The Human Drama Teacher’s Guide: Volume II
Table of Contents
General Introduction
Introduction to teaching Volume I of the Human Drama
The Historian’s Job
Marking Time
Maps Lie because they Lie
The Power to Name
Bessie the Cow: Strategies for Understanding Abstraction
A Bio Poem
Act One: The Origins of the Human Community (from earliest times of 3,500 BCE)
Introduction to Gathering, Scavenging and Hunting
How did Bipedalism Help us to Become Human? (Includes “a sense of mortality”
Races
Pattern One: Agricultural Revolution Results in Two Ways of Life
Pastoral Nomads
Act II: Surplus, Specialization, Stratification and Cities (Third millennium BCE)
Introduction to Surplus, Specialization and Cities)
Surplus, Specialization and Hierarchy
Technology as an Agent of Change
Background Information about the Indus Valley Civilization
Sample Quiz on the Rise of Cities
Act Three: Nomadic Migrations and Invasions (Second millennium BCE)
Introduction to interaction between Settled Farmers and Herders
Nomad Settled Interaction: Using an Options schema to Restore Options People once had.
Pastoral Nomads on the Move
Area Specific Lessons
Power and Legitimacy, Shift from Settled Farmers to Invading Nomads
in Mesopotamia in the 2ndCentury BCE
Gilgamesh and Enkidu Become Friends: Mesopotamia”
What Does Hammurabi’s Code reveal about life in Babylonia in the 18th
Century BCE?
Insight into the Lives of Women in Hellas During the 2ndMillennium
BCE “Women and the Trojan War”
Pattern IV: Philosophic and Religious Developments: The Axial Age
Introduction to the Axial Age
Axial Age Pattern
Dualism, Monism and the Harmony of Opposites
Dear Abby Tests
Area Specific Suggested Lessons
Pattern V: The Growth of Empires
Introduction to Empires
Using an Outline to Evaluate an Empire
Options for Keeping the Bureaucrats Loyal
Legitimacy: What Gives a Ruler the Right to Rule?
Area Specific Suggested Lessons
Understanding Artha, one of the Four Aims of Life in Hinduism
Teaching about Dharma, Karma, Samsara with a Skit
What were Emperor Ashoka’s Sources of Legitimacy?
The Bhagavadgita: Putting it all Together
Summary
World History Tests, Samples
Lesson Plans forThe Human Drama
The Human Dramapresents human history as if it were a play. The various major patterns that reoccurred in world history are called "Acts" and the way those patterns are presented in different times and places are called "Scenes." After setting the stage and introducing various aspects writing and teaching about the past, Volume I, focuses on five important patterns that were important in different areas of the world during the period from the origin of life to 500 CE.
There are several reasons why we have chosen this approach.One is the desire to return to history the options people had by presenting the past as an on-going drama that is continually unfolding. We want to try and immerse the readers into the milieu of a specific time and place, keeping in mind that the people living then did not know what was going to happen next: who would win the war; what natural disaster might strike; who would become the next ruler; what new jobs might open up. At each moment in the past, people face specific challenges and choices and they must determine what options they have and what they will do next. However, their choices are shaped by what each specific group understood about the world and the knowledge they had at that time.
As in any good drama, we have tried to build in the element of suspense, encouraging students to try and figure out how the battles and elections and love stories will unfold. Instead of summarizing what will happen in a particular scene, we try and set the stage and examine some of the options and then let the story unfold.But there is another reason: we want to give agency back to the actors in the drama. If students can realize how the choices people made in the past changed the direction of history, they may realize that their choices they are making now are also important, not just for their own lives but for their communities, country and the world.
A second related insight we suggest you emphasize is change over time.The Human Dramais organized chronologically, and students will have the opportunity to revisit areas several different times to see the result of earlier choices and to identify new options. Instead of treating civilizations as unchanging, we emphasize what causes things to change and how they change.
We also hope to make it possible for students to compare and contrast what was happening in different areas of the world at roughly the same time, what options different people had, and what choices they made and why. Over the course of their world history study, your students will be asked to study the same pattern as it occurred in several different places, so it should be relatively easy for them to compare and contrast what was happening. And because they will look at what was happening in the same area in different time periods, they should be able to compare the major changes from one historic era to the next.
Setting the Stage
These lesson plans are organized around various patterns. You will find them most helpful for volumes one and two where these patterns or themes are first introduced. If you start your study of world history with volume three or four, we recommend that you check to see if some of the material that introduces the patterns might be useful for your classes. We especially recommend that you consider using “The Power to Name” and “Bessie the Cow” as a way to deal with these issues throughout your study. We have also included a few supplementary lessons that we found particularly useful.
The five patterns in Volume One are: Act One: The Origins of the Human Community, introduces the Agricultural Revolution and establishes settled farming and pastoralism. Act Two: Surplus, Specialization and Cities, establishes the development of cities. Act Three: Nomadic Migrations and Invasions, focuses on the interaction between settled and nomadic people. Act Four: The Axial Age, introduces major religious and philosophical questions and answers during the first millennium BCE. Act Five: Establishing a Synthesis in the Age of Empires; it offers a pattern for empires and examines the empires that developed in West Asia, the Indian Subcontinent; East Asia; and the Eastern Mediterranean. In later volumes, you will find out how and where these and other patterns occurred and reoccurred. By the third and fourth volumes, your students will have been introduced to ten separate patterns that occur in different places all around the globe, as they study different variations within and among the different patterns and areas.We have also included s few individual lessons at the end of each volume that you may want to use with your students.
We hope that these different patterns and teaching suggestions will enhance your teaching of world history and will help your students both understand and retain their insights about the past.
Introductory Lesson One: Using Bessie the Cow to Understand Abstractions
In teaching and learning about the past, teachers and students need to understand meaning of the concepts they are considering. The students' understanding of a word or words must be similar to the definitions and meanings the teacher wants to convey. If a teacher uses words such as grass, dog, house or tree, students and teachers will probably have a similar idea what the word means. However, when the teacher introduces more abstract words such as social structure, revolution, nationalism, balance of trade and legitimacy, the likelihood of the teacher and students having the same understanding will decline. One sentence definitions often don’t help students understand abstractions.
It is almost impossible to teach world history without referring to numerous abstract concepts. One excellent way to try and ensure that our students understand these concepts is by applying. S. I. Hayakawa's Abstraction Ladder, referred to here as "Bessie the Cow." Professor Hayakawa identified seven levels of abstraction that we can use to help make an abstract concept clear.
1. Let's assume we have been studying farming and we want our students to understand the concept of agricultural wealth. “Agricultural wealth’ can seem pretty abstract to many students, so we decide to start with a black and white animal with four legs and a tail that students can imagine touching and smelling and hearing mooing, an animal we call "Bessie the Cow." Bessie is at the bottom of the abstraction ladder, because she is very concrete and there is only one of her.
2. But then we notice that Bessie shares characteristics with other animals. Even though they are a different color and may be different sizes, they share so much in common that we call them all "cows." That's level 2.
3. As we move up to level 3 on the abstraction ladder, we add horses, chickens, goats and other farm animals and Bessie becomes part of a larger concept called "livestock."
4. At level 4 livestock merges with other valuable things on the farm such as tractors, barns, fences, etc. and we can now talk about “farm assets."
5. At level 5, farm assets combine with other valuable things such as bank accounts, stocks and bonds, land and jewelry to form the highly abstract level know as “Wealth.”
Many problems both teacher and students of world history have come from teachers' use of abstract words which their students do not fully understand. Teachers must be vigilant in initially using terms that are at the student's level of abstraction. Talking about nationalism or colonialism without drawing upon the students’ actual experience with aspects of these concepts is like talking in a foreign language to many of our students. Simply giving a definition that uses other abstractions only confounds the problem.
Choosing the correct level of abstraction means starting with ideas the student does understand and building on that understanding as we get more and more abstract. In world history, especially, the teacher will have to build up many concepts from the lower levels of abstraction and gradually move students to a higher level of abstraction. In other words, we must "Bessie" the concept. In helping students understand abstract concepts, the following guide to decoding abstractions is suggested. This list goes from most concrete to most abstract.
1. The student's own experience.
2. The experience of someone the student knows
3. A Simulation such as a banking exercise, "Brown and Blue Eyes", "Fascism," etc.
4. Viewing a film or video of an actual event that illustrates the concept.
5. Reading a first hand source such as an enslaved person’s diary or soldier’s memoirs.
6. A good secondary source such as a biographyor case study.
7. A selection of historic fiction such asAll Quiet on the Western Front or The Inheritance of Loss.
8. The class textbook and teacher explanations (These are often filled with abstractions, but some offer concrete examples)
Since world history can be one of the most abstract courses students will take, because it examines people and events and concepts far removed in time and space from the students' experience, constantly sharing concrete examples is essential. Trying to find a more personal example of large abstractions such as the Mercantilism, The Protestant Reformation, Peasant Revolts and religious terms like Hinduism is both necessary and time consuming. Good world history teaching must be both very general and very local and personal.
One way to address the abstraction problem is to build up definitions of abstractions as the year progresses.To help achieve this goal,The Human Dramauses ten large reoccurring patterns in world history. As the year progresses, students can add to their understanding of these concepts, something like creating a layer cake. The use of patterns also draws from the teaching of mathematics. In learning math students begin with addition and move on to subtraction. Then, using addition and subtraction, they learn multiplication and division. Each year math students build on the concrete levels of the years before as they gradually move to higher abstract levels.
In our world history patterns, we introduce a new pattern for the first time with simple concrete illustrations. For example, in teaching the pattern of urbanization, we introduce the first cities in Sumer, Egypt and the Indus as examples and explain to students how surplus (an abstraction) makes specialization (another abstraction) possible, and that surplus and specialization leads to the development of cities. When urbanization is reprised later, we make the cities more complicated by introducing economic, social and political factors. Each time cities are reprised, we hope to deepen the analysis, introducing cosmic cities such as Beijing and even orthogenetic cities such Madurai in India. By the end of the course, most students should know what a city is and how it functions. Some will understand how cultural enclaves in cities form voting blocs and some won't, but most should be able to recognize aspects of urbanization when they encounter them and know when they visit a city.
Introductory Lesson Two: The Power to Name
Background:The names we give people and groups reflect our perspectives and values. Less powerful groups often have to accept belittling or even insulting names. For example, many in China think of themselves as the People of Han, not Chinese, which reflects the Qin [Ch'in], the first dynasty to unite their land. When Romans called people Greeks, they meant dishonest traders. Greeks called themselves Hellenes. For Indians in Asia the name of their homeland was “Bharat,” but the Greek word took hold and hence today there is a nation called “India.”