ANN: Teaching the Globe, website for global histories

Hello all, 

I'm writing to share a website called Teaching the Globe (http://teachingtheglobe.net) created by grad students in my seminar on Space, Nature & History last fall. The site offers resources--book reviews, sample syllabi, and active-learning lesson plans--for teaching global environmental history courses as well as "global" courses in a variety of other disciplines, including history of science, geography, and comparative literature. 

These resources are designed to answer the question that was at the heart of the seminar: how can environmental humanities scholars teach global stories without losing site of the particularities of life? Doing global research and framing global narratives can be a challenge for those of us whose training is more oriented to attending to fine-grained histories. But the seminar challenged the common assumed dichotomy between global and local, drawing from spatial theory to think about the "global" in multiple ways. The website offers essays by the students and I that dig into different ways of rethinking the "global"--by, for example, attending to the production of scale, the circulation of things through networks, and investigating claims of universality. The teaching resources they developed provide practical means of implementing these ideas in the classroom. We hope you'll find them helpful and encourage you to download, use, and tweak them! 

At ASEH this week, I've organized a panel on Telling Global Environmental Histories through the Particular (Thursday morning, 10:30-12) that will also explore these ideas. Hope you can join us! 

Elizabeth Hennessy

Assistant Professor, World Environmental History

History Department

Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies

University of Wisconsin-Madison

elizabeth.hennessy@wisc.edu