At the beginning of the school year I had quit a few challenges to look forward to. Let me back up, I've been teaching World History at Tulare Union High School for about five years. During that time of teaching I have been getting lethargic with my methods. I figured there had to be something better than the same redundant year after year methods of teaching.
One thing I do know is that students love technology. They love their ipods, lap tops, and above all else their cell phones.
The content of my action research is going to be introducing Multicultural curriculum into a World History classroom utilizing Technology. My question is, “Is there multicultural curriculum of technology for a World History class?”
I decided to research this particular question because after teaching World History for five years I was beginning to notice a westernized view of World History. Everything was from the perspective of how history was interpreted though European American eyes and books. It almost seemed as though world history revolved mostly around the United States or Europe. The reality of world history is that western civilization only existed and dominated for only about 600 years. China and Persia have been at the fore front of domination for thousands of years prior. And a little secret us historians know is that is about twenty years China will be dominant once again. If we didn’t notice how dominant China was at the Olympics, we missed the biggest story.
My research is related to this so we can see how the rest of the world views world history. We have so many different races and ethnicity's in our classroom that we as historians will often sell our students short of their own cultural identity if we don’t teach the students to look through their own eyes, rather than a Euro-American’s eye’s. I believe this is vital for teaching. I have found multiple lessons looking at America from a minority point of view but I have not found as much looking at Europe, Africa, Asia or Southeast Asia historically. Basically I'm a Mexican guy trying to see how my culture would view Europeans, Africans, Asians and Southeast Asian historically. I hope that makes sense...
This will dramatically change the was I teach if I could figure out how to utilize technology with the students. I believe that students would be more engaged if they could visualize history through their culture's eye's. Whether the student is Portuguese(which there are a lot of), Danish, Canadian, and all the rest. I believe it would be intriguing.
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2 comments:
I love that you are trying to reinvigorate the World History curriculum. I agree that it is very western focused and if it's called "World History" it should be much more well rounded. Also, the focus on technology is brilliant. My students love it too. Have you considered how blogging, google docs, videos, or web pages might be part of your move toward more technology?
I think the idea of viewing the world through different lenses is great. We often only get one perspective and it is greatly westernized. The focus does seem to be on the western world and its dominance. I, too, wonder what the minority perspective is on on different minority countries. How do African Americans view Africa, Asia, Europe.... This is a great question that will probably lead to many more questions. I wonder if your students could become pen-pals to students in other countries and discuss their ideas of the world condition?
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