36.4  
Journals link Search link Partners link Information link
August, 2003
Previous
Next
The History Teacher

Table of Contents
List journal issues
Home
Get a printer-friendly version of this page
 
 

Establishing World History as a Teaching Field: Comments from the Field

Patricia Lopes Don
San José State University

IN THE PAST TWENTY YEARS, world history advocates have persuaded states across the nation to replace western civilization courses in the public schools with world history. The trend to adopt world history courses is happening perhaps more rapidly than was anticipated. With some frustration, however, world historians are recognizing that the world history label on a course does not necessarily mean a global perspective is being taught in the classroom. If teachers were presenting a curriculum informed by a global perspective, by interpretations based on the work of world historians, and by teaching strategies that were tailored to the world history field, we might say that world history had been established as a teaching field. That clearly has not happened yet, because state curriculum committees, public schools and teachers seem to have settled for a curriculum that merely reflects the old western civilization paradigm rather than presenting a fresh and dynamic global approach to world history. 1
      What needs to be done to ensure that instruction reflects world historiography and that we move beyond old curricula? As a world history educator at the undergraduate and graduate level and a methods instructor for history/social science teacher candidates at a university with a long tradition of teacher training in California, I have compiled a series of observations from the field about the state of world history teacher training and what needs to be done both to accelerate training and to improve it. In the first part of this paper, I will argue that the critical ingredient for improving world history instruction in public schools is not in the teacher training programs or the in-service training of teachers in the public schools, but rather in the improvement of the undergraduate world history survey course at the universities. I will argue that the undergraduate survey in world history, intended or not, is the model that most teachers will implement in their future world history classrooms, and that consequently world history advocates must be more vigilant in its development. In the second part I will explain what needs to be done to improve the subject matter content of the university survey in a way that will not only improve prospective teachers' knowledge but also help to advance university instruction in world history. In the third part, I will suggest ways to enhance better content with appropriate teaching strategies. This will not only improve the quality of the undergraduate world history survey but greatly benefit the training of school teachers of history. 2
   

The Problem and Possible Initiatives

 
      Why is the undergraduate survey so critical for teacher training? Simply, it is the best venue for providing a model in both content and methodology of what world history instruction ought to be. Teaching is not so much a presentation of the knowledge in the instructor's head as it is a transformation of that knowledge into formats and experiences that induce understanding in the student's mind.1 The density and sophistication of the content knowledge of a teacher affects the teacher's choices in the selection of teaching strategies. In turn, the strategies or methods significantly influence the way that content, especially the higher level critical thinking involved in world history learning, will be absorbed and understood by the student. The more complex this interplay between dense subject content and sophisticated methods, the more difficult the curriculum is to develop. Good curriculum design for world history, more than any other field, requires both a significant mastery of complex content and intensive experience with appropriate teaching strategies. If they have not somehow acquired this knowledge and experience, novice teachers, consciously or unconsciously, will depend on models of curricula which they have previously experienced as college or university students in the undergraduate classroom.2 Research has shown that teachers depend upon these models so much that no amount of subsequent pedagogical training can guide teachers away from them.3 Therefore, the undergraduate survey is not only a content course, it is in fact a learning lab for future world history teachers. Its quality impacts future world history instruction. 3
      We should be deeply concerned about this because research also indicates that undergraduate instruction relies heavily on the transmission of low-level factual information in the simple lecture format and does not induce understanding at the higher level of critical thinking deemed necessary for good teaching in the schools. "Even teachers with majors in their disciplines ... have highly developed low literacy. They know a lot of facts...but not very much about the relationships they will need to master in order to teach well."4 Large amounts of "declarative knowledge" without an understanding of the structural patterns within a discipline or the functional role of the discipline in relationship to the rest of the world of knowledge, leaves teachers unable to decide "what is worthwhile" to teach.5 Research indicates that if teachers' knowledge of any subject field were "more explicit, better connected and more integrated," they would "tend to teach the subject matter more dynamically, represent it in more varied ways and encourage and respond to students' comments and questions."6 4
      Unfortunately, teachers with "highly developed low literacy" tend to teach their students at the same low critical thinking level. This is problematic in world history because the pool of world history facts is very large in comparison to American history or western civilization. Teachers who attempt to "cram" the available facts into a survey find themselves drowning in a short time. In fact they balk at the task because they instinctively know that it is impossible to teach world history in the low-level literacy mode common in American history and western civilization. But they do not perceive having another choice because their university professors rarely present a well-edited and concise world history alternative at the undergraduate level. Instead, university instructors have generally adopted one of two models of a world history curriculum that has confused the situation for teachers-in-training. 5
      Often, university world history educators divide the water in the world history pool into a number of smaller containers known as area studies—Asia, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, etc. This course model seems to represent the history of the world as a series of adjacent geographic boxes in which the history of each has little to do with the others. I call this the "composite area studies approach." Frankly, it is understandable that world history educators would rely upon the older established literature of area studies when they are not familiar with world historiography (which I believe is a greater problem than the history profession cares to admit). However, more often, world historians adopt a second approach. They simply dust off the old western civilization survey, compress it a bit and add segues into non-western history, or what is often called "the West and the rest." Usually, university professors have sufficient understanding of historiography and the nature of survey to know that either of these approaches is inadequate and temporary at best, but they often lack enthusiasm for tackling the pedagogical problems of a world history survey. Public school teachers, then, simply copy the approaches they have experienced, not understanding the why or wherefore of using either of them.7 6
      Since a lack of purpose, clarity, and conciseness in the undergraduate survey seems to be at the heart of the problem of poor world history teaching in the schools, and we need to go there to solve it. University professors generally do not like to see themselves as pedagogical specialists, which is strange considering that a good deal of their time is spent teaching and that they are usually in the vanguard in developing new fields, subjects, courses, and information. The lack of enthusiasm for tackling the pedagogical problems of world history is related to the haphazard way in which it has been introduced into the universities. Often history departments have been required to offer the course because of the teacher training imperatives of the university-at-large and not because a faculty member or the department wishes to develop a new course. At most universities, the world history survey is not taught by trained world historians but faculty who have strengths in two or more fields, usually European or American and a non-western field. As the need for more courses grows, and new members better trained world historians are hired, departments may have two distinct and separate groups handling the development of the world history survey. My own experience has suggested to me, however, that except for active members of the World History Association, the various faculty involved in world history may know little about what others are doing in terms of teaching or scholarship, and that is a very serious problem. 7
      Will world history advocates address this problem? In an influential article about the state of world history instruction, Gilbert Allardyce has suggested that the prime mover of world history in the United States and founder of the World History Association (WHA) William H. McNeill, could count among his many achievements leading "the subject of world history out of...abstract quarrels in the philosophy of history. As a result, the impulse of his WHA admirers is not so much to theorize about world history as to think about how to teach it."8 However, many in the WHA have observed in recent years that the study of the teaching of world history as an equal companion to the development of world historiography may have lessened. Given the tendencies in the professional culture of historians to elevate research and de-emphasize teaching, it is understandable that world historians want to obtain greater acceptance in the history community-at-large by somewhat separating themselves professionally from teaching imperatives.9 In short, it is difficult to know whether interested parties will maintain the historical balance between teaching and historiography in their activities. Nevertheless, the world history survey can hardly be considered tangential to the concerns of universities and professional groups. 8
      In 1977 in this journal, McNeill severely rebuked the history profession for a lack of responsibility for the undergraduate survey, which he regarded as "the central failure of our profession in the last two decades." Preoccupied with avoiding these courses and concentrating on narrow specialties and research, he observed, "historians in this country seem to have been unable or unwilling to devote much effort to thinking about how to improve existing survey courses for freshmen and sophomores, or invent new ones that might be capable both of speaking to the concerns of the rising generation and of commanding the enthusiasm of those asked to teach such courses."10 McNeill, more than anybody, has been responsible for the development of the modern world history field and the prominence of world history in American education. It would be a shame if the anchor of that movement, the undergraduate world history survey, were to flounder at precisely the moment when both the educational and historiographical aspects of the movement could most benefit from its substantial improvement. 9
      What can be done to address the problem of improving the world history survey? In some parts of the country there are already sufficient numbers of world historians and world history educators to form regional forums to direct or at least influence the teaching of the undergraduate course. Perhaps the most critical problem is presenting and discussing the emerging historiography of world historians to enough world history educators at the various universities. In California, there are two trends that warrant regional conferences in world history. First, a fortuitous number of outstanding world historians in the country are presently teaching in California's universities, including the Universities of California at Irvine, Davis and Los Angeles as well as San Diego State University and the University of the Pacific. Second, California has recently passed landmark legislation to completely revamp teacher training in the state. For fifteen years California has mandated world history instruction in the public schools, but California universities that offer teacher-training programs have not been required to offer world history courses in line with the instruction required by the schools. In Senate Bill 2042 (Mazzoni Act), however, the California legislature has required that all universities offering teacher training in the state must provide specific training in ancient, medieval, early modern and modern world history by 2005.11 Over two-thirds of California's universities will introduce the undergraduate world history survey for the first time in the next three years. Given the size of the California educational system, this single piece of legislation may be responsible for the largest quantitative increase in world history education nationally in the last twenty years. 10
      California could continue to allow the world history survey to emerge in haphazard ways or the California university professorship could choose to lead and provide new world history educators with an opportunity to meet state-wide and develop a more coherent curriculum. Items for the agenda would be the presentation of recent historiography by the historians themselves, discussion of the fully integrated global perspective versus a regional or area studies emphasis, sharing of curricular approaches, thrashing out concepts that link together to make a narrative approach (or discussion of whether a narrative approach is necessary or desirable, as I maintain), and examination of the large number of textbooks that have come out recently to determine which might be adequate to professors' wants and needs in the survey. Should the California professorship develop the network and relationships that would advance the undergraduate survey, perhaps they could influence significant revisions to the California Framework and Academic Content Standards in world history, which are wholly inadequate at this point.12 What is done in large states, such as California, Texas and New York, will certainly influence curriculum development in other parts of the nation. Indeed, even if California alone were to make a concerted effort to improve and generate some consensus about improving the undergraduate survey, it might provide a template for the rest of the states, just as individual universities in the past have influenced the teaching of western civilization and American history. 11
      In addition to improving the undergraduate survey, universities could also have a direct impact on the world history instruction currently provided in the public schools. Most public school teachers have received no formal instruction in world history because their undergraduate university training did not include world history courses. They recognize that they lack background in world history and many are prepared to go back to college to obtain further content expertise.13 Furthermore, school districts often reward teachers who seek advanced training with step-ups in salary, grants and promotion. Providing advanced world history training could be done in a variety of ways, including summer institutes and weekend workshops via the usual partnerships between universities, school districts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. However, there is also the possibility of offering the masters degree in world history to public school teachers. 12
      Currently, there are few doctoral programs in world history in the nation. There are even fewer terminal degree masters programs. Because of the large investment necessary for large doctorate-granting institutions to offer the degree, few are likely to do so and the number of Ph.D's trained as world historians will probably remain small for years to come. Five-year institutions, such as state universities, may feel that they have to wait for the larger institutions to take the lead before they begin to offer terminal graduate and undergraduate degrees. I think this would be a mistake. They should take the plunge into world history graduate education with an eye toward retraining public school world history teachers. The professors for these programs will almost all have to be world history educators who are willing to do their own retraining in order to teach graduate world history. Is this a problem? No. Many of the most prominent historians teaching and writing in the field today have not been trained at a university offering a degree in world history. 13
      My own university's experience offers an example of the possibilities. Seven years ago, San José State University began to offer a one-year lower division world history survey. The following year, we offered one upper division world history course. Three years ago, we received permission from the chancellor of the California State University system to offer a Masters in History, Concentration in History Education to public school teachers who wanted to return to the university for an academic content degree in either American or world history rather than the usual pedagogical degree, a Masters in Education. Since then we have had two cohorts of admission for a total of thirty-two teachers, approximately half of whom were world history majors. While we began by restricting the world history major to teachers, interest among our regular masters students was so strong that we have extended the major to all regular masters students as well. We now provide a series of three colloquia in world history and a seminar. 14
      The four professors who offer the core world history program come from backgrounds in Asian, Latin American and European history, ranging from the ancient to modern eras in their specialties. I might add that our department is able to manage this graduate program even though we are relatively small with only eighteen faculty members. In short, it is not necessary to wait for things to evolve in the history profession or in the world history discipline to accomplish useful goals for world history education. The concern of world history advocates now should be with the reputation of the discipline and the way it is being translated into public and university education, especially and most urgently in California. 15
   

Improving the World History Survey Course

 
      What precisely would make for a better survey approach that aids the goal of training teachers? In examining this question it might be well to start by looking at the "standards" for world history promulgated at the state and national levels. They reflect a wide-range of approaches, some a great deal more sophisticated than others. A problem I have noticed with all the standards, and for that matter the survey itself, is that instructors and curriculum committees have not been courageous enough to edit them into a concise form with a strong global perspective. Too often the standards are very long and unrealistic laundry lists of historical data. Instead of doing the curricular heavy lifting, they continue to leave it up to under-trained teachers to decide what is worthwhile, which is of course the most difficult teaching decision. The best set of standards is the recently developed Advanced Placement Standards, for here we see some progress toward a more integrated global perspective rather than the "West and the rest," watered down western civilization or the composite area studies approach. By contrast, the California Academic Content Standards contain an extremely weak set of world history standards. Unfortunately, these standards are a very unruly mix of cryptic western civilization, warmed over twentieth-century American history, and severely abbreviated area studies. 16
      In order to move toward a more coherent survey, I want to suggest that we look a little deeper at two important characteristics of a good survey. First, a survey must have a purpose or an organizing idea that both summarizes the import of why the field is being taught to so many students and helps in the process of prioritizing information. Second, the survey needs a conceptual narrative, a kind of macro-story line of the concepts and developments that must in all cases be included in the survey. This is the opposite of some of the standards lists used now that seem to be built more on the fear of leaving something out. A purpose and a conceptual narrative are characteristics that the American history and western civilization surveys have. I maintain that the lack of them in world history is the reason why instructors and standards committees keep borrowing blocks of the American and western civilization surveys and pressing them into service in a world history curriculum, a place where they simply do not belong.14 17
      What does one mean by a purpose or an organizing idea? It has been suggested that the organizing idea of American history is a story of progress and democracy. Not surprisingly, western civilization has the same organizational principle for, as has been suggested, western civilization looks a good deal like "American history pushed back through time."15 Progress and the rise of democracy do not serve very well as organizing ideas for world history because these overarching concepts project an interpretation of national history onto a world stage, a notion that breaks down historically with the first investigation of world events and processes beyond the Greco-Roman sphere of influence. (In fact, a more critical look at Greco-Roman history would effectively undermine the western civilization premise.) Nevertheless, world history could benefit from an organizing principle and I would like to suggest that we begin by taking note of the reason that our communities are adopting world history today and offering a more sensible purpose. The popular culture has developed a kind of discursive love affair with the word "globalization." It is on everybody's mind and everybody's tongue, but what does it mean? The problem with the way the term "globalization" has been used in recent years is that it suggests that nothing ever happened globally before the 1990s. A major benefit of world history instruction is to explain how this is not so and to provide the missing historical context for our present intellectual ferment. Globalization roughly describes a number of historical processes that, for most of written history, have been affecting humans and human groups on this planet. A better understanding of these processes is essential for people who will live in a twentieth-first-century democracy. 18
      The clearer and better-articulated conceptual narrative of American and western civilization, as compared to world history, surveys also derives from consensus on the critical problems, processes and questions being addressed. One look at the American history standards in California demonstrates that they are far superior to the world history standards because they reflect the interpretations of American historians about our national history. As usual with standards, American history teachers are exhorted to teach a very long laundry list of facts but at least the American history facts are grouped into coherent concepts that explain the how and why of American history. The slavery question as defining the early American Republic, the rapid evolution of the concept of nation in the Civil War, frontier dynamics in Americans' concept of themselves, the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the evolving role of government, and other highly recognizable schools of thought are presented. One looks long and hard in the California world history standards for similar explanations and concepts. In fact the only sustainable conceptual narrative is borrowed from the western civilization intellectual history narrative—Greek democratic principles (which are repeated at the beginning of each year of history instruction for California students), the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, etc. These standards are hardly informed by the major concepts and interpretations in world history which include: McNeill and Marshall G. S. Hodgson on the Afro-Eurasia axis of cultures and interregional cultural sharing in world history, the Islamic consolidation, the European military revolution (or any other factor that accounts for the rise of Europe), comparative analysis of the nature and timing of European colonialism in the Americas and in Afro-Eurasia, the role of the Atlantic in the economic rise of Europe and the European world system, the China-centered world economy and the silver thesis, the divergence of Europe and Asia during the Industrial Revolution with reasons for this, the Versailles Conference and the emergence of sovereignty, decolonization and civil rights on the world stage—to name a few essential concepts. 19
      Can the various processes that I have described above, and others, be linked in a conceptual narrative that will help students understand world globalization processes throughout human history?16 Most certainly, they can. In fact, I have become so concerned that the California Standards are not up to the task of providing public school teachers with a solid marriage of world historiography and world history narrative, that I have attended numerous teachers' conferences in the last two years to present model units in early modern and nineteenth-century world history. In effect my presentation is a summary explanation of historiography, of narrative strategies for putting together world history concepts and processes with world events and chronologies, of appropriate methods for teaching various world history processes, and of exemplary primary and secondary sources for elucidating the concepts. The presentation is in fact a model curriculum based on my own world history survey in the university classroom. The response has been rather dramatic. Teachers at these conferences have told me that they had no understanding of the generalized level at which they were supposed to be teaching when it came to world history until they attended the presentation. 20
      Some skeptics might argue at this point that university historians need not get together to organize the developed world historiography into a conceptual narrative for the benefit of teachers such as these because the rapidly expanding list of recently published world history textbooks provide an emerging conceptual narrative. I would not like to think, however, that textbooks should take the place of a real dialogue among world history professionals. Moreover, as an instructor of history/social science methods in a graduate teacher training program, I must say that I discourage teachers from using the textbook as a syllabus and curricular guide, though I know the practice is widespread. Nevertheless, a review of the way that recently-published textbooks have addressed the problem of a conceptual narrative is worthwhile. 21
      World history text authors seem to do a very good job of reading each other's work; most of the texts are remarkably similar.17 Perhaps this is a sign of an emerging consensus or perhaps it is an indication that the limitations of textbook publishing force a certain conformity on the authors' thinking. In either case, it is not conducive to the kind of integrative global perspective I believe is necessary. The books outline consistently broad epochs—1000–1500, 1500–1800, 1800–1900, and 1900 to the present—and almost all texts mark 1500 as a mid point and the beginning of modern trends in world history, though many world historians may consider 1000 or 1300 as more significant. I find the periodization schemes too broad and would like to see narrower frames of time, giving the curriculum more of a driving narration. Presented in this way, the world history story could then be combined with more direct comparisons and analysis of what is happening in and between various regions of the world. Failures to make such comparisons is a great problem in the current world history texts. While the texts are less Euro-centric than ten years ago, they tend to use a composite area studies approach. Within the broad epochs, each region is dealt with in a separate way and the emphasis is on giving a clear summary of the conclusions and interpretations of each field—Latin America, Asia, Europe, etc. If world history teachers were to organize the curriculum according to this type of text, they would spend a week or two on each regional area in each of the broad epochs. An alternative would be to highlight large-scale historical events and processes that affect at least two or more regions of the world simultaneously, either because they represent an encounter between two civilizations or because a process is affecting two parts of the world and can be compared.18 In a more radical approach of this sort, the detail of area studies would be edited out, leaving only the most essential phenomena for explaining global processes. I have only found two very recent textbooks where the authors clearly have made integration of global processes the central goal as opposed to comprehensive area studies presentations.19 22
      Even these texts, however, do not radically eliminate detailed information which is interesting from an area studies perspective but less so from a global perspective. A textbook, however, ought to fulfill a more encyclopedic responsibility than a professor's syllabus. A professor's instructional curriculum can be driven solely by the essential conceptual narrative while relying on the students' textbook reading to provide a broader universe of information. For example, I test my students weekly on the reading in the text but follow my own conceptual narrative structure in the classroom. Using this teaching strategy makes it conceivable to adopt a text with an area studies approach while presenting a dynamic global narrative in lectures and learning activities in the classroom. I have found, however, that using texts with briefer narrative periods and more direct analysis of comparisons and conjunctures in every chapter is a better fit with instruction that is conceptually driven. 23
      The following is a brief outline of an instructional conceptual narrative in the early modern period. In this approach, instruction is organized in more frequent snapshots of the world—1300, 1450, 1600, and 1750. I am most concerned with conveying the processes and events occurring at these times that will have the most impact on subsequent world history. In 1300, the most important component is examining Afro-Eurasia during and after the Mongol Consolidation, which would include the crisis induced in the land powers of Afro-Eurasia by the Black Death and the implications of the Chinese artisanal industry and cultural influences across the continents. I also compare the scale of what is happening here (economic, social and political) with events in other regions of the world, especially the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa. In the middle period to 1600 I investigate the confrontation in western Eurasia between the Ottoman Empire and the European nation-states, including the divergent characteristics of intellectual ferment in Europe (in comparison to the land empires of Asia), the revival and expansion of the Indian Ocean system under Islamic consolidation, and comparative European encounters, conquests and colonization by the Spanish in the Americas and the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. The period to 1750 involves an examination of the rise of the Atlantic system and its impact on global relations, including the wealth of and military revolutions in Europe, the impact of China and on China of global trade (with study of the silver thesis), and the African slave trade in the Atlantic and the Islamic world. Because world history aims to understand globalization and its evident advantages and problems in the present, I also spend some time examining the loss of Islamic power and prestige in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the commensurate rise of early fundamentalist Islamic movements in Arabia and Africa. Finally, 1750 lends itself to a comparative analysis of China and Europe, where I want to investigate the "great divergence" thesis of Ken Pomerantz and the comparative efforts of cultural and intellectual revivals in both regions. 24
      This instructional conceptual narrative avoids the problem of having to do everything, which is where the frustration begins for the world history teacher. I have selected certain processes that I believe are essential to understanding the global thrust of world history and I clearly do not worry whether I have summarized the regional histories of each zone.20 Within each process, I mix studies of comparison and conjuncture and I can investigate points of view effectively without sweeping up all the minutiae of events which are less significant from the global perspective. For example, in investigating comparative encounter, conquest and colonization, I provide primary sources and learning experiences in case studies that help students understand the perspective of the dominating and dominated cultures. But it is neither a good use of instructional time nor an effective teaching choice for me to treat a world history class as a humanities course for every tribe, culture and civilization in the world (and I say this as a cultural historian of early modern Europe).21 Again, if a world history educator feels that students need to have more detailed information about individual cultures and societies, she/he can effectively rely on a solid reading strategy with a textbook that highlights social world history. I maintain, however, that students need to have a world history course that is strongly related to world historiography and clearly articulates an interpretation of the why and how of global forces in human history. 25
   

World History Teaching Strategies

 
      There are teaching methods and strategies that are highly conducive to world history instruction. History professors are sometimes resistant to discussions of the relative merits of different pedagogies in the world history curriculum. But there are several reasons for such discussions. First, young professors are finding that teaching has become a far more important factor in advancing them along the tenure track than it was been for their senior colleagues. Universities are spending a great deal of money to provide the pedagogical training that senior professors did not receive in doctoral programs, and many universities now require teaching experience of their current Ph.D. candidates. Second, as noted before, whether professors like it or not, their undergraduate courses are training courses for world history teachers. What they do in their survey classes is the model for future educators and they need to make sure that they are passing on the kind of pedagogical legacy that world history needs right now. Third, states are increasingly requiring "content specific support structures," or effective mixes of subject content and teaching strategies in courses required of prospective school teachers.22 Building on research that has demonstrated the modeling influence of undergraduate courses on teacher knowledge and skills, Senate Bill 2042, California's recent teacher training initiative, includes standards that require university instructors to teach undergraduate courses required in the teacher training program with diverse methods in order to model and train prospective teachers.23 Therefore, it is to the advantage of world history teachers to identify the most effective mixes of methods and content in the world history field. 26
      In the last twenty years a group of educational psychologists under the mentorship of Lee S. Shulman has studied the importance of content specific teacher training. They have examined the teaching of outstanding teachers, including history teachers, and tried to isolate the "knowledge base" and teaching skills associated with the teaching of various subjects. The "intersection of content and pedagogy, ... the capacity of a teacher to transform the content knowledge he or she possesses into forms that are pedagogically powerful and yet adaptive to the variations in ability and background presented by the students" is generally referred to now as "pedagogical content knowledge."24 The Shulman group began with the proposition that the realm of reasoning about appropriate ways to use text, dynamic representations of concepts in classroom activities, probing questions in response to student reasoning, and all the elements that go into methods and teacher behavior are not generic but are rather content specific. Shulman also argues that pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is individual.25 Nevertheless, teachers of a similar intellectual community, such as history teachers or world history teachers, share a language born of experience and particular knowledge that allows them to engage most readily in a dialogue about the processes of teaching in their own field. It stands to reason then that university courses responsible for preparing teachers to teach a particular field ought to engage openly in a "pedagogical content knowledge" dialogue with colleagues and students in the undergraduate or graduate classroom. More specifically, this dialogue should include effective pairings of concepts in the emerging world history narrative and appropriate methods and teaching strategies for transforming the knowledge into learning activities that have been successful. 27
      There are numerous examples about what works well in world history education.26 First, I am a firm believer that effective world history lectures are transformed by the engaging use of presentation technology, especially Power-Point software. The reason is very simple. A world history teacher has to be something of a master in the use of maps and chronology. An overhead projection does no good; the image simply is not large enough. A wall map is fine but there are times when you need physical maps, times when you need political maps and times when you need to show a rapid succession of changes over time in the same location. I have found that texts and atlases are good sources for these specific images and scanning them into Power-Point slides gives me the most flexibility. The world history lecture by its very nature is highly conceptual and must traverse time and space with facility. Visual aids help to keep the concepts more firmly fixed and ordered in students' minds and my premise has been born out by better essay grades on exams based on Power-Point lectures as opposed to those based on lectures that did not employ presentation technology. 28
      In addition, the highly conceptual lecture often needs a strong hook at the beginning to establish the thesis and get the lecture rolling and I can introduce this effectively with a quotation, a speech, an image, or a rhetorical question on a slide and then move into the remaining lecture. I keep each Power-Point lecture to no more than twenty-five minutes with a college audience and use no more than nine slides for this length of time. Experience has shown me that this is the saturation point. Creating a Power-Point presentation also forces me to stay on concept and helps my students to take better notes, a concern in recent years. I encourage students to use the Cornell note-taking method and I keep my verbal prompts on the screen to the one word or short phrase that would appear in the left hand margin of the Cornell method. Presently, I am experimenting with short five-to-seven minute DVD clips embedded in the Power-Point presentation either as a hook or as an illustration of a concept. As a methods teacher, I discourage teachers from the practice of using long hours of DVD or video in the classroom and instead encourage editing and incorporating into a lecture or daily lesson the brief (five to twelve minute) video clip that crucially illustrates a concept or poses a question. Therefore, I practice what I preach in the undergraduate classroom and the Power-Point technology is most conducive to this technique. 29
      Another method well known to history teachers that has a world history variation is the jigsaw. Jigsaw is an effective way to summarize a good deal of information in a short period of time and use texts or informational handouts efficiently. Students in a group concentrate on one aspect of a problem, become expert, and then re-form into groups where they teach other students their information and receive the other students' expert information in turn. Unfortunately, the jigsaw is too often used as a dry, low-level informational exercise. Teachers like to use the exercise in social history, for example, in teaching the accomplishments of Ming China. When jigsaw is combined with a conceptual narrative that uses a composite area studies approach as described in the previous section, it becomes particularly dreary and ineffective in world history. A world history jigsaw needs two very important elements—a direct comparison of the social histories of civilizations or societies in a series of distinct categories and a culminating question that asks students to use the comparative information they have gained, preferably in a written assignment. An example of this would be an exercise comparing the four cultural centers of Afro-Eurasia in 1250 C.E.—Mediterranean Europe, the Islamic Caliphates, India and China—in terms of technology, science and art, family and religion, political superstructure, and market, agriculture and economy. The rhetorical proposition would be to predict what happens to each of these cultural centers in the wake of the Mongol Invasion. A similar exercise could be used to show the impact on Africa and Asia of the approach of European imperialism. In world history, it is most important to make social history dynamic by requiring students to make direct comparison in a snapshot of time and then using their comparative observations to tackle analytical problems. 30
      Simulations have always been regarded as the ultimate in methods prowess. However, most simulations seem to get buried under their own conceptual weight and luxurious use of instructional time. At least I have found that they tend to bury the concept when they exceed forty minutes. In any case, a college professor, and frankly even a public school teacher, does not have the time for long simulations. In addition, simulations that try to duplicate large-scale processes in world history are subject to instructional breakdown because there are so many variables in any world history process that students become confused and lose the concepts essential to understanding the process. I recommend, and in my undergraduate course I use, a few simulations that are strictly limited to isolated cases of the effects of world history processes rather than the process itself. For example, I avoid colonialism simulations and instead select a more isolated phenomenon of neo-colonialism in the case of Peru and Great Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, using guano and British textiles as the exchange products. The game is built on a monopoly model and takes approximately forty minutes with debriefing, or summarization, of the neo-colonial concept. I use a similar brief game strategy built on Risk to illustrate absolutism among the six major powers of seventeenth-century Europe and a strategy game to demonstrate the dynamics of mutual assured destruction in the Cold War. In world history, the proper mix of simulation and concept is with the more discreet, case-oriented concept than it is with larger global processes. 31
      Another area where appropriate methods have to be tailored to world history needs is the method known as interactive slide or image lectures. This is primarily a hook strategy but can set the tone for larger processes at work in world history. The interactive slide lecture is a patented method used by a popular publisher of teacher-made curricula in California, known as Teachers' Curriculum Institute. While the method effectively requires students to analyze images closely to gather information about a culture's or society's attitudes and values, I feel that it needs to be revised somewhat to give it more of a world history edge. The way that I do this is to use two images produced before and after an important turning point or long process event. The comparison of characteristics that signify a change in values or beliefs from before to after helps students to better describe and understand the intervening phenomena. For example, I use artwork before and during the Renaissance to help students comprehend a critical intellectual shift of the Renaissance—the observation and study of man in the present rather than God and the hereafter. For this I use paintings by Giotto and Massaccio about a century apart. To comprehend the social and class impact of the Mexican Revolution, I use photos of the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz and his cabinet taken in August 1910 and the leaders of the initial phase of the Mexican Revolution taken in November 1910. This same technique could be used effectively in comparisons of art in the eighteenth century in the Ottoman Empire, Qing Empire, Tokugawa Shogunate, Enlightenment Europe, and Mughal India. World historiography tends to emphasize economic and political history, but image analysis should be taken advantage of to flesh out the intellectual and cultural dynamics accompanying large structural changes. 32
      Another area where world history has its own variation on a classic method is small group work on primary source documents. In the college classroom one may use up to twelve primary sources to illustrate a problem or question, though I recommend no more than six in the typical high school setting. Naturally a focus question anchors the investigation of the documents and it is essential to provide background reading for the question or phenomenon the class is investigating. There are generally three approaches. First, one may use primary documents to trace a phenomenon over time. In world history, a good case study is to use both charts and primary documents to explore the question, how did the Atlantic slave trade change over time and how did it affect African societies? A second example is comparing the same historical archetype or figure in different cultures, such as revolutionary heroes or leaders in time of war. This is best done with historical actors of about the same period of time and using documentation from the society or country that produced the individual. Sometimes the comparative work on these documents can be turned into a short debate on the merits—who was the greater leader or who advanced his/her country or civilization most effectively? Lastly, there is the two-sided problem approach using the same historical event. Classic cases in world history would be the encounter between western and non-western peoples or a decision to go to war, such as, Sulieman the Magnificent and the Habsburg monarchs, the Japanese and the Americans in WWII, or the Chinese and the British in the opium conflicts of the nineteenth century. My own conversations with other world history educators tells me that there is a wealth of observations and ideas about the specific needs and demands of world history pedagogy out there. Discussing and problem-solving these suggestions and observations is not an onerous task for the university professorship but rather a great pleasure that can serve as a stimulus to the discipline of world history. 33
      Conferences of university educators to improve the world history survey, with dedicated discussions about the purpose of world history, the conceptual narrative and the body of pedagogical content knowledge, is one strategy for advancing world history and may or may not be the best. Simply publishing examples such as this one of my own world history strategies in this journal is another way to proceed. In addition, members of the World History Association are currently pursuing the publication of a journal of world history teaching, which ought to provide a focal point for discussions. 34
      The adoption of world history as the educational standard along with American history in public school and university education is being done so hastily at present that the process may result in very poor pedagogy that ultimately harms the reputation of the world history discipline. Under the circumstances, professors in regional and state university systems need to take a leading role along with the World History Association to assure the quality of world history instruction in the future. Current trends suggest it is advisable that they lend their voices to the subject right now. 35


Notes

1.  Lee S. Shulman, "Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform," Harvard Educational Review, 57, no. 1 (February 1987): 15.

2.  Deborah Loewenberg Ball and G. Williamson McDiarmid, "The Subject-Matter Preparation of Teachers," in Handbook of Research on Teacher Education: A Project of the Association of Teacher Educators, ed. W. Robert Houston (New York: MacMillan, 1990), 444, suggests that "the undergraduate instruction is not sufficiently conceptual or epistemological enough to replace the static view that they may acquire from pre-collegiate education."

3.  Pamela L. Grossman, Suzanne M. Wilson, and Lee S. Shulman, "Teachers of Substance: Subject Matter Knowledge for Teaching," in Knowledge Base for the Beginning Teacher, ed. Maynard C. Reynolds (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989), 25.

4.  Charles W. Anderson, "The Role of Education in the Academic Disciplines in Teacher Education," in Research Perspectives on the Graduate Preparation of Teachers, ed. Anita E. Woolfolk (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1989), 98.

5.  Ibid., 96 and 104.

6.  Jere Brophy, "Conclusion," in Advances in Research on Teaching, vol. 2, Teachers' Knowledge of Subject Matter as it Relates to their Teaching Practice, ed. Jere Brophy (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1991), 352.

7.  Julie Gess-Newsome, "Secondary Teachers' Knowledge and Beliefs about Subject Matter and Their Impact on Instruction," in Examining Pedagogical Content Knowledge, ed. Julie Gess-Newsome and Norman G. Lederman (London, Boston, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), 86.

8.  Gilbert Allardyce, "Toward World History: American Historians and the Coming of the World History Course," in The New World History: A Teacher's Companion, ed. Ross E. Dunn (Boston, New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000), 52.

9.  Ibid., 46, on the cold reception of world history in the history profession.

10.  William H. McNeill, "Beyond Western Civilization: Rebuilding the Survey," in The New World History, 83.

11. Standards of Program Quality and Effectiveness for the Subject Matter Requirement for the Multiple Subject Credential: Handbook for Teacher Educators and Program Reviewers (Sacramento: California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, September 2001).

12.  See The Updated California History-Social Science Framework. (Sacramento: California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, 2001).

13.  Gess-Newsome, 85, points out that "by the second year of classroom practice, management concerns dissipate and opportunities for increased attention on subject matter instruction exist." Therefore, a graduate degree in world history fits well into the natural pattern of a secondary teacher's career.

14.  See the excellent discussion of "an adequate conceptual base" and "survey wisdom" in Allardyce, 44–48.

15.  Ibid., 37.

16.  Edmund Burke III, "Marshall G. S. Hodgson and the Hemispheric Interregional Approach to World History," in The New World History, 173, notes that "the attempt to devise a methodology [for interregional comparison] is obviously of central importance to the development of world history as a field."

17.  Though there are several new world history texts on the market, I have chosen the following texts for the purposes of this limited analysis: Jerry H. Bentley and Herbert F. Ziegler, Traditions & Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2000); William J. Duiker and Jackson J. Spielvogel, World History, 3d ed. (Belmont, California, Stamford, Connecticut: Wadsworth/Thomas Learning, 2001); John P. McKay et. al., A History of World Societies, 5th ed. (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000); L. S. Stavrianos, A Global History: From Prehistory to the Present, 5th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1991; Peter N. Stearns et. al., World Civilizations: The Global Experience, 3d ed. (New York: Longman, 2001; Robert Tignor, et. al., Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the Modern World from the Mongol Empire to the Present (New York, London: W. W. Norton Company, 2002); Jiu-Hwa L. Upshur et. al., World History, 4th ed. (Belmont, California, Stamford, Connecticut: Wadsworth/Thomas Learning, 2002).

18.  Richard W. Bulliett, "Themes, Conjunctures and Comparisons," in Teaching World History: A Resource Book, ed. Heidi Roupp (London: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 94–109, has written an excellent essay that prioritizes conjunctures and comparisons in the various epochs.

19.  The two texts that I have found most useful are the Bentley/Ziegler text and the very recent publication of the group under Tignor. Bentley's text contains numerous chapters of interregional analysis that attempt to demonstrate globalizing processes. The Tignor group makes a real break from composite area studies. It is the closest example of shorter chronological periods with direct interregional comparisons and conjunctures in each chapter.

20.  It is interesting to see that Jerry H. Bentley has also argued for a paring down of the detail of world history to events and processes that cover large regional areas. See "The Quest for World-Class Standards in World History," The History Teacher 28, n. 3 (May 1995): 449–456.

21.  For an opposing argument to this position, see Donald Johnson, "The American Educational Tradition: Hostile to a Humanities World History?" in The New World History, 329–350.

22.  Gess-Newsome, 86.

23.  This is standard five in the regulatory standards that implement Senate Bill 2042: Standards of Program Quality and Effectiveness. The standards for the single subject or secondary credential are scheduled for publication in January 2003.

24.  Shulman, 15.

25.  The individuality involves personal talents and characteristics that provide the teacher with "a way of thinking, of reasoning through and solving problems," in addition to the shared professional knowledge base. See Suzanne M. Wilson, "A Case Concerning Content: Using Case Studies to Teach About Subject Matter," in Case Methods in Teacher Education, ed. Judith H. Shulman (New York, London: Teachers' College Press, 1992), 64–89.

26.  In this article I have not attempted to give a full-scale analysis of pedagogical content knowledge in world history instruction, rather a brief introduction. However, I wish to note that the practitioners of PCK comprehend in the concept much more detail than I have offered here, including answers to the following kinds of questions: "Is the language accessible to adolescents? Is the subject vivid and memorable? Is there human interest in the documents? Can the document be excerpted without distorting its meaning? Can it be related to topics already covered in the discipline?" See Samuel S. Wineberg and Suzanne M. Wilson, "Subject-Matter Knowledge in the Teaching of History," in Advances in Research on Teaching, 335.


Works Cited

Alardyce, Gilbert. "Toward World History: American Historians and the Coming of the World History Course." In The New World History: A Teacher's Companion, edited by Ross E. Dunn. Boston, New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000.

Anderson, Charles W. "The Role of Education in the Academic Disciplines in Teacher Education." In Research Perspectives on the Graduate Preparation of Teachers, edited by Anita E. Woolfolk. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1989.

Bentley, Jerry H. "The Quest for World-Class Standards in World History."The History Teacher 28, no. 3 (May 1995): 449–456.

_____ and Herbert F. Ziegler. Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2000.

Brophy, Jere. "Conclusion." In Advances in Research on Teaching. Vol. 2, Teachers' Knowledge of Subject Matter as it Relates to their Teaching Practice, edited by Jere Brophy. Greenwich, Conn: JAI Press, 1991.

Bulliet, Richard. "Themes, Conjunctures, and Comparisons." In Teaching World History: A Resource Book, edited by Heidi Roupp. London, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1997.

Burke, Edmund III. "Marshall G. S. Hodgson and the Hemispheric Interregional Approach to World History." In The New World History: A Teacher's Companion, edited by Ross E. Dunn. Boston, New York: Bedford/St. Marin's, 2000.

Duiker, William J. and Jackson L. Spielvogel. World History. 3d ed. Belmont, California, Stamford Connecticut: Wadsworth/Thomas Learning, 2001.

Gess-Newsome, Julie. "Secondary Teachers' Knowledge and Beliefs about Subject Matter and their Impact on Instruction." In Examining Pedagogical Content Knowledge, edited by Julie Gess-Newsome and Norman G. Lederman. London, Boston, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999.

Grossman, Pamela L, Suzanne M. Wilson, and Lee S. Shulman. "Teachers of Substance: Subject Matter Knowledge for Teaching." In Knowledge Base for the Beginning Teacher, edited by Maynard C. Reynolds. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989.

Johnson, Donald. "The American Educational Tradition: Hostile to a Humanities World History?" In The New World History: A Teacher's Companion, edited by Ross E. Dunn. Boston, New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000.

Loewenberg Ball, Deborah and G. Williamson McDiarmid. "The Subject-Matter Preparation of Teachers." In Handbook of Research on Teacher Education: A Project of the Association of Teacher Educators, edited by W. Robert Houston. New York: MacMillan, 1990.

McKay, John P., Bennett D. Hill, John Buckler, and Patricia Buckley Ebrey. A History of World Societies. 5th ed. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

McNeill, William H. "Beyond Western Civilization: Rebuilding the Survey." In The New World History: A Teacher's Companion, edited by Ross E. Dunn. Boston, New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000.

Shulman, Less S. "Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform." Harvard Educational Review 57, no. 1 (February 1987): 1–22.

Standards of Program Quality and Effectiveness for the Subject Matter Requirement for the Multiple Subject Credential: Handbook for Teacher Educators and Program Reviewers. Sacramento: California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, September 2001.

Stavrianos, L. S. A Global History: From Prehistory to the Present. 5th ed. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1991.

Stearns, Peter, Michael Adas, Stuart B. Schwartz, and Marc J. Gilbert. World Civilizations: The Global Experience. 3d ed. New York: Longman, 2001.

The Updated California History-Social Science Framework. Sacramento: California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, 2001.

Tignor, Robert, Jeremy Adelman, Stephen Aron, Stephen Kotkin, Suzanne Marchand, Gyan Prakash, and Michael Tsin. Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the Modern World from the Mongol Empire to the Present. New York, London: W. W. Norton Company, 2002.

Upshur, Jiu-Hwa L., Janice J. Terry, James P. Holoka, Richard D. Goff, and George H. Cassar. World History. 4th ed. Belmont, California, Stamford, Connecticut: Wadsworth/ Thomas Learning, 2002.

Wilson, Suzanne M. "A Case Concerning Content: Using Case Studies to Teach About Subject Matter." In Case Methods in Teacher Education, edited by Judith H. Shulman. New York, London: Teachers' College Press, 1992.

Wineberg, Samuel S. and Suzanne M. Wilson. "Subject-Matter Knowledge in the Teaching of History." In Advances in Research in Teaching. Vol. 2, Teachers' Knowledge of Subject Matter as it Relates to their Teaching Practice, edited by Jere Brophy. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1991.

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.

 



August, 2003 Previous Table of Contents Next