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From world history to American history, economics, politics, philosophy; history classes from Common Core Standards-aligned curriculum to undergraduate level. Find History Lessons WFH freelancers on January 21, 2025 who work remotely. Read less
The AP History curriculum, encompassing courses like AP United States History (APUSH), AP European History, and AP World History, is structured to not only provide students with factual historical knowledge but also to cultivate skills in critical reasoning, interpretation, and bias assessment. Here's a technical breakdown:
Curriculum Structure:
1. Course Themes and Periodization:
Thematic Learning Objectives: The curriculum is organized around themes that span across time periods, such as "Identity," "Work, Exchange, and Technology," "Peopling," "Politics and Power," "America in the World," "Environment and Geography," and "Ideas, Beliefs, and Culture." These themes allow students to see historical events from multiple perspectives and understand broader trends.
Chronological Periods: Each AP History course is structured into distinct chronological periods. For example, APUSH divides U.S. history into nine periods, each with specific learning objectives. This segmentation helps in understanding the progression of history while providing context for events.
2. Skills Development:
Historical Thinking Skills: These are crucial for assessing bias and engaging in critical reasoning:
Contextualization: Understanding historical events in their specific temporal, geographical, and cultural context.
Comparison: Analyzing similarities and differences across time periods or geographical areas.
Causation: Exploring causes and effects of historical events.
Continuity and Change Over Time: Recognizing patterns or shifts over time.
Periodization: Evaluating whether historical periods are appropriately defined by significant turning points or developments.
Reasoning Processes:
Argumentation: Constructing coherent, evidence-based arguments.
Sourcing: Analyzing the origin, purpose, context, and audience of a document to assess its credibility and bias.
Interpretation: Deciphering the meaning of historical evidence.
3. Content Delivery and Assessment:
Primary and Secondary Sources: Students work extensively with both primary sources (original documents from the time period) and secondary sources (interpretations by historians). This exposure helps in understanding bias as primary sources can reflect the biases of the time, and secondary sources can introduce the biases of the interpreter.
Document-Based Questions (DBQs): A key assessment tool where students analyze multiple documents to answer a historical question. This format directly promotes skills in bias assessment by requiring students to discuss the reliability and perspective of each document.
Free-Response Questions (FRQs): These require students to apply their knowledge to analyze historical developments or processes, often involving comparison, causation, or change over time, which indirectly involves assessing bias as students must consider multiple interpretations of history.
Multiple-Choice Questions: These test factual knowledge but often include questions that require students to reason through historical interpretations or biases.
4. Teaching Strategies for Bias Assessment:
Source Analysis: Teachers guide students to question:
Who wrote this source?
When was it written?
What was the author's purpose?
What biases might the author have?
How does this source compare to others from the same period or different perspectives?
Use of Diverse Sources: Incorporating sources from various cultural, political, and social perspectives to highlight different narratives of the same event or period.
Debates and Discussions: Encouraging students to debate historical interpretations, which naturally brings biases to the forefront.
Reflective Writing: Students might write reflections on how their understanding of history might differ based on the sources they've encountered, pushing them to consider bias in their own learning process.
Implementation:
Curriculum Framework: Provides a detailed outline of what students should know and be able to do, including specific historical content and skills.
Teacher Resources: The College Board offers numerous resources like sample questions, scoring guidelines, and teaching strategies that focus on these skills.
Professional Development: Teachers are trained to incorporate these critical thinking and bias assessment components into their teaching.
By structuring the curriculum around these principles, AP History courses aim to produce students who not only memorize historical facts but also actively engage with the past, questioning narratives, understanding the construction of history, and recognizing the role of bias in historical interpretation.
Comparing demographics and contextualizing the first English settlements in the Americas at Jamestown to crafting historical arguments using historical evidence for the later founding of the American government; the early republic (1800-1848) and age of Andrew Jackson (https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/andrew-jackson/); culture and reform in the early nineteenth century , and interpreting and synthesizing historical narrative through the Civil War era (1844-1877), Slavery and the Missouri Compromise to Reconstruction with an understanding of content learning around the Gilded Age (1865-1898) to modern post-WW2 era, Khrushchev and the Cuban Crisis (1962), the Cold War, and how Reagan foreign policy and the Iran-Contra affair shaped the world.
The AP History syllabus is broad and diverse. From learning about the prohibition of the manufacture, transport, or sale of alcoholic beverages under the 18th Amendment (1920–1933) and "the Jazz Age", the Bread and Roses Strike in Lawrence (1912), the Boston police strike (1919), and the Massachusetts trials, appeals and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1921) to the diplomatic and military policies on the War in Vietnam of Presidents Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon and explain the intended and unreported (at the time) consequences of the Vietnam War: https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-united-states-history/professional-learning
In terms of foundations of modern government, it covers domestic policies of Presidents Truman and Eisenhower (e.g., Truman's Fair Deal, the Taft-Hartley Act (1947), the Federal-Aid Highway Act (1956), Social Security Disability Insurance Act of 1956) and analysis of the roots of domestic communism and anti-communism in the 1950s, the resistance to McCarthyism, researching and reporting on people and institutions such as Whittaker Chambers, Alger Hiss, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Senators Joseph McCarthy and Margaret Chase Smith, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the American Communist Party, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and congressional investigations into the Lavender Scare: https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/lavender-scare-gay-and-lesbian-life-post-wwii-america
Economic history and consideration of competing economic theories that explain the Great Depression (e.g., insufficient demand for goods and services (Keynesianism) vs insufficient supply of money (monetarism) is core to the syllabus and a good online history teacher will educate students about the legacy of democratic government and incorporate diverse perspectives that build historical research literacy and reasoning skills in weighing bias, making logical arguments, and bolstering reading comprehension by increasing content knowledge.