Beyond Survey Courses Transcript

A lot of times we think in terms of World History Commons as a resource for world history survey courses but because of the types of sources that are available in World History Commons, we can actually search for lesson plans, we can look for images, we can look for documents that we can incorporate into many different history courses, as well as even political science courses, geography courses at many different levels.

For example, if you're studying the French revolution there's a lot of things that are available in World History Commons that can supplement a very, you know, robust course just on the French revolution or just on the history of modern France. And so whether it's a survey course or a very specific specialized course, you can, you know, you may not find everything but you can certainly find some sources to support your teaching and help students to grapple with primary sources and look at the coursework or the subject in a different way.

Another thing is, I'll look for ways to bring in world history sources into courses that are not necessarily, you know, build or labeled as world history. So for example there's some recent additions in California missions that have been added to World History Commons. So coming from California, if you're a K-12 educator and you're teaching fourth grade that's all about California history. And so you can integrate some of these great images and resources into a California history class for fourth graders. You can also integrate that into a California history class that you're teaching at the college level for teacher credentialing and you can use these resources for a course on either colonialism or the early American history or Mexican history when you're examining kind of that spread into the southwest and the west.

So there's a lot of different ways that you can you know, a lot of different sources that you can find and a lot of different ways that you can actually think in terms of how can I maybe internationalize the curriculum or how might I find sources that can bolster what I already have in terms of my curriculum.