Our Shared Past

The British Council and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) are pleased to announce the launch of Our Shared Past, a collaborative grants program to encourage new approaches to world history curriculum and curricular content design in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and North America.

This initiative, jointly developed by the British Council, the SSRC and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, aims to create a new generation of students who have a solid grasp not only of their own country's history, but also of the deep and complex connections that bind cultures together through arts, technology, values and ideas.

 

Together, the winning projects will help lay the foundation for a growing coalition of scholars and teachers committed to improving and promoting the teaching of world history in schools throughout the US, UK and the Mediterranean region. Through curriculum development, course assessment and teacher training, the projects will help shift from an "us and them" approach to teaching world history to one that focuses on the rich economic, scientific, social and religious interplay between diverse cultures.

 

We have awarded five grants of up to US$75,000. The first grant period will span twelve months, from September 1, 2012, to August 31, 2013. Efforts are currently under way to support the second phase of development of Our Shared Past in 2013-2014.

The Winning Projects

Sites of Encounter in the Medieval World

Nancy McTygue, University of California, Davis

A team of professional historians at UC Davis will create a new curriculum on "Sites of Encounter in the Medieval World" for seventh-grade students. Through this course, students will be immersed in Mediterranean sites of encounter - Sicily, Majorca, Quanshou, Mali and Cairo - where merchants, travellers and scholars participated in shared cultural, economic and scientific networks. Through the organization of an online colloquium on "Reframing World History," the team will also support world history teachers and engage scholarly communities in promoting curriculum reform in world history.

 

Alliance for Curriculum and Professional Development in World History

Marian McKenna Olivas, University of California Los Angeles

This project will build an alliance that will both maximize use of scarce resources for curriculum and professional development in world history and seek to expand the resource base. The Alliance will include leading scholars and educators from the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA, the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh and the Department of History at California State University, Long Beach. The alliance will generate a curriculum framework for teaching world history and guidelines for professional development as well as create partnerships with world history educators in the UK and other countries.

 

Nesting World History Instruction for Future Faculty, Secondary Teachers and Students: A Project to Prepare Teachers of World History at Multiple Levels

Bob Bain, University of Michigan

This project focuses on the professional development and the development of curriculum materials for teachers of world history at the secondary school level. It will develop new curriculum for classrooms, training for teachers, curricular and video archives to disseminate instructional materials, and classroom assessments to study the impact of these activities on both teachers and students. The project will connect four key components of world history teaching: university faculty training, preparation of secondary school teachers, curriculum content and instructional assessment.

 

Our Shared Past in the Mediterranean

Peter Mandaville, George Mason University

The project will develop a pedagogical vision and teaching resources for K-14 education focused on the Mediterranean. Emphasizing this region as a zone of contact and exchange in terms of culture, commerce, and human mobility, the project will provide teachers with ideas and materials that can be integrated into existing programs and standards for world history education. The initiative will generate new teaching modules that will be correlated with state and national standards and disseminated through several networks, including the World History for US All online curriculum, the National Council for Social Studies and the World History Association.

 

Rethinking the Region: New Approaches to 9-12 US Curriculum on the "Modern Middle East"

Maria Hantzopoulos, Vassar College

This project aims to integrate new scholarship into the teaching of the Middle East. While the dominant narratives surrounding the rise of Islam, the Crusades and the Ottoman Empire often depict civilizations at odds with one another, the project will illuminate the ways in which communities and societies also interacted in collaborative and fluid ways. To this end, the project will review and analyze curricula and textbooks, integrate new scholarship on the region in grades 9-12 education, generate curricula and web-based materials and collaborate with school districts to jumpstart local teacher professional development.

 

Additional Information and Questions

This program is directed by Thomas Asher, Program Director at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and Emmanuel Kattan, Program Manager at the British Council. Contact information for the British Council appears below. To reach SSRC, please contact osp@ssrc.org.  

 

Program Director

Emmanuel Kattan

Contact

Tim Rivera