Teaching World History

World history teaching pedagogies have experienced a significant transformation over recent decades. In the past, world history survey courses centered around Western civilization, with “non-Western” civilizations covered mostly in the context of bygone golden ages and dynastic sequences. Under new frameworks, however, effective survey courses cover a sequence of global eras, examining various societies side-by-side within the appropriate time period. This allows students to learn about the emergence, growth, and characteristics of each society, as well as the interactions that took place between them, highlighting intellectual, cultural, and technological exchanges in new ways.

Teachers often need support in transitioning to this pedagogical approach, especially since most textbooks have neither fully embraced the framework nor kept pace with advances in world history scholarship. CCAS has focused its education outreach program on making interdisciplinary world history scholarship accessible and enjoyable to teach, connecting teachers through our CCAS Summer Teacher Institutes and workshops with curriculum materials and teaching tools that utilize current world history pedagogies and the latest scholarship. Below are some of the resources CCAS has produced related to teaching world history.

The Long 19th Century in the MENA and its Global Impact

Video Series

The week-long Summer Teacher Institute 2023 explored the period known as the Long Nineteenth Century—which begins with the closing decade of the eighteenth century and extends to the early decades of the twentieth century—and provided a framework for understanding and teaching about the forces, groups and individuals who were agents of the enormous changes that took place during that time period and its impacts on people at all levels of society. The institute featured eleven different speakers, including four current Georgetown professors, and several past professors or individuals affiliated with CCAS’ visiting faculty programs.
Click here to view a playlist of videos from the institute. 

Connected Histories of the Renaissance

Video Series

Inspired by Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s concept of connected histories, the Summer Teacher Institute 2020 explored topics that illustrate the impact of this movement of people, animals, and objects on a new global scale during the Renaissance. The Institute featured eleven speakers from a variety of disciplinary and geographic specializations with lectures designed to help teachers deconstruct traditional narratives of the Renaissance and understand the global nature of the movement of culture, resources, and peoples during this period to provide more nuanced instruction in this period. The Summer Institute was a collaboration between the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.
Click here for a list of all sessions from STI 2020 with descriptions and links to recorded lectures. Click here to go directly to the YouTube playlist. 

The Enlightenment as Global Phenomenon

Video Series

The Summer Teacher Institute 2019 explored the global origins and enduring global effects of Enlightenment ideas and exchanges. As many historians have noted, the view of the Enlightenment as a European thought movement is inadequate and ignores the effects of intellectual exchanges within and beyond Europe. What we call Enlightenment thought emerged during the first global era when Europeans were exposed to intellectual stimuli and challenges in Asia, Africa and the Americas. Not only mercantile but also scholarly exchanges characterized this period, and opened Europeans’ horizons on linguistic, philosophical, historical, literary, and religious traditions to which they had not been previously exposed. Merchants, missionaries and administrative officials of the trading companies encountered social settings in which people of multiple ethnicities and religions mingled and engaged in business and social engagement—unlike Europe, which was still in the throes of religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, and where Jews and Muslims found only limited and contingent tolerance. As ties with Asia deepened, exposure to unfamiliar legal and administrative models of governance confronted Europeans and stimulated deeper learning. Artistic traditions and a host of new products, technologies and styles flowed into Europe, stimulating new import substitution industries and innovations.
Click here for a list of all sessions from STI 2019 with descriptions and links to recorded lectures. Click here to go directly to the YouTube playlist.

Integrating the Mediterranean into World History

Video Series & Online Resource

The Summer Institute 2014 was built around the synergy between two institutions’ ongoing projects to advance scholarship and teaching on the Mediterranean. The Center for Contemporary Arab Studies produced an edited volume titled “The Mediterranean Re-Imagined.”  The Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University produced a K-14 curriculum project with a grant from the British Council and Social Science Research Council’s “Our Shared Past” initiative. Our Shared Past in the Mediterranean lesson modules, together with the CCAS volume The Mediterranean Re-Imagined, give teachers new perspectives on an old and familiar region.
Click here to watch recorded lectures from STI 2014. Click here to visit Our Shared Past in the Mediterranean: A World History Curriculum Project for Educators.

See also the Geography, Travel, & Trade resources page for additional topics of relevance to teaching world history.