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Considering the “Hidden” Challenges of Teaching and Learning World History

often masks the challenges students and teachers face in learning its content. Such, I think, is the case with world history. While it is the fastest growing subject of the secondary social studies curriculum (by 2005 over 75% of secondary students graduated having taken a course in world history, an increase of more than 125% in the last thirty years1) world history poses distinctive and often unacknowledged challenges to both teachers and students. One challenge is the amount of content. How can teachers and students learn all that “stuff ”? However, a much greater issue in my view is how world history teachers and students learn to manage what Thomas Holt has called “the levels problem,” the complicated relationship between “behavioral explanations sited at the individual level of human experience and those at the level of society and social forces.” The historian’s task, according to Holt, is “to simultaneously grasp the manifestations of the very large and abstract structures and the transformations of the world in the small details of life.”2 Michael Adas agrees, arguing that world history must “infuse the contextual analysis of world systems and structures and aggregate socioeconomic transformations with serious attention to ideas, human agency, and contingency.”3 Or, as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie imaginatively put it, world history requires teachers and students to be both parachutists and truffle hunters.4 Without question, the intellectual capacity to move strategically among temporal and spatial scales is useful, if not outright necessary for both world history teachers and students. A parachute and a nose for history’s truffles are required to make sense of all the events and changes that teachers and students encounter in studying the world’s history. Yet years of teaching experience and a small but instructive body of research on “historical thinking” have convinced me that levels thinking does not come naturally.5 Consider a thought experiment that I along with colleagues have used in workshops with hundreds of history teachers over the past ten years. We ask teachers to construct threeto five-minute histories of the United States, of Western civilization, and of the world. With only a few exceptions, the results are strikingly similar. Teachers tackle the first two challenges quickly, producing common stories with remarkably similar key events: Native American societies, European settlement and colonization, War for Independence, Constitutional Convention, Civil War and Reconstruction, westward expansion and industrialism, World Wars, Depression and New Deal, Cold War, and civil rights movement. Likewise, teachers develop a familiar tale of the growth of Western civilization, marked