ABSTRACT
When I began the journey from teaching Advanced Placement (AP) European history to AP World History, I realized that my ingrained habits of mind had to change. I discovered that as long as we try to teach world history in the same way we teach U.S. or regional history, we are doomed to failure: world history is too broad and complex to be taught using the same approaches we use for more traditional courses. As world history teachers, we must begin to adopt a big-picture perspective of history. We must examine and compare evidence gleaned from many geographical regions and across broad time periods, looking for patterns that reveal basic themes of human activity and development. To reorient ourselves to a world history perspective, we need to constantly ask ourselves big history questions: What are the major themes that we see painted on the world canvas? How are those themes encountered and elaborated in different cultures or in different time periods? (I developed the acronym SPICE™ to remind my students to look for and apply major themes: social, political, interaction between humans and the environment, cultural, and economic.)
