Tricks, Treats, and Tony Blair

Happy Halloween! I survived the 2012 Zombie Run in Darlington MD this past weekend…barely. I had one flag on my belt left.  It is interesting to see what holidays and festivals catch on in nations AND how they are interpreted, what meanings are given to

The Zombie Run in Maryland 2012. Click here for VIdeo

them, symbols used, traditions created, and rituals practiced. I have always been a fan of Halloween’s regional boundedness (in the US -New England,PA, NY, NJ,  made sense… but beyond those states, it never resonated with me). Halloween in Arizona, Hawaii, Indiana… just doesn’t seem to fit. What about in India, China, or Saudi Arabia? When I lived in Brazil, there was a quasi-visceral movement against celebrating Halloween. It was seen as cultural imperialism by the US; non-sensical practice to sell candy.  Halloween was a pop-cultural event celebrated beyond the expat community.  What other parts of the globe had it expanded? A quick search found this map charting global Halloween created on ChartsBin (more on this website in the future). ChartsBin does reference its sources!


via chartsbin.com

So, what is behind my Halloween mask today. I have one history trick, one technology treat, and a Tony Blair Global…BOO! Enjoy.

TRICK:  Video games can teach.  Growing up playing simulations/adventure games on my Apple IIGS like Pirates!, Revolution ’76, and Balance of Power expanded my vocabulary and conceptual frameworks, introduced me to historical people and events, and reinforced time and space contexts. It goes without saying then, that I felt blissful nostalgia when I saw ads for Assassin’s Creed 3 a historical action game set around American Revolution. Great. Another generation would engage the American Revolution in a different format and enjoy it.  But then I read CNN’s review by Larry Frum “American history unfolds in ‘Assassin’s Creed 3”.   The article takes nothing away from the game. It is Frum’s opening paragraph that makes me wince: “History, we are told, is immutable. What has happened cannot be changed and, when lessons are not heeded, is doomed to repeat itself.: UGGGHH.

Issue 1:  History is not immutable.  History is a rendering of the past, a human conceptual construct that changes according to sources used, experiences, intent etc.

Issue 2: What has happened changes because interpretation changes.  This is an empowering aspect of historical study. History is not an external canon to be memorized.

Issue 3: History doesn’t repeat itself. History doesn’t DO anything. History is not a mystical force that directs. Most of all, history is not inevitable. When people speak in these terms they are sharing their world views, and limited understanding of historical studies, theory, and epistemology.

A potential fix addressing these issues can be found in The Big Six a new publication by Peter Seixas and Tom Morton.  Add it to your professional development reading and “to do ” list.

TREAT: The University of Texas at Austin, Hemispheres and Not Even Past are pleased to announce the launch of 15 Minute History, a podcast—with supplementary materials—about World and US history.  This podcast series is devoted to short, accessible discussions of important topics in World History and US History. The discussions will be conducted by the award winning faculty and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin. They are off

Channel Warhol with these15 minutes of fame!

to a great start!  As of Halloween 2012, they have 5 episodes:

Another neat feature is that they are taking suggestions! Email the staff (they got back to me within minutes). Combine that with a transcript of the podcast and further reading, and 15 minute history’s future looks bright. Add them to your bag of tricks… I mean treats.

TONY BLAIR:I was recently introduced to an outstanding Global Education program/curriculum used in over 600 schools worldwide called Face to Faith. Started in 2008, the  The Tony Blair Faith Foundationaims to promote respect and understanding about the world’s major religions and show how faith can be a powerful force for good in the modern world.  The former Prime Minister of the UK notes “I have always believed that faith is an essential part of the modern world. As globalisation pushes us ever closer it is vital it’s not used as a force for conflict and division. Faith is not something either old-fashioned or to be used for extremism.”  This sentiment may unsettle some individual’s world views and narrative of a secular progression through world history.  Meeting with a teacher who uses the program in Utah public schools, curriculum coordinators, representatives from the DOE and NCSS, I soon realized that Face to Faith was an empowering curriculum that trains educators how to teach global issues through religious perspectives. Amazing!  The program is in 19 countries; Australia, Canada, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Mexico, Pakistan, Palestine, Philippines, Singapore, UAE, UK, Kosovo, Ukraine and USA. Face to Faith guarantees an interactive, global and life-changing experience for participating schools, teachers and students.

If interested, you can contact Dr. Charles Haynes  director of the Religious Freedom Education Project at the Newseum and a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, or Marcia Beauchamp at   marcia.beauchamp@tonyblairfaithfoundation.org

BOO!

 

5 Easy Pieces for a Global Classroom

Adapting classroom practice should be an easy, ongoing set of processes drawing from a range of resources and nodes of information. Professional teaching, and teachers, are at their best when they are agile, adaptable, open, and look to improve their craft. Of course there are ranges of willingness, complexity, time, and opportunity around this aspect of education.  Focus and organization are key attributes as well. However, classroom improvements need to not be paradigm shifts in teaching.  Small pieces which explore the possibilities of education, address contemporary educational demands, and indulge teachers’ interests form the base for continued evolution. This includes changes made in the name of global education. I suggest this need not be an all encompassing move. Likewise, static teaching is like bad customer (and existential) service…

 

If Jack was the student and the waitress a teacher set in stagnant practice, the order (adaptive teaching) never gets delivered (authentic, relevant learning).  Thankfully, their is no lack of ways teachers can explore and improve their craft.  Below is a menu of 5 global education resources.  They can be engaged in varying layers of depth, explored individually or with  a group, and implemented according to your students, personal, school, and community needs.  Let me know what you think about them and how you use them. I am going to get a chicken salad sandwich.

Global Nomads: Connect -> Collaborate –>Create –> Change!  So simple, yet so effective a formula is the central mantra of Global Nomads.  “Global Nomads Group (GNG) is an international NGO whose mission is to foster dialogue and understanding among the world’s youth. GNG engages and empowers young people worldwide using media, including: interactive videoconferencing, webcasting, social networking, gaming, and participatory filmmaking. GNG operates at the intersection of international and peace education, striving to serve as a vehicle for awareness, bridging the boundaries of cultural misconceptions and instilling in our audience a heightened appreciation and comprehension of the world in which they live.”   Heads up…. their  Election Watch Webcast is coming up:

  • WhenThu, November 1, 12pm – 1pm
  • DescriptionGrades 7-12 Join us as we follow the 2012 Presidential election campaign. In this four-part program, we will explore the following topics: • Voting in the USA & Campaign 101 • Political Parties: Policies, Perspectives & Promises • Voting Day
  • Register at http://bit.ly/N9pK81

Collabornation: Whoa! You have to check this interactive website designed by Susan Fisher of Ridgeview IB Charter School in Georgia. In her own words “This is the gamification website I created as an integral part of my “Dream Classroom” where students can experience and interact with the  curriculum in an exciting and unique way. It includes elements of flipping, webquest design, differentiation, gaming, and project based learning… just to name a few. Areas the students explore include Noob Quests, Cartographer’s Workshop, Shaman’s Insight, Capital City, Economist’s Lair, Library, Urgent Evoke and Arcadia.The names are all plays on the themes we visit throughout the year.”  It feels like Blade Runner meets Khan Academy… a great mix indeed.

 

Tourwrist: This is pretty amazing.   “In less than 60 seconds, you can now create, label and submit your own 360°panorama (pano) with the totally free TourWrist iOS app.”   Although not designed as an educational tool, using Tourwrist in social studies and history classes adds a visual element to lessons, projects, etc not available before. Be sure to scroll up and down to get the full effect.

UN Cyber Schoolbus: “The United Nations Cyberschoolbus was created in 1996 as the online education component of the Global Teaching and Learning Project, whose mission is to promote education about international issues and the United Nations. The Global Teaching and Learning Project produces high quality teaching materials and activities designed for educational use (at primary, intermediate and secondary school levels) and for training teachers. The vision of this Project is to provide exceptional educational resources (both online and in print) to students growing up in a world undergoing increased globalization. The Global Teaching and Learning Project is part of the Outreach Division of the United Nations Department of Public Information. ” My favorites include their curriculum of 20 global issues and their interactive game on refugees.

US Peace Institute:  I had the pleasure of visiting the institute at its new, stunning headquarters in Washington D.C. this past week.  The institute, “the

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.
Baruch Spinoza

independent, nonpartisan conflict management center created by Congress to prevent and mitigate international conflict without resorting to violence”, recognizes that conflict is part of humanity but need not lead to violence and war.  Their education programs, many of them found at the Global Peacebuilding  Center, are extensive including classroom resources, professional development, networking, and online resources.  There is something very every level of educator… don’t miss the conflict style assessment test, virtual passport, and essay contest.

OK…. 6 easy pieces. Consider this dessert.  Mmm.. Enjoy.

My Hero:  “Educators use The MY HERO Project in schools, libraries, after-school workshops, and community and media centers around the world to build student’s 21st Century skills, stimulate character development and engage them in thinking critically about heroism, personal and cultural values, human rights, and environment issues.”  There are numerous resources on their educators page   A great feature is the numerous ways to share projects to the community on their site form around the globe.

Laboring to Implement Global and Transnational Contexts in Secondary History Education

Baseball is an international sport. What is the purpose behind national claims to ownership of an event, idea, person, invention etc? Exploring systems and networks is indicative of a 21st century education. Click here to see the Asia Society’s explanation of “Systems Thinking.”

Happy Labor Day. This summer, I took a minor league baseball  pilgrimage to Myrtle Beach, SC (home of the Pelicans and Kenny Power’s fictional Merman) via Durham North Carolina to see the legendary Durham Bulls play.  Combined with the Washington National’s success, this season has been a very fun one indeed.  As I drove through North Carolina, however, I had repeated flashbacks to my time living in Brazil, specifically during 2003.   The source of my memories was NC’s license plate which boosts the claim “First in Flight.”  It was on the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brother’s 1903 Kitty Hawk run that I became aware that a counter argument and broader circumstances even existed concerning first flight narratives. Enter Mr. Santos Dumont, Brazilian inventor, aviator, and eccentric. (I had been flying into the airport named after him for years at that point but hadn’t bothered checking who he was).  At a recent visit to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, staff there had never heard of Dumont despite his achievements and this entry in Smithsonian Education. Dumont, I am confident, remains in obscurity in US education and thus North Carolina’s claim has been elevated to “truth.”

This post is not to engage in the Dumont v. Wright debate.  Rather, I would like to use it as an inroad to address the state of Global and Transnational historical perspectives in secondary history/social studies education.  I think there is little doubt that the national paradigm, including celebratory claims to “firstness” and national “ownership” of events, ideas, inventions, people etc. are unfortunately alive and well.  Wjile at Virtual High School, a course we offered included a discussion prompt asking students to identify what sports are truly “American.”  This was done without exploring what a national claim entails , detailing the limitations of such national claims, examining theories of nationalism, or considering systems thinking beyond national boundaries. It seems these types of inquiries are more relevant, higher order, and rigorous.  Contemporary histories embrace global and transnational paradigms. Certain universities, like Georgetown and University College London have established centers around these models of thought.  The result has been an abundance of scholarship using these theories and methods.  In a recent article in the Globality Studies Journal, historian Akira Iriye notes

Does Santos Dumont reinforce national claims of flight (US, Brazil or otherwise…) or can he be an inroad into exploring alternative narratives and investigate flows of ideas? I say YES! Fasten your seat belts… and watch this video (CLICK HERE).

“The privileging of the nation as the key unit of analysis, and of international relations as the basic framework in which to look at the world at a given moment in time, had led to an incomplete understanding of the past, not a full view of how humankind had evolved. It may be said that historians finally caught up with history when they became interested in paying greater attention than their predecessors to non-state actors and transnational phenomena, not just to nation-specific stories or to vicissitudes in interstate affairs.”

Also,  The “Making History” website hosted by the University of London is an excellent resource for historical theory and practice.

The La Pietra Report of 2000 formally announced  the need for globalizing historical understanding and perspectives beyond the nation. This practice had been carried out, however, for decades.  SUNY Stonybrook’s Center for Global and Local History (directed by Wolf Schafer) recognizes British Historian Geoffrey Barraclough as a key figure in the development global history. Likewise Randolph Bourne’s 1916 essay “Trans-national America” indicate a that contemporary calls for perspectives broader than the nation are a return to a past approach, not a new movement to undermine national identity. Still, clarity over these terms is not crystal clear.  Andre Kuech in his article “A Survey of World History Studies: Theory, Methodology and Networks” wrestles with the peculiraties and lack of universal agreement around  global, transnational, and world history. He contends, “Each different historical approach essentially works to map out a network of actors and connections, or a series of networks of actors and connections, in order to account for the large-scale processes of human interactions over time. The differing units of analysis used in world, global and transnational studies directly affect the geographic scales they can cover.”

Kuech concludes that “exploring and investigating the underlying characteristics of human interactions, world and global historians will be better able to comprehend not just the who, what, and when of global connections, but also the why and how these connections have increased, spread and varied over time. My contention is that historians should carefully consider their usage of the terms ‘global,’ ‘transnational’ and ‘world’ before employing them in historical projects.”   I contend that history education in high school is indeed one of the historical projects Kuech alludes to.

Bridging the gaps that exist between the academy, the public, and secondary history education can be effectively done by teachers.  To that end, I offer a

National boundaries don’t stop flows, connections,and exchanges. Why would they? A sample transnational map. Click on it for the full details.

list of prompts to start the conversation and action around the integration of global and transnational perspectives in high school. In the broad scheme of things, I believe this move will elevate history and the social sciences to a level held presently by STEM education.  The skills and mental constructs that develop from global and transnational studies better equip students for the future than that provided by national models of the past.

Prompts to consider:

  • Discuss the concepts of agency, structuralism, and knowledge construction with students.
  • Use multiple Periodizations and discuss the the role of the nation and nationalism in our world views.
  • Use online timelines to engage technology and collaborative practices. (A suggested list is here)
  • Utilize multiple narratives that run counter to and problematize textbook and heritage studies.
  • Discuss the purpose of history education in your school.
  • Engage in Professional Development in global and transnational history.
  • Communicate to the community what these types of history entail.

Professor Bruce Van Sledright, in his 2010 work  The Challenge of Rethinking History Education: On Practices, Theories, and Policy identifies History (with a cap) as being the national/official narrative reinforced in schooling, media society etc (I tend to call this heritage). With a small “h” history supposes that constructing stories about the past are complex, varying, multiple and together provide a clearer understanding of the past.  Typical things identified as “American”, jazz, jeans, democracy, football, etc, all have a global and transnational history. Moving beyond the national model is waaaaayyy overdue. What are you doing to make it happen in your school and community?

Gold Medal Global Education

Sorry for the delay in this post.  Vacation got in the way.  Nevertheless, I am back and excited about the 2012 Olympics.  The mascots are a bit bizarre and their cycloptic vision is certainly not something that should be promoted in history or global

Wenlock and Mandeville, a bit Hux-wellian? Click hear to see a classic opening ceremony.

education.  Also, is was unfortunate that during the opening ceremony’s parade of nations, all Bob Costas could muster about Uganda was a reference to Idi Amin.  Why he did so is probably best explained by reading John Willinsky’s classic text Learning to Divide The World. Beyond these non-athletic based observations,  the spirit  of the Olympics and athletic competition is infectious.

A friend of mine suggested a fitting icebreaker, which also gives me the opportunity to use, for the first time in this blog, a polling toll. Check it out and be heard!

What is your favorite Summer Olympic event?

I recall, from my classroom days,  students consistently asking what the 5 Olympic Rings represent.  Do you know? Here is the explanation taken from the Olympic website:

The rings are interlocking and arranged in a trapezoid shape in colors blue, black, red, yellow, and green.Pierre de Coubertin first proposed this symbol at the1914 Olympic congress in Paris. Upon its initial introduction, de Coubertin stated

“…the six colors [including the flag’s white background] thus combined reproduce the colors of all the nations, with no exception. The blue and yellow of Sweden, the blue and white of Greece, the tri- colours of France, England and America, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Hungary, the yellow and red of Spain next to the novelties of Brazil or Australia, with old Japan and new China. Here is truly an international symbol.”

5 continents or 7? Remember this great cold-war era soccer gold medal match?

The Olympic flag flew for the first time in an Olympic stadium in 1920 during the Antwerp Games. If the number of rings represents the continents, the colors (six of them, counting the white background) were chosen to ensure that every country would have at least one of the colors in its national flag included. Overall, the five rings that make up the Olympic symbol  represent the universality of the Olympics  and of athletes from around the globe.

For purposes related to this blog, I see the rings as an opportunity to share some “gold medal” global education programs. Check them out, share them, leave some comments, explore, and enjoy .

1)       IREX: Teachers For Global Classrooms

The Teachers for Global Classrooms (TGC) Program provides a professional development opportunity for middle and high school teachers from the United States to participate in a program aimed at globalizing teaching and learning in their classrooms. TGC is a program of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and administered by IREX. Participants are selected through a national, open competition. Eligible applicants must be U.S. citizens and full-time secondary-level (middle or high school), teaching professionals with five or more years of classroom experience in disciplines including English as a Second Language, English Language or Literature, Social Studies, Mathematics, or Science.

2)    Connected Educators Month:

Online communities and learning networks are helping hundreds of thousands of educators learn, reducing isolation and providing “just in time” access to knowledge and opportunities for collaboration. However, many educators are not yet participating and others aren’t realizing the full benefits. In many cases, schools, districts, and states also are not recognizing and rewarding this essential professional learning.For these reasons, the U.S. Department of Education’s Connected Educators initiative is launching Connected Educator Month in August 2012. Throughout August, there will be coordinated opportunities to participate in events and activities in dozens of online locations to develop skills and enhance one’s personal learning network.

Be sure to check out the webinar I am leading on August 20th at 11:00 am EDT on the AHA’s Tuning History project.

3) Google World Wonders Project:

The World Wonders Project is a valuable resource for students and scholars who can now virtually discover some of the most famous sites on earth. The project offers an innovative way to teach history and geography to students of primary and secondary schools all over the world. By using our Street View technology, Google has a unique opportunity to make world heritage sites available to users across the globe. With advancements in our camera technologies we can now go off the beaten track to photograph some of the most significant places in the world so that anyone, anywhere can explore them.

4)  The Longview Foundation: 

Founded by William L. Breese, the Longview Foundation for World Affairs and International Understanding has been helping young people in the United States learn about world regions and global issues since 1966. At the dawn of the 21st century, knowledge of other peoples, economies, languages and international affairs has become a necessity for every child. Eliminating global poverty, solving international conflicts, working in new markets, and addressing global health and environmental problems require international knowledge and cooperation. And in our increasingly diverse communities in the United States, knowledge of other cultures is essential to strengthening our own democracy.

5)   Teachers Without Borders:

At over 59 million, teachers are the largest group of trained professionals in the world. As transmitters of knowledge and community leaders, teachers are powerful catalysts for lasting global change. However, teacher professional development is often irrelevant, inconsequential, or missing entirely. Teachers must therefore have a support network to provide the resources, training, tools and colleagues they need to fulfill their important role. Teachers Without Borders offers that support. We do not send teachers from the West to the East or from the North to the South; rather, we provide the space for teachers around the world to find and learn from each other.

6) OER Conferences (two events)

Open Education has come of age. The tiny movement that began in the late 1990s as a desire to increase access to educational opportunity has blossomed into requirements in national grant programs, key strategies in state legislatures and offices of education, content sharing initiatives at hundreds of universities and high schools, and a wide range of innovation and entrepreneurship in both the commercial and nonprofit sectors.

The Past: The presentations at UNESCO’s June 2012 conference in Paris are archived and can be viewed here.

The Future:  OpenEd12, the ninth annual Open Education Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia  “Beyond Content”

All the World’s an Online, Open Courseware, Cloud Based, Professional Development Stage

An important question contemporary educators should reflect upon asks where they sit with innovations in professional development opportunities. Long gone are the days when PD is delivered in a whole staff assembly over a few days throughout the school year (at least they should be). To many teachers, this model was irrelevant, pointless, or  extra grading time. Personalized learning, a strategy long practiced with students, is found in some districts allowing teachers to pick from a personalized menu of presentations. I was part of that model in Springfield, MA and found I could utilize my time better. I also felt more professional.  However, another move, one that goes from the personalized to the personal, is upon us. Learning Analytics, the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occur, bridges that move to personal learning. Toronto educator Melanie McBride , explaining the import of personal learning, notes:

All the World's a Stage. Isn't it? Click here to find out...

“Autonomous learning is self-directed and self-selected according to the learner’s own needs, preferences, and learning arrangements… Truly autonomous learning means making our own choices about what…and with whom we wish to learn with or from, where we want to do this learning, when we prefer to… and how we want to learn.”

McBride’s statement was targeted at students. I contend that her sentiments are just as relevant when applied to the teaching profession. Moreover, a personal approach to PD addresses the contentious theme of teacher  professionalism  by empowering educators to demonstrate all they do to improve and inform themselves in their content area and in the field of education in general.  In turn, personal PD plans should be used in evaluations and impact promotion decisions. In other words, this model of PD is available, As You Like It.

So, in relation to self-designed PD,  what stage of development or activity (Shakespeare suggests there are 7!) are you in?  Are you a main character,supporting cast, behind the scenes, in the audience, looking for a ticket?  Has your involvement with online PD involve been a tragedy or comedy? Are you making history?  The great news is, that wherever you are, there are always ways to improve, expand, or sharpen your present practice.   Online opportunities for educators to grow professionally abound. You can  take a course, create a PLC, explore recorded webinars, and build a network of educators. You can act as a catalyst for your own learning and impact the learning of those connected to you. Overall, this area of education is exciting, daunting, and rapidly expanding. It is an aspect that was probably not covered in most teachers’ pre-service training. But it is never too late to start or return for a cameo.

I have found that demystifying online technology is important in order to attract hesitant educators. Simply put, online technology, courses, and communities…

a) Remove the limits of space and time concerning learning and collaboration.

b) Allows educators to design their own innovative PD plan  and teacher evaluation.

c) Act as a gateway for building networks, meeting people, and exposure to ideas.

Will Richardson, during a recent webinar hosted at the Center for Learning, emphasized the advantages of engaging in and developing your own online personal network. In his book, Personal Learning Networks: The Future of Learning, Richardson reminds us that among the triple A of online learning  (Anytime, Anywhere, Anyone),  “Anyone” stands out as most important. Engaging in a  public network of professionals, as opposed to having  nodes of contacts, places ideas and perspectives on center stage. Moreover, it is more likely that comments will not only be from “yes men” but will invite challenging discussions to help refine your educational philosophy and practice.

Below,  I have included a brief list of options for teachers to take online courses or modules. This is only a sampling and I am confident they will expand. Enjoy…

Seven possible stages of development, London sculpture version. Kind of like Thomas Cole's Course of Empire series. As one of my respected colleagues noted "Wait until Wal Mart enters the field of online education." Well, until then, check these out and I hope to see you in my future network.

Coursera:We are  a social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. We envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions. Our technology enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students. Through this, we hope to give everyone access to the world-class education that has so far been available only to a select few.

Udacity: Udacity was founded by three roboticists who believed much of the educational value of their university classes could be offered online. A few weeks later, over 160,000 students in more than 190 countries enrolled in our first class,

Open Culture: Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community. Web 2.0 has given us great amounts of intelligent audio and video. It’s all free. It’s all enriching. But it’s also scattered across the web, and not easy to find. Our whole mission is to centralize this content, curate it, and give you access to this high quality content whenever and wherever you want it

P2PU: The Peer 2 Peer University is a grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. P2PU creates a model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education. Leveraging the internet and educational materials openly available online, P2PU enables high-quality low-cost education opportunities. P2PU – learning for everyone, by everyone about almost anything.

Learning Space The Open Univeristy: Try over 600 free online courses from The Open University.Available from introductory to advanced level, each takes between 1 and 50 hours to study.Complete activities to assess your progress and compare your thoughts with sample answers.

Academic Earth: We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars.  Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.We invite those who share our passion to explore our website, participate in our online community, and help us continue to find new ways to make learning easier for everyone.

iAcademics:iAcademics is a group of teachers of the teaching department of Catalonia who has created a collaborative portal of courses of any fieldThe objective of iAcademics is to create a learning environment which makes it possible to share some resources among all its users.

Tufts Open Courseware Tufts OpenCourseWare is part of a new educational movement initiated by MIT that provides free access to course content for everyone online. Tufts’ course offerings demonstrate the University’s strength in the life sciences in addition to its multidisciplinary approach, international perspective and underlying ethic of service to its local, national and international communities.

Ted-ED: TED-Ed’s commitment to creating lessons worth sharing is an extension of TED’s mission of spreading great ideas. Within the growing TED-Ed video library, you will find carefully curated educational videos, many of which represent collaborations between talented educators and animators nominated through the TED-Ed platform.

EdX: EdX is a joint partnership between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to offer online learning to millions of people around the world. EdX will offer Harvard and MIT classes online for free. Through this partnership, the institutions aim to extend their collective reach to build a global community of online learners and to improve education for everyone.

 

Will you get involved in the world stage? The Bard would... Click here to see.

Global Education Conference: the third annual Global Education Conference, a free week-long online event bringing together educators and innovators from around the world, will be held Monday, November 12 through Friday, November 16, 2012 (Saturday, November 17th in some time zones). The entire conference will be held online using the Blackboard Collaborate platform (formerly known as Elluminate/Wimba) with the support of iEARN worldwide as the conference founding sponsor, who will be running their annual international conference in conjunction with this event.

Hope to see you at the Global Education Conference. If you don’t attend or  watch at least one of the over300 sessions, or submit a proposal to present  a great idea and share it with educators on a global scale, please comment to this blog an share your excuse why you decided not to. By not participating, you perpetuate the vision of educators as profession filled with people who were motivated to teach by three reasons; June, July, and August. If teachers are to be viewed as professionals, anything must be done to bury this view;  “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

 

A Mythed Opportunity: U.S. Isolationism 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 etc.

 

C. Vann Woodward’s sentiment “America is an innocent nation in a wicked world able to obtain freely and innocently that which other

Professor Woodward says thinks that make me go Hmmm.... click here

nations sought by the sword” is one of those lines I had to re-read over and over to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind.  Happy with my reading comprehension I thought about Woodward’s sentiment and the complex connections among national identity, myth, history education, and foreign policy. Combine that with free/open educational resources and you get a nexus where Benedict Anderson meets Khan Academy meets Howard Gardner. That is some imagined community.

Gardner wrote “Over time and cultures, the most robust and most effective form of communication is the creation of a powerful narrative.” Applied to American Foreign Policy,  the traditional standard narrative establishes a myth of isolationism  in which the Spanish-American War of 1898 followed by the  little known or discussed Philippine-American Warwas an imperial aberration. Professor Hilde Restad in the article “Old Paradigms in History Die Hard in Political Science: US Foreign Policy and American Exceptionalism” (by the way this is from the inaugural issue of the new journal American Political Thought, and is available online for free for about 3 more weeks?) notes  “isolationism  (and its present colloquialism ‘aloofness’ means essentially keeping the world at a distance and tending to one’s own business, whereas internationalism means being actively engaged in world affairs.”  This myth is perpetuated by high school History courses, state standards, textbooks, testing agencies, the College Board, and International Baccalaureate establishing a simplified binary of us/them and  isolationism/interventionism that is not indicative of 21st century education expectations, international realities, or contemporary trends in historical research.

Restad continues, “contemporary historians do not think early US foreign policy was isolationist at all… it constitutes the old paradigm among historians that speak to a certain discourse on US identity…They rely on outdated assumptions and do not explain US Foreign policy traditions very well…Today, however, historians of US foreign relations reject the term “isolationsim” as a valid description for early American Foreign Policy…the foreign policy dichotomy is outdated  and incorrect…”  A sample of recent scholarship supporting Restad and challenging the isolationism myth includes:

 

The evidence continues. In America’s Backyard: The United States & Latin America from the Monroe Doctrine to the War on Terror Grace Livingston’s survey’s United States’ “180 years of intervention” in Latin America.  Her first chapter identifies U.S. interwar political, military, and economic intervention in the Dominican Republic (1916-1924), Guatemala (1920), Honduras (1919, 1924, 1925), and Panama (1921, 1925).

Two more examples, Mary Renda’s 2001 work, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 and Michel Gobat’s 2005 Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule are emblematic of research throughout Latin America. Both authors summarize U.S. encounters under an imperial dynamic touted since the end of the Cold War. Both texts’ openings are notably explicit in regard to U.S. intervention. Renda writes: “The United States invaded Haiti in July 1915 and subsequently held the second oldest independent nation in the Western Hemisphere under military occupation for nineteen years. While in Haiti, marines installed a puppet president, dissolved the legislature at gunpoint, denied freedom of speech, and forced a new constitution on the Caribbean nation- one more favorable to foreign investment.” 

Gobet follows suit in his summation of U.S. involvement in Nicaragua:

“The occupation of 1912-1933 represented the greatest U.S. effort to turn Nicaragua into ‘a little United States’. (The occupation) profoundly destabilized Nicaragua. Most notably, it produced…protracted civil war…led to the disruptive U.S. takeover of Nicaragua’s finances under the aegis of dollar diplomacy… subverted the existing order by facilitating the dramatic spread of U.S. Protestant missionary activity…enabled a U.S. established military institution to become the most powerful political force …that helped produce Central America’s lengthiest dictatorship, the Somoza dynasty of 1936-1979.

You can imagine my level of  excitement around the possibility of finding a high school textbook that refuted the isolation myth when I read this History News Network post about the release of a new open source textbook:

“A group of thirty historians put together a comprehensive US survey textbook that is COMPLETELY FREE for students to read online. Students who don’t want to read 500 pages online can buy the paper copy at their college bookstore-just like any other textbook. Volume 2 (after 1865) has been published and the reviews on this book have been very strong, and there are hundreds of maps and images-something that is often missing from value textbooks. The book also does a superior job of presenting US history in a global context. It’s real easy to read online-lots of viewing options and students can take notes and view study guides. As adjuncts, we are uniquely qualified to know what our students are going through when purchasing textbooks:) And we are also unique in that we depend upon maintaining the goodwill of students–imagine the kind of goodwill this would create? I love to hear about other great innovations that will help us get books (websites are great but I think there is no substitute for books) into the hands of students without breaking their budgets. Here is the link to the book. It’s generated some great press but given the fact that it is free means there will be no book reps coming to your office-so please spread the word as I am doing.”

The textbook is viewable here.  My hope was quickly dashed when I did a word search for “isolationism” which produced these all too familiar mythological sentiments:

  • “symbolized the end of American isolationism and prompted a similar response.”
  • “However, two decades of isolationism kept US military spending…”
  • “…the United States transitioned from isolationism to intervention.”
  • “…policy that was similar to the isolationism of earlier periods in US “

Ugghhh. The Flatworld Knowledge textbook is a disappointment on this subject and represents  a missed opportunity to de mystify and

America's Backyard... doesn't sound isolationist. Click here for an animated map

de-mythologize US History.  The question is why? Why did the authors confront this myth?  What are your comments?  I will give it a shot below:

The implications of “fashioning new historical narratives that expand beyond the scope of the nation” ultimately challenge the long standing tradition of national historical narratives. Moreover, Historian Ian Tyrrell, sees this process as an advantage to “conceptualizing American history better.”  The scholarship cited here questions the long standing tradition of U.S. isolationism between World War I and World War II.  Each cite distinct, overt, intentional, long-term American intervention in nation-states between 1918 and 1941. Yet, the myth of American isolationism remains intact, part of the American consciousness and official narrative.

 

Continued use of American isolationism implies a set of qualifications regarding U.S. history.

1)      Isolationism refers only to American affairs in military actions in Europe.

2)      Isolationism is indicative of reluctant American interventionism.

Taken together, qualified “American isolationism” is a constructed concept limited by a bounded geo-political structure. It casts the U.S. in a historical context  of exceptionalism resistant to the lure of intervention practiced by other nation-states. Internationalizing U.S. historical memory effectively dispels any claims to U.S. interwar isolationism as a viable concept.  Whether defined as militaristic, political, economic, or cultural, U.S. intervention was the norm, not the exception in the 1920’s and 1930’s. A paradigm change has profound impact on knowledge, memory, and understanding. To these ends, the transnational challenge ask us to rethink national dogma found in historical narratives. The emerging clarity affecting national identity positions nations to better engage themselves and the world.

Simply put, the US has never been isolationist.  Why would it be? Celebrating Woodward’s sentiment in our education system limits students’ knowledge and fails to prepare them for the world.  Educators who end  this myth are better preparing their students and should be recognized, supported, and celebrated for their efforts.

 

 

 

History (does not) repeat(s) itself

I think many of us have heard this statement before, “History repeats itself”,  used as a causal explanation, as a set up for some form of comparison, or to legitimize futurists’ predictions.  This tidbit of conventional wisdom is excusable when uttered by non-history educators. When promoted in a history classroom, however, claims of historical repetition establishes a paradigm defined by inevitability, oversimplification, cycloptic perspectives, and limited agency.  Granted, we all use

Is that you my dear?

mental frameworks and imaginings to categorize the world and engage the past. I am reminded of the ill-fated patient with Korsakoff Syndrome  in   Oliver  Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat  forced to constantly recreate an understandable past in order to exist in the present.  But reliance on a schema of historical re-occurrence limits analytical, nuanced, and contextual understanding of the past.

At its core, history is the narration of change over time.  I recall a professor of mine demystifying the work of Michel Foucault with a metacognitive strategy usable with almost any historical work. To paraphrase professor Tim Brownat Northeastern University, understanding the genealogy of an idea involves identifying its manifestation in the past, defining its existence at a latter date and then explaining how those changes happened.  This approach helps understand and explore historical explanation. Moreover being able to recognize, describe, and analyze “change over time” is an ability promoted by multiple organizations devoted to History Thinking Skills in history education.  Three of those organizations are highlighted below:

  • Historical Thinking Project : “Students sometimes misunderstand history as a list of events. Once they start to understand history as a complex mix of continuity and change, they reach a fundamentally different sense of the past.”
  • The College Board: “Historical thinking involves the ability to recognize, analyze and evaluate the dynamics of historical continuity and change over periods of time of varying lengths, as well as relating these patterns to larger historical processes or themes.”
  • American Historical Association: “Students readily acknowledge that we employ and struggle with technologies unavailable to our forebears, that we live by different laws, and that we enjoy different cultural pursuits. Moreover, students also note that some aspects of life remain the same across time… Continuity thus comprises an integral part of the idea of change over time.

Watch this! I'll be wrapped around your finger...

In his book Thinking Historically: Educating Students for the 21st Centuryprofessor Stephane Levesque argues “If history is, by definition, concerned with the study of historical change, it is reasonable to assume that continuity and change should be concepts of crucial consideration in school history.”  There are a multitude of ways to teach this historical thinking skill.  I prefer using primary source visuals.  To this end, I consider the “Digital Vaults”online tool, created by the National Archives in Washington D.C., to be a fantastic, effective way to engage students with change over time (and use technology,  literacy skills, and student generated knowledge). With minimal practice, students and teachers can become proficient with the Digital Vaults application.     Among its features, students can create posters and films to present their “change over time” content and material. I created one of each as instructional models and samples of learning tools. Check them out!

Combined with the Historical Thinking Project’s Continuity and Change worksheet (found under ‘resources’), these tools are great additions to a teacher’s repertoire and should become an integral part of students’ learning about the past. Building off of what Mark Twain may have said, “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme”, students can better provide the “reasons” for continuity and change. This fosters critical thinking skills and a paradigm of history that is a complex, nuanced, and interpretive process about unique events in the past.

I am not a history buff…

I remember, in my 11th year of teaching middle and high school history, being asked by a colleague how I had time to teach my students about the philosophy of history, theory, and historiography. My response, “I make time” was, to large extent, the product of personal shock.  As I spoke those words, my mind raced with reflective questions. “Doesn’t every history teacher do this? Why I am being asked this? Isn’t it obvious?”

Answers to these questions came, a few months later, during a professional learning community (PLC) session to plan our mid-term exam for the 10th  grade U.S. history survey.  I thought the teacher across the table from me was joking when he said, “One of the multiple choice questions has to be about Lincoln’s Secretary of War.” (Who was it?)  I smiled at the perceived humor. However, when he added, “…and the Anaconda Plan, definitely”, I realized he was serious. I also knew that his students must be getting a very different version and understanding of history.

Edwin Stanton was Lincoln's Secretary of War. I looked it up while writing this post.

My colleague’s conviction was founded in his experience with history education, understanding of the purpose of history, and epistemology. His was rooted in a late 19th early 20th century view of history as a set body of knowledge promoted by the nation-state. In turn, if the effort to teach  theory isn’t taken, then history becomes an external “truth” to be memorized. Too often this is the case.  One result of this conception of history courses has been to hasten its relegation to a secondary status below STEM courses and ELA.

Historical thinking skills have the potential to reshape history’s purpose beyond nationalism and  socialization in an imagined community. Beyond civics, history, taught as an internal, social process of knowledge construction, emphasizes the understanding of human systems, processes, culture, causation, change, and perspective. Simply put, the present is better perceived by engaging the past, not being told it full stop. As a starting point to these ends, I suggest teachers engage students with three ideas as a basis for teaching authentic history.

  1. Historical Narrative
  2. Causation
  3. Complexity over Binary thought

How these ideas can be introduced and taught are for future posts. But, for now, note that the words “theory”, “historiography”, and “philosophy” need not be used to engage students in historical thought, and not expecting memorization as history.

Overall, I promote a change in how history is perceived and taught. One way to perform this resides in college education departments. History teachers need to be trained in historical theory as a content knowledge as well as pedagogy to teach those concepts. In turn, history courses must be expected to devote time to teaching history theory and thinking skills. Without this basis, history classes are exercises in memorization. And history teachers are nothing more than history “buffs”.