Making Connections for Themselves and Their Students: Examining Teachers’ Organization of World History

Abstract

The ability to make connections is an important aspect of teaching history and a vital skill in our increasingly globalized world. This study examines how preservice and practicing teachers organize and connect world historical events and concepts for themselves and for instructional purposes. Findings are based on interviews with 2 card-sorting and think-aloud tasks. Analysis of card-sort maps found that participants made different kinds of connections that give insight into the types of knowledge needed for and the challenges involved with teaching world history. Participants were able to represent the most sophisticated historical processes when they discussed how to connect events to other events. All of the participants made fewer event-to-event connections in the second card-sort focused on instruction, and all but 1 changed the organizational scheme of the cards. This second finding indicates a shift in how participants represented their thinking of world history for themselves and how they might represent it for their students.

Keywords:

• history teaching
• world history
• global education
• teacher knowledge
• preservice teacher education

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article originated from my dissertation work, so I would like to thank my committee for all of their help: Robert B. Bain, Jeffrey Mirel, Douglas E. Northrop, and Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar. I would also like to thank Hala Ghousseimi, Brian Girard, Anne-Lise Halvorsen, Gabriel Reich, Tamara Shreiner, and Melissa Stull for their valuable feedback on previous drafts.

Notes

1. The differing academic backgrounds of the practicing teachers in this study is consistent with the large percentage of out-of-field teaching in history in general and world history in particular (see Ravitch, 2000; Stearns, 2006).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lauren McArthur Harris

LAUREN McARTHUR HARRIS is an Assistant Professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College and the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287. She can be contacted at [email protected].