A recent activity in my AP World History classes brought together the original and the current foci of this blog: online pedagogy and decolonizing history curricula. Students in my classes (54 kids), another class in my building (16) and two classes at another school in my district (47) discussed revolutions and the Enlightenment in small […]
Author: Eric Beckman
I am a veteran high school history teacher interested in decolonizing history curricula, anti-racist pedagogy, and e-learning.
Like World War One and the “New” Imperialism of the late nineteenth-century, the Age of Revolution is a justifiably prominent topic in both World History and Western Civilization courses. The American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, and the Latin American Wars of Independence created major change across the Atlantic World. As a topic taught in the […]
Teacher educator Christopher Martell recently tweeted a call for collaboration: We need to build better bridges between historians and social studies teachers/teacher educators, so they know what we do. Starting this today! For the next month, I will follow a new historian each day and hopefully they will follow me back. Join me @NCSSNetwork folks! […]
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Flags
NB: this lesson is not politically correct, a phrase which I use broadly and literally. It may be illegal in some states.
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Ideas in History
I started listening to the Head On History podcast this summer and I’m continuing to catch up with the episodes during my commute now that school has started. It’s been great for adding nuance to and correcting misperceptions of the history of Islam. I plan to suggest some episodes as supplemental resources to students in my […]
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Hashtags and grain size
Early last week three of my summer’s hashtags intersected on a concept that I find very useful in World History pedagogy: granularity. As I was finalizing my presentation for #MNHistoryFest (3rd annual, always epic), I noticed that the benchmark for the “New” Imperialism in the Minnesota state standards is in the eleventh standard of World […]
As I have for the past two summers, I am eagerly anticipating History Fest 2018 (third annual, always epic). This year I’m presenting on how classroom discussions of Imperialism can either reinscribe or interrupt racist narratives. I reflected on this topic in a series of blog posts, and the ideas have percolated through the World History collaborative […]
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#SaveAPWorld
I just returned home from the AP World History reading in Salt Lake City, where I attended the contentious forum hosted by the College Board’s Vice President for AP Programs, Trevor Packer. At this forum Packer defended the recently announced change to the AP World History exam which would reduce the scope of the Exam […]
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Adjusting our time frames
My reading over the past year encouraged me to consider a variety of geographic vantage points on World History. This year I’m having a similar experience with regard to time. In addition to adjusting our spatial vantage points, history teachers need to thoughtfully consider time frames and established narratives, I learned a lot from Wensheng Wang’s White Lotus […]
Stenka Razin Sailing in the Caspian Sea, Vasily Surikov, 1906Stepan, aka Stenka, Razin led a 17th century attack on outposts of the Russian state, and it looks different from the vantage point of Moscow or the Caspian sea. I’m currently reading about rebels and pirates in Qing China, and Razin was both. This “rebellion” began as maritime […]