Teaching the West and the World from the Massachusetts Framework

1998 ◽  
Vol 180 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-78
Author(s):  
Paul Gagnon

This article summarizes how teachers may implement the Massachusetts History and Social Science Curriculum Framework as they design and teach courses in Western civilization and world history. It discusses the integration of history, geography, and the social sciences, together with suggested approaches to common problems such as the balance between Western and world studies, selection of main topics and questions, professional development, student assessment, and challenges teachers may confront.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quan-Hoang Vuong

Valian rightly made a case for better recognition of women in science during the Nobel week in October 2018 (Valian, 2018). However, it seems most published views about gender inequality in Nature focused on the West. This correspondence shifts the focus to women in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in a low- and middle-income country (LMIC).


1998 ◽  
Vol 180 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Sheldon M. Stern

The commitment of Massachusetts to strive for the highest standards in history education is now inextricably linked to the implementation of the History and Social Science Curriculum Framework completed in 1997. The author writes that teachers and other educators, parents and students, should consider carefully the concepts and principles contained in the Framework and, particularly in American history, try to understand how the Massachusetts Framework differs in substance and approach from the controversial national history standards first proposed in 1994.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-187
Author(s):  
Joanna Wawrzyniak

The Durkheimian School of sociology was one of the most comprehensive programmes ever developed in the social sciences. This article contributes to those accounts of the School that discuss its intergenerational, interdisciplinary and international transformations after the Great War. From this perspective, the article presents the case of a Polish scholar, Stefan Czarnowski (1879–1937), whose early work on the cult of St. Patrick in Ireland became one of the Durkheimian classics on social integration. In the interwar period Czarnowski argued against race studies and anti-social concepts of culture and called for sociologically grounded comparative world history ordered around the notions of class and work. More generally, Czarnowski’s reconfiguration of Durkheimian universal principles in the specific location of East Central Europe calls for a deeper historicisation of the Durkheimian School as a movement in international social sciences.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Ashim Dutta

<p>Focusing on a selection of Rabindranath Tagore’s essays, lectures, and a few of his creative works, this essay draws attention to the spiritual orientation of Tagore’s transnationalism. In his vast and multifaceted writings, Tagore offers an alternative vision of transnational union of humanity, different from and often resistant to nationalist distributions of human relationship. Through close readings of Tagore’s works, this essay complicates Orientalist notions of the East-West polarities. While strongly opposing Western imperialist ideology, Tagore was always frank about his trust in and indebtedness to the liberal humanist values of the West. On the other hand, despite upholding Indian or Eastern spirituality, he was critically aware of the social and political crises of the contemporary East. A large volume of his works betrays his scepticism about any political solution to national and international problems. What he promotes is a spiritual concord of the best in Western and Eastern cultures, connecting the liberal humanist conscience of the West with the harmonizing, all-inclusive spiritual wisdom of the East. Neither completely secular nor thoroughly religious in an institutional sense, the transnationalist spirituality of Tagore bridges the gap between the secular humanism of Western modernity and the mystic–religious spirituality of Eastern antiquity, offering nuanced perspectives on both. </p>


2000 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Dowding

In a recent issue of this journal Peter John (1999) suggests we can use an evolutionary account to explain policy change. In particular he suggests we should see the battle of ideas about policy formation as an evolutionary process and gives as an example the introduction and abolition of the poll tax. John is correct in two claims in his article. First, traditional models of policy-generation tend to ignore the role of ideas, concentrating attention upon the bargaining and power struggles between different sets of competing interests. Secondly, he is right that evolutionary explanation has a place in the social sciences. But these two thoughts are best kept apart and the way he packages them suggests a poor understanding of evolutionary explanation and of the role ideas may play within it. There are at least three problems with his account. First, the object at which he directs explanation —in his example the poll tax—is misspecified. Secondly, he fails to specify a mechanism for the natural selection of ideas, leaving his claim about the promise of evolutionary accounts vague and unsatisfactory. Finally, he fails to distinguish learning as an intentional process from selection as an evolutionary one.


Author(s):  
Jürgen Osterhammel

The revival of world history towards the end of the twentieth century was intimately connected with the rise of a new master concept in the social sciences: globalization. Historians and social scientists responded to the same generational experience that the interconnectedness of social life on the planet had arrived at a new level of intensity. The conclusions drawn from this insight in the various academic disciplines diverged considerably. The early theorists of globalization in sociology, political science, and economics disdained a historical perspective. The new concept seemed ideally suited to grasp the characteristic features of contemporary society. It helped to pinpoint the very essence of present-day modernity. Globalization opened up a way towards the social science mainstream, provided elements of a fresh terminology to a field that had suffered for a long time from an excess of descriptive simplicity.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-127

AbstractFrom November 2012 to May 2013, the Erlitou Archaeological Team of the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences found a roughly north-south orientated rammed-earth wall (Q7) and hard-trodden road surface parallel to the wall in the vicinity of the workshop zone of the Erlitou Site. The wall was most likely erected during Erlitou Phase II and continued to be in use until the early stage of Phase IV. The trodden roads took form during Phase II and ended in Phase III or early stage of Phase IV. Together with the previous findings, the excavators postulated two competing propositions on the rammed-earth wall in question. It was the west wall of the walled workshop zone or it was the east wall of a walled enclosure has yet to be discovered to its west. The roads were auxiliary facilities of the walled zone when it was in use.


1970 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 572-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
David E. Powell ◽  
Paul Shoup

The scientific study of politics requires an environment which accepts free inquiry and discussion. Scholars must be permitted to ask questions of their own choosing, gather data without hindrance, and communicate freely with one another about their findings. To be sure, freedom to investigate sensitive policy matters is limited by all governments. Moreover, political scientists themselves inevitably introduce some measure of their own values or ideological predispositions into their works. But it is obvious that without the guarantee of certain minimum freedoms, political science as we know it in the West could never exist.Communist regimes traditionally have made independent inquiry or objective discussion of political phenomena impossible. In the Stalinist period, scholarly analyses of politics—or, for that matter, of aesthetic, literary, moral or economic questions—amounted to little more than doctrinal exegesis or the elaboration of practical measures to implement the Party's demands. An autonomous social science in Stalin's Russia or Eastern Europe was simply unthinkable.Since the dictator's death, however, Communist governments have modified their hostility toward the social sciences in general, and toward political science in particular. A decade of de-Stalinization has been accompanied by steps to encourage the scientific study of politics. In several East European countries, political science now enjoys recognition as a discipline in its own right.This does not mean that political science in Communist countries has freed itself of political controls, or that what is presented as political science is always of scholarly merit.


Hawwa ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yvonne Haddad

AbstractThis bibliography sets out to explore the topics that Muslim women in the West reflected on and researched as they joined the institutions of higher learning and began to have an input in the creation of knowledge. It also attempts to gather the available information about the experiences of Muslim women and surveys the available literature in English on Muslim women living in the West. While Muslim women have been professionally active in many fields, the bibliography is focused primarily on the production of knowledge by professors in the humanities and the social sciences and their contribution to our understanding of the debates about the women of Islam.


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