Help me design a history course

In My Humble Opinion
1

The TL : DR version is that my wife was suddenly given the assignment for teaching a class on modern history at the private high school where she works here in Taiwan.

Somehow I got volunteered to help her design the course.

The kids are pretty motivated and so it’s probably close to an AP level class.

At the school, they have three week blocks for subjects, two hours a day, so there is a total of 30 hours.

She gets to decide when “modern” begins and has complete freedom over the curriculum.

She’s starting off with the Senkaku Island dispute with the idea of showing the kids the current problems have their basis in history. She’ll cover that for two days.

OK, so where to begin and what to do?

My initial idea is to pick several topics, discuss the current world and how it was in 1900 or so, and then show the events which led to the current situation.

For example, talk about the economic systems of the world, capitalism, Northern Europe socialism, and communism, and compare how the world was in 1900 with exploited workers and uneducated peasants. Show how the various countries coped with those problems, such as the Western counties adding government involvement in such areas as social security and universal health care. Look at the development and collapse of the communist scare but how China has kept on to it.

Another topic is the end of colonialism and how colonialism has contributed to problems in Africa and the Middle East, with various tribes thrown together to form “nations.”

War is a big topic, with the evolution from limited war to the slaughter of WWI, then total war of WWII, the cold war, Korean War, Vietnam and the Golf Wars.

As this is Taiwan, she’ll spend time on China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan.

Another topic could be human rights, with women suffrage, civil rights, apartheid.

Genocide should be discussed, with the Holocaust, Armenians, Pol Pot, China, USSR, etc.

So what should be included and what goes?

Maybe do seven topics and spend two days (four hours) on each topic.

Any advice or thoughts?

2

I’d start with Nicklaus v. Trevino, and finish up with Hope v. Crosby.

3

Okay, seven topics in modern world history.

  1. The collapse of aristocratic government and its replacement by popular government.
  2. The development of electricity based technology.
  3. The rise of nationalism as a political force.
  4. The shifting away of power from the western world.
  5. The growth of civil rights.
  6. The environmental movement.
  7. The globalization of popular culture and entertainment.
4

IANAT, and I don’t know anything about the theory of teaching, but that seems like a lot of topics to cover in a short time, to me. Are the kids going to have any discussions, or do any research or anything like that? It seems like you could teach a good amount of information in that time, but giving the students time to interact with a topic and develop some thinking/analysis skills would take longer.

5

I would consider teaching what history is and how to do history a vital and integral part of teaching history, alongside teaching historical facts.

Perhaps you could have weekly presentations by the students, in which they have to discuss an original document or source and two secondary sources? I would choose the original documents for the students, so they discuss things that are of interest to the weekly topic. In that way they could learn about the power to define, the winners writing history, archival research, using different sources etc etc.

6

It’s important she focus on what she can teach well, given the available resources, than what she would feel is ideal. Gracer is absolutely right that including primary sources is important. It’s also important to know what the class is for: are these kids going on to college tracks where they will take more history courses, or is this the last history class for most of them? To what degree does she need to be teaching college-skills, not just history? That can really shift your focus.

I will say this: history on that level is too big to be taught entirely through lecture: they need to be exposed to so much information that some of it will only come up in their reading. Therefore, you are kind of limited to teaching those things that you have good readings over. At a private high school, I assume she can chose her text(s) and ask her students to buy them, but I also suspect there is a practical limit on that: she can’t have them buy 10 books at $25-$50 each and then only read a short chapter from each. So what she really needs to do is find 1 central text to shape her course around and then 1-2 supplemental texts to shore up any weak areas.

I am not saying she needs to find a book and teach it, but having some sort of framework will make this much more effective. There’s no point in designing a theoretical curriculum only to discover you can’t organize the readings.

She also needs to be practical about time. If this is a one-off course when she’s also teaching a full load of other classes, reading ten textbooks and assembling a full set of primary and secondary sources is not realistic. There probably exists a collection of modern history primary sources designed for college classes. They might not be the exact best choices, but they are a starting point, especially for the first year she teaches the course.

Most publishers will send teachers review copies of texts. My very first step would be to start calling and emailing for those.