This course teaches important themes in African history by focusing on three regions of Africa: the Niger Delta, the Zimbabwe plateau and the upper Niger River valley. For each region, the instructor assigned students both primary and secondary source readings covering a variety of disciplines including geography, archeology, sociology, biography and history. In all three cases, we examined the region from antiquity to the present considering themes such as state formation, the rise of militant Islamic states, ties to global markets and colonial conquest. At the end of our consideration of each of the three regions, class members wrote long essays relating the assigned readings to each other and outside texts.

The knowledge I've gained in this course will be very helpful for teaching world history courses. African history is a nearly universally neglected subject in the public schools (and in the academic literature as well) and this course makes for a nice corrective. Not only did the course provide a mass of dates and important people, the instructor also did a marvelous job of narrating the story of the land and its people in a way that I could share with my own students.

However, the most important things I take from this course are from watching my instructor teach. She designed and executed a course that created endless opportunities for learning. Many professors allow the texts they assign to do most of the work in a course. Schoolteachers know they do not have that option. My professor may have had that option, but instead she willingly and capably used classroom instruction, visual aids, primary sources and even (gasp!) assessments to encourage us to not just absorb a mass of information, but to let it change us and how we think about the world. I will recommend this course to all future MAT social studies students not just for the content of the class, but for the chance it affords to see a master teacher in action.