Consider this alternative approach to teaching history that would present
a more relevant, coherent, and engaging “story” from the student’s point of
view, without sacrificing content. Imagine restructuring a world history course
so that it begins and ends with the same essential question (one of, say, four
for the year): “Why did the events of September 11, 2001, happen, from a historical
point of view? As a historian advising the administration on policy
issues (or, alternatively, as a museum curator or a journalist from the Middle
East), how will you place these events in historical perspective so that our
leaders might better understand why they happened and address the underlying
issues?” All readings, discussions, lectures, and research would be
focused around answering the question as if the students were journalists, historians,
and museum curators, representing different cultural perspectives.
The course would culminate in written, oral, and visual products, and interactive
performances. The textbook, with its chronological summaries, would
serve as a resource—to be tapped only as needed. We would move backward
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and forward in time, uncovering key content and process as needed to equip
students to answer the question and perform successfully. The movement
would be logical though not chronological. In short, understanding with the
goal of performance requires an iterative curriculum that focuses on overarching
questions and explicit tasks, with varied approaches to teaching as dictated
by the needs of learners to master such questions and tasks.