The new AP World History: Modern course virtually ignores the development of capitalism and racial ideology in the early modern world. It does address global exchange, albeit in a Eurocentric frame, and the development of larger empires.
Category: Curriculum
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Decolonizing with scissors and tape
Cut and Paste My eight year old and I recently spent parts of a couple of summer days cutting apart the official poster and binder materials for the Course and Exam Description for the new AP World History: Modern. It was a satisfying way to work on decolonizing this course. I tweeted the process. NB: […]
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Southeast Asia in World History
Considering how a Southeast Asia-centric World History course would look as an experiment in decolonization.
We can decolonize AP World: Modern from within. To do so, we must reject the new Unit Guides which center the outdated Western Civ of the legacy curriculum.
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It’s not AP Euro
Eurocentric World History is like scoring SAQs at home: the worst of both worlds. It combines the main disadvantages of European history—only covering part of the World—and of World History—limited time to dig into specific developments. The result is outdated version of European history narrating the history of the entire World.
The College Board recently released this Course and Exam Description for the new AP World. It features a course framework, including “Unit Guides;” suggestions for instruction; and sample exam questions. Key Concepts from the previous CED are linked, but are not presented in order. I term this partial because I’m expecting a new set of […]
Globalizing content, however is only one step in decolonizing world history. The next step is reframing the context for this global content.
A legacy course haunts contemporary World History classes.
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 […]
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 […]