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Teacher
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Editors' note: This feature is meant to provide practical, although not
unbiased, reviews of textbooks based on experience in the classroom. Readers
will note that the teachers who wrote these reviews differ widely in terms
of what they seek in a textbook. Moreover, these reviews are not meant to
advocate or discourage the adoption of any one text. Rather, they seek to
begin a dialogue about textbook use that we hope will continue long past
the posting of this issue. Indeed, we would like to encourage other teachers—both
at the secondary and at the university-level—to send us comparable
reviews of texts for inclusion in later issues of World History Connected.
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Peter Stearns, Michael Adas, Stuart Schwartz, Marc Jason Gilbert, World
Civilizations: The Global Experience, 5th edition (New York:
Longman, 2006). |
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When instructors on a listserv ask which is the
best world history textbook, I always reply that the answer depends on the
instructor’s own teaching strategy. Ironically, that truth was driven
home to me through a change in my own teaching approach and my ability to
help work corresponding changes in Stearns et. al, World Civilizations:
the Global Experience, of which I am a co-author. This text is
well known for its focus on the process of world history and necessarily
by the themes that dominate that process, from migration to technology and
from gender to trade. In recent editions, efforts have been to make these
processes more visible, while also making them more accessible. For example,
each chapter of the forthcoming fifth edition will have very dramatic introductions
to the central events and themes of the chapter, clearer chronological arrangement,
and concluding sections that leave the reader in no doubt where they have
been. These changes became more necessary as I myself changed my teaching
approach, one wrought by the increasing unwillingness of students to take
responsibility for their own learning, such as by not even looking through,
let alone reading, a textbook! This change, more obvious over the
past four years, forced a change in my expectations and use of the textbook,
which was formerly used mainly as a mirror of my own lecture content.
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Many instructors, faced with declining student interest
in formal learning strategies (“Dude, science is just a bunch of theories!”)
have understandably adopted the adage that “if you cannot beat them,
join them,” and have abandoned textbooks. However, I decided to shift
much of my student’s learning activities and examinations to text
content (self-contained documents and essays), to self-testing on the supporting
web page and its web-based critical thinking exercises. My aim was to force
students to adopt an active learning approach in which the harder they work
and the more they engage in critical thinking, the higher the grade they
get. But to accomplish this task they had to be given the tools of an accessible
main text with associated interactive web resources, flawless test banks,
never–fail or duplicate sourced web links and challenging in-text
documents and essays. Coincidentally, I, in my classroom practice, and the
other authors undergoing their own self-examinations found that even the
third edition and a quick turnaround fourth edition to add discussion-based
questions did not meet the highest standard of service to such an approach.
Hopefully, by our own efforts and through consultative work from several
much admired experts on world history teaching methodology, the fifth edition
will meet that standard. However, even the third edition has supported
my shift in approach to textbooks from a partner in story-telling to a partner
in promoting learning. The results have been dramatic. |
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Though my world history classes have more than 60
students, they feel more like seminars; grades have gone up during the semester
as students bought into the course; there is more laughter in class (because
of the students’ rising confidence in their growing ability to learn)
and they have even come to accept responsibility for poor performance. A
miracle? No. Any text which mirrors an instructor’s own view
of world history (in my case processes, rather than cultural moments or
events) and delivers the tools necessary for the student to grasp them though
lively narrative and good text support materials can do that. And so we
return to the beginning: a text is only as useful as it suits the aims of
the instructor. My aims have changed over time and my use of that text has
been able to change to suit it.
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| Marc
Jason Gilbert
North Georgia College and State University
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