Description: A Primer for Teaching World History is a guide for college and high school teachers who are designing an introductory-level world history syllabus for the first time, for those who already teach world history and are seeking new ideas or approaches, and for those who train future teachers to prepare any history course with a global or transnational focus. Drawing on her own classroom practices, as well as her career as a historian, Antoinette Burton offers a set of principles to help instructors think about how to design their courses with specific goals in mind, whatever those may be. She encourages teachers to envision the world history syllabus as having an architecture: a fundamental, underlying structure or interpretive focus that runs throughout the course, shaping students' experiences, offering pathways in and out of "the global," and reflecting the teacher's convictions about the world and the work of history.
Review Quotes: "Antoinette Burton has done everyone who teaches world history a great service: she shows how the most significant new work by scholars can be incorporated in ways that make world history more exciting, satisfying, and successful at introducing students to historical thinking and writing. No one who teaches this survey will remain untouched by what she has to say."--Lynn Hunt, Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History, University of California, Los Angeles