great new resource for cultural competency & world history

Today in the mail I received a very exciting delivery: the National Council for the Social Studies' 103rd Bulletin, Social Studies and the World: Teaching Global Perspectives. I almost cried when I started skimming through it. How often have I felt totally isolated and even been belittled for promoting ideas like these—but whaddya know, they're the official position of the most prominent professional organization.

This is an incredible publication & I can't wait to read it in more depth. I hope to transcribe here some of the 49 "teaching ideas" scattered throughout. Some examples:

• Teaching Idea 20: Stereotypes and exotica
  
• Teaching Idea 18: Experiences of Refugees and Immigrants
  
• Teaching Idea 27: Inventing America Through Maps
  
• Teaching Idea 28: Imperial Frameworks

...on and on!!!

This just fuels my increasing eagerness to seek out lesson plans other people have written—which goes hand in hand with my growing suspicion that what I want to do has already been done, or half-done, and is out there somewhere if only I could find it.

I begin to feel that it's not so strange that it takes me so long to write lesson plans. I had started to think of myself as quite slow & stupid, but really, to write a really, really good lesson plan (the only kind I ever want to write) can take a really, really long time.

Also, increasingly, when I hear about a teacher here or there who is "developing a set of materials," I feel great frustration and anxiety. How many teachers are working endlessly at these "materials," when they already exist? Or how many teachers could benefit from these materials, who have no access to them? I want a nationally standardized curriculum! The only reason we don't have one, is because the quality of the standardized textbooks is so abysmal that everyone fears being reduced to that level. But think what could be accomplished if we combined the best research with the most up-to-date information...

Anyway, back to this particular exemplary book. Here's a great little excerpt, a personal anecdote from one of the authors, that sums up a lot:

The comments of a guest speaker from Nigeria woke me up to the inadequacies of [my] approach [to teaching world cultures]. He told me how disappointed he was that my students not onlyknew nothing significant about Nigerian people but did not want to listen to what he thought or cared about. "They just want to learn a game or eat some food—what does that teach them that is important?" were the words I shall never forget.

*Sigh.* Don't you just want to buy a copy of this book for every social studies teacher you've ever encountered????

how to teach for genuine cultural competency

A while ago while taking a walk I was pondering how to help students develop the ability to empathize with multiple perspectives, and, hopefully, the habit of doing so.

I thought about daily "perspective exercises" where the students would look at a picture of people from another culture doing something that might seem strange, then hear the explanation, and then try to imagine how the people in the picture would see "us." Simple example: people in Japan taking their shoes off to enter home or school. How might they see us, here in the classroom with our "outside shoes" on?

But this is too easy, perhaps even boring and predictable after a while. It also smacks too much of the type of simple-minded stuff my former cooperating teacher used to do.

So, maybe we could combine "perspective" with "current events," and have students respond to a particular news article by writing a few lines imagining the thoughts, goals, interests, etc. of different persons or groups involved in (or implied in) the story.

I have so many ideas for daily exercises, I could teach entire semesters composed only of daily exercises......hey.... there might actually be a decent idea in there somewhere...with students' short attention spans, interspersing little exercises could be a good way to break up the week and the class period... these kinds of things do seem to lower the stress level a bit...