ABSTRACT
Beginning world history teachers must, in addition to mastering the content itself and delivering instruction, imbue their students with a sense of the texture or fabric of history. This texture takes form, in the student's mind, upon the analysis of several discrete themes that, together, make for the study of history itself. The integration of the themes, which is the subject of this chapter, makes possible a kind of teaching that is perhaps more durable (in that the learning sticks to students long after the delivery of instruction) as a consequence of the integrated way in which the material is taught. The approach makes it more likely that students who might otherwise remain indifferent to the subject will form coherent understandings of history that are meaningful and relevant. All too often what passes for history teaching is the force-feeding of an unintelligible mass of disconnected events that, ultimately, means very little to the actual lives of sixteen-year-olds.
