WHP Frames Guide
FRAMES OF OER PROJECT: WORLD HISTORYOER Project: World History (WH) courses ask you and your students to examine world history through different lenses, or frames. The three frames—communities, networks, and production and distribution—help students organize the vast amount of information they will encounter in world history, giving them a framework to help make sense of all the ways in which someone might tell the history of the world. This approach highlights the idea that historical accounts are based on particular perspectives. More important, these frames provide students with big picture, historical “stories,” thus providing a cohesive backdrop against which students can construct their historical understanding. As students move through the course, they’ll examine how each frame has changed over our long history. We describe the three frames of WH in detail later in this guide.BackgroundWe use the frames to help students build and maintain historical coherence. Through the chronological narrative that accompanies each frame, we introduce students to a big, global, overgeneralized starter picture of historical events and processes. Pitched at very large scales of time and space, these provide a brief story arc to help students contextualize, organize, connect, and evaluate the historical data—names, facts, and events—they encounter at smaller scales throughout the course.While the frames are helpful for the zoomed-out view of history and for gaining an overarching understanding of what happened over a long period of time, their limitations become clear when zooming in, that is, when we examine the past at smaller scales. But these limitations also carry benefits. Through studying historical processes and events at smaller scales, students are able to use what they are learning to test the usefulness and the limits of the frames. Much like we test and modify theories, students will be able to determine if the information they’re learning supports, extends, or challenges what they currently know about the frame narrative.
2Frames GuideScale Switching to Support, Extend, or Challenge Frame NarrativesStudents use and analyze the frame narratives by scale switching, moving between the global ideas that the frame narratives present and the processes or events at smaller scales of time and space. The goal of this analysis is to determine the degree to which historical events support, extend, or challenge a frame narrative. Students will consider how some human experiences reflect the transformations articulated in a frame narrative and will also look for experiences that diverge from the frame narratives they’re given. In this way, students evaluate the stories we give them, identifying areas where the narrative needs modification.It might be helpful to think of the frame narratives as road maps, guides that we present to students at the beginning of the course to get them started on their world-history journey. Like a road map, the frame narrative highlights historical transformations and provides information about turns and landmarks. The frames should help students see where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going. The frame narrative they start with, therefore, will be quite different from the finished frame narrative.The frames and their narratives are woven into WH in the following ways:• Frame videos and accompanying activities are placed in the first lesson of each unit to prep students for how each frame narrative will unfold, and to give them a chance to make some predictions about what will change.• Most articles attend to the frames to some degree, and many Guiding Questions directly address frames.• Various “thinking tools” (such as the Comparison, Contextualization, and CCOT Tools) address the frames.• In the first unit, students are asked to draw a visual representation of the frames based on the frame introduction videos. Then, throughout the course, they’re asked to redraw the frames. Over time, these drawings show how their thinking around frame narratives has changed and grown over time.• Graphic biographies are used throughout the courses to show history at a very small scale: the level of the individual. These stories complicate and often challenge the frame narratives—the experience of an individual will not necessarily fit with the big, global narrative—but they don’t invalidate the frames; they just deepen and enrich them.Frames as a LensSo, why select these three frames when there are probably an infinite number of lenses through which we can view history and construct the story of the past?These particular frames allow students to understand the increasing connectedness of the human experience over time while still identifying the complexity and differences that enrich our understanding of the past. In this way, they help us get to the core of the shared human experience while still recognizing that each individual’s experience is unique. Moreover, rather than pulling out and separating culture, gender, politics, technology, economics, and social organization into their own interpretive boxes, these frames help students see how they’re wrapped together at different levels—in small communities, in states, and through larger networks.As students use the frames to identify and evaluate the degree to which people and cultures have grown increasingly connected over our long history, they will examine the integration and interconnection of human experiences and our increasingly common approaches to living. At the same time, by zooming in, students will identify distinctions and differences among the human community and human experiences, distinctions that extend or challenge the narrative arc, making it more complex, plausible, and useful.
3Frames GuideCommunitiesHow do we define communities in the course?Communities are defined as the ways in which we’ve structured the societies around us, including the state and religion. There are numerous types of communities, including those on the smallest scale, such as families, and a multitude of different configurations that include neighborhoods, states, religions, and even online forums.How have we organized the communities in which we live?Humans have always lived in groups. In the beginning, those groups were very small. Today, they’re quite big, with some in the billions. Once, our sense of community was quite simple, with few rules and little need to consciously think about it. Now, many of us live in very complex communities with laws and rules, and most of us belong to several communities at once. The idea of community is different from the concept of the networks that we looked at earlier, although they may overlap. Unlike networks, which are defined through exchange, communities, by definition, share a sense of identity, of being “us” or “we.” Networks often stretch between communities, connecting them to each other.The kinds of communities in which we’ve lived, the ways we’ve organized them, and how we’ve understood our membership in them, is constantly changing, but throughout our existence, being a member of a community—or several communities at the same time—has remained a central feature of human existence.NetworksHow do we define networks in the course?We define networks as the patterns of connection between and among people and their communities. Networks link populations, enabling people living in different communities to move and share ideas, material goods, crops, animals, pathogens, and even people. We communicate across and through our networks.In what ways are we interconnected?We are all connected to other people, some of them very close friends and relatives, whom we rely on for many things. But these connections go beyond the communities in which we live and the people we know directly. They become networks—webs of people to whom we are interconnected through the exchange of things and ideas. One way to tell the history of the world is to focus on how our connections to other people have changed over time. It’s a story of how we became connected to more and more people across larger and larger parts of the Earth. Today, in many ways, we are all connected—all 7 billion of us.
4Frames GuideProduction and DistributionHow do we define production and distribution in the course?We refer to production as how we make things, and to distribution as how we share, sell, or trade them within our communities and across networks.How do we make and distribute the stuff we need and use?One thing that humans share is the need and desire for stuff. Like all animals, we need food and drink to survive. Like a small subset of animals, such as the octopus, some birds, and other apes, we make physical tools with which we interact with our environment. Alone among all species on Earth, humans have developed a culture that makes and consumes cultural products like art, music, and video. How we make, share, and use these things is one way to view human history, and this is the theme at the core of the production and distribution frame.