Rewriting World History in the Classroom: Pedagogical Dispatches from India

In this paper we examine some of the problems of world historical frames especially as they are made manifest in the classroom, and we show how we designed a course to resist and avoid reproducing Eurocentrism and other biases. We reject frameworks that insist on focusing solely on connectivities, entanglements, braidedness, and “Big History.” Drawing pedagogical and intellectual inspiration from the writings of Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich, John Holt, and Rudolf Steiner, we make a case for widening the scope of world history by insisting that it take on board the ruptures, dissonances, and messiness of a human past that defies easy cataloguing and facile connectivities. We centered the course around developing students’ understanding of how history is constructed and written, including how we can construct, write, and teach many possible narratives of world history. We argue that a course taught in such a way can be a vehicle for deepening human understanding, for decolonizing thought, and for helping students understand and articulate their position in the world.