The Importance Of Periodization In World History Teaching

World history as a professional disciple has been fluid. From the time when world history became a disciple until modern day, there is not one uniform consensus on how historians should look at the past. The modern historians Jerry Bentley, Ross Dunn, and Peter Stearns all add to the world history conversation by taking what world history had been and attempting to improve how students and historians view world history. While all three historians take a different piece of the world history puzzle, they all bring aspects of teaching world history that should be implemented in the classroom. The rise of the disciple of world history is multifaceted. When the professionalization of history emerged in the nineteenth century it was extremely Eurocentric …show more content…
Stearns in his article, “Periodization in World History Teaching: Identifying the Big Changes,” argues that periodization in teaching world history needs to be more than it has been in the past. As it states in the title of his article, Stearns wants to identify the big changes in world history. The dilemma that Stearns attempts to fix is world history courses need for periodization to avoid a survey class. His three periodizations are expansion of technology, commercial exchange, and shifts in religious outlooks. Stearns argues that, “World history courses particularly need periodization to avoid unmanageable survey qualities and to spark thought, but they also face particular problems in filling their need for the simple reason that the world has never been a single basic society, operating according to a close-knit pattern of common causation.” Stearns views periodization as a way to weave the societies together, which in turn helps students get flesh out a survey class into periods providing factors that can be discussed and examined. Stearns expresses the importance of having periodizations for students succinctly by writing, “By learning to look for definitional cues, as a means of establishing periodization, through technology, commerce, and culture, students begin to be able to handle the idea of change without falling victim to more evanescent fads or some simple determinism” Students by using Stearns periodization are equipped with being able to view the past without looking at it in a teleological way. The periodizations that Stearns proposes is a great way to view the past as a big picture. Connecting cultures, empires, and people, which provides the student with a grasp of world history that surveys would not provide. It also gives the student something to hang their hat on. It provides them with a big periodization to place events in which helps them