I’m an emergency certified teacher for geography in middle school in the US. Our textbooks are most odious propaganda I’ve ever had to witness, and I just can’t deal with it. I managed to swing some alternative sources when we covered Eastern Europe and Western Russia, and when we covered China, but now we’re going over Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Russia.
The textbook is just vile. Takes any opportunity to overrepresent every negative aspect of socialist countries in ways obvious to people like us, but innocuous to children. I’ve been struggling to balance my lessons in a way that teaches the regions, but isn’t brainrot. Some of the stuff I can let slide and use the textbook for, but anything Soviet related is written in an insanely biased way.
We have to rush through the region to catch up to where other classes are, so I only need a few days’ worth of material, but it’s difficult to find things on YT that cover history of the region that’s 1) easy for kids to understand, and 2) doesn’t try and make the region out to be some kind of nightmare.
I’d love to help find resources. Just a few questions to help guide me. You don’t have to answer them all.
What are the main learning objectives of the unit? What timeframe of history are you covering? And what’s the assessment like fit the unit, if there is one?
You might find luck with videos about daily life in Central Asia today and use that as a humanizing factor to counter the critical content in you textbook.
I’m honestly just following the layout of the textbook, which breaks each region into 3 lessons: physical geography, history, and daily life/current affairs. I’ve covered the first with the book well enough, but the remaining lessons are obnoxiously biased.
For history, I’ve focused mostly on pre-industrial periods and the formation of countries (then a little history blurb to catch them up to modern day). I try to keep things neutral, emphasize anything cool or unique about areas, and if there’s controversy, clearly emphasize it’s controversial and provide a nuanced middle ground (so I don’t get burned at the stake, but also to keep kiddos from drinking the Koolaid). For daily life, anything cultural would be good, but I’m having trouble finding videos that aren’t political.
I also need to move quickly through this section, so even just a handful of videos can help a lot.
Got it. I’ll set a reminder for Sunday to find some resources. I have my own planning to do, but I’ll try really hard to get that done more quickly to help you out. Hope that’s ok.
I’ll DM if I think of anything in the meantime.
[off topic]
“Connections” old BBC series free on Youtube. Gives watchers a ton of information, and shows how actions connect with one another.
https://youtu.be/XetplHcM7aQ?list=PLf02uWXhaGRng_YzH-Ser_VEV4lGSLX_1 episode 1
