, this document can become part of a wonderful discussion about bias in history! Instead, the students are presented with a female ruler described as an evil being.
5
These section assessments certainly seem to be a holdover from the Krieger text.
6
As a small but significant example of its Eurocentrism, the authors use the Christian-based terminology of Before Christ and Anno Domini, when they could just as easily use the terms B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era), which are now the norm in World History scholarship.
7
As a teacher in an independent school, I do not have to prepare my students for comprehensive state history tests, nor do I have first-hand knowledge of them. I base my assumption on discussions I have had with public school teachers who use this text, or are familiar with it.
8 The first World
History AP exam is scheduled to be given in May 2002. Detailed
information about the test can be found in the "Acorn Book", available
from the College Board. See their website at http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/.
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