Women and Gender World History Syllabus Transcript
One of the reasons that I decided to create a syllabus about teaching gender in world history using just world history commons was this was sort of a little challenge I'd set for myself so as a it's kind of a little offhand comment I went I just looked it up again I said, "oh there's these wonderful online resources if you've never used them before and one of the great things of online resources is you could actually teach a very good course using only the materials on this website and your students would pay nothing exclamation point. I'm talking about how to keep prices of materials down - I thought well that's a little challenge Ihave for myself and then I sat down and looked at all of the materials for world history what is now World History Commons and tried to then see what -- could i design a course which I just said that one could do this, and what would that course look like? And because World History Commons has had certain parameters in the past um certain courses would be easier to teach from materials that on there and women is one of them and then I think looking at designing the syllabus also then made me realize where there are kind of gaps. One of the gaps is that there isn't very much material on the ancient world - although there's now a few more things than there were when I first designed a syllabus just a year ago. But if you - there really is - if you think in the syllabus that's up there starts in around 600, so if you start in kind of late antiquity it starts actually with Islam and the period of Islam and then goes all the way up till really into the 21st century. So that -- I wrote the syllabus because I said well one could do this and in fact one can do this and looking at the course it's -- it's not a women in world history or gender in her world history from the paleolithic to now but it really covers a huge span of 1500 years in a very um a really very global way, in a way that I, you know, I hadn't really sat down and until I made up a syllabus myself. And that's what i was useful about making episodes is okay this is really where the rubber meets the road in terms of teaching is: How am I going to design it? What am i going to do what kinds of materials are they going to be there? What kind of assessments am I going to use? And World History Commons provides all of that. And so that what I do on the syllabus is try to just sort of guide people through how to use the resources on this really fantastic website for teaching about women women and gender in world history.