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ERIC Number: EJ1043104
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2013-Oct
Pages: 3
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0037-7724
EISSN: N/A
The Promise of AP World History
Saldaña, Cristóbal T.
Social Education, v77 n5 p263-265 Oct 2013
AP World History is the ideal history course. It introduces students to 10,000 years of world history, and demands critical reading, critical writing, and critical thinking skills on the part of both the teacher and the students. It requires students to build their expertise in reading their textbook, and places demands on the teacher to assign the right primary sources to help clarify the inconsistencies, omissions, and different perspectives not presented in the textbooks. The teacher's role is also to make students aware of the varying points of view of those who experienced the events and occurrences of world history so as to help students synthesize, evaluate, and analyze the material. Most teachers would agree that it is not difficult to get a student to voice an opinion. However, it can be difficult to get that same student to explain why he or she maintains that opinion. In AP World History, the teacher must "break the wall" and show students how to transform their opinions into conclusions based on the information presented throughout the class. Synthesizing the varied and diverse information to arrive at a coherent analysis is a demanding task for even a well-versed, published world historian. We live in an increasingly globalized society, where the ability to connect with someone far away is merely a mouse click, text message, instant message, Tweet, Facebook post, or Instagram away. One might hope that with the world seemingly shrinking that the human experience would foster a brotherhood/sisterhood of humanity. Unfortunately, those same tools that we have used to connect to each other have ferreted out the fact that intolerance still exists in the world. The news we access is full of conflicts, and intolerance is very evident in online exchanges of opinion. The study of world history offers a great opportunity to increase students' understanding of other perspectives.
National Council for the Social Studies. 8555 Sixteenth Street #500, Silver Spring, MD 20910. Tel: 800-683-0812; Tel: 301-588-1800; Fax: 301-588-2049; e-mail: membership@ncss.org; Web site: http://www.socialstudies.org
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: High Schools; Secondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A