Teaching Context in AP World

Teaching context?

I have been working with students on context in AP World and trying to help them understand how to do it in their DBQs.

I was able to drive the point home when I showed them the first 15 minutes of PBS, Egalite for All about Toussaint L'Overture and the Haitian Revolution.

As the documentary opens, the narrators tell us a little about Haiti and then move to the French Revolution. I stopped the video and asked students why the narrator had moved to France. After all, this was a video about Haiti. I told them that the narrator was providing context.

And as the video progressed, I stopped it again to remind students that the development of context was not just a sentence. After all, the narrator of this documentary was spending five minutes discussing it.

Finally,  as the narrator moved back to Haiti, I stopped the video again and had students listen to the connecting sentence where the narrator connected the context to the Haitian Revolution.

It’s kind of cool when we can review these challenging concepts in different ways.