Bridging World History
The advent of world history as a discrete field of study was heralded in the 1980s by the organization of the World History Association and the creation of graduate programs at a handful of universities. Over the past 20 years, scholarly publications, professional and academic organizations, and graduate programs in world history have proliferated, yet the terrain of secondary education in world history remains relatively undeveloped. Despite the efforts of some individuals and organizations to prepare materials, offer workshops, and otherwise provide support for teachers, there is still a great need for an integrated guide to the field.
Hundreds of thousands of middle school and high school students now take world history courses. It is a required course in many states—in Texas alone 150,000 students are enrolled annually in world history courses. The need for secondary teacher preparation exploded with the debut of the AP world history test in May 2002, with 20,000 students taking the test in its first year.
Nationally speaking, teachers are unprepared to meet this demand: recent statistics from the National Council for Educational Statistics indicate that more than 60% of high school teachers in history classrooms have no history degree or history certification.
The challenge of creating a comprehensive introduction for pre-service and in-service teachers lies in the need to deliver content that reflects the multiple perspectives of the world’s pasts. World history courses must construct a meaningful context that reveals a shared human past. Teachers must develop a global framework that makes the past both relevant and accessible.
BRIDGING WORLD HISTORY is a set of multimedia materials designed to help teachers and others discover world history and to:
- Develop a dynamic conceptual framework for the study of world history, its theoretical constructs, and historiographical practices
- Establish a spatial and temporal grasp of the peoples and cultures that make up world history, spanning thousands of years and the entire globe
- Discover insights into thematic relationships that shape our understanding of world history
- Span the gaps between what teachers comfortably know and what they need to comprehend in order to teach a truly global and relevant past
BRIDGING WORLD HISTORY is inquiry-based, integrated and recursive, with each medium (video, web, and text) used in the most effective way. Each component refers to the others, picks up the “trail” from the others and builds upon it, but is also capable of standing alone.
The organization of this project addresses the tension between thematic and chronological approaches by following a loosely chronological order while developing a series of world history themes that are woven throughout the project’s 26 units. The units move chronologically across the key world historical contexts, from earliest human history (Unit 1) to the global experience of the past century (Unit 26)
