Monday, July 19, 2010

Now available: Teaching the Silk Road

Teaching the Silk Road discusses why and how to teach about China’s Silk Road. Subtitled "A Guide for College Teachers", the book advocates for a global rather than Eurocentric perspective in the college classroom.

The romance of the Silk Road journey, with its exotic locales and luxury goods, still excites the popular imagination. But study of the trade routes between China and central Asia that flourished from about 200 BCE to the 1500s can also greatly enhance contemporary higher education curricula. With people, plants, animals, ideas, and beliefs traversing it, the Silk Road is both a metaphor of globalization and an early example of it.

Editors Jacqueline M. Moore and Rebecca Woodward Wendelken highlight the reasons to incorporate this material into a variety of courses and share resources to facilitate that process. The book is intended for those who are not Silk Road or Asian specialists but who wish to embrace a global history and civilizations perspective in teaching, as opposed to the more traditional approach that focuses on cultures in isolation.

Visit our website to view the book's table of contents to see how the essays explore both classroom and experiential learning in an intentionally interdisciplinary manner.