Jacqueline M. Moore & Rebecca Woodward Wendelken 
Teaching the Silk Road 
A Guide for College Teachers

The romance of the journey along the Silk Road with its exotic locales and luxury goods still excites the popular imagination. The trade route between China and Central Asia that flourished from about 200 BCE to the 1500s, the Silk Road can provide great insight for contemporary higher education curricula. Indeed, with people, plants, animals, ideas, and beliefs traversing it, the Silk Road is now considered both a metaphor of globalization and an early example of it.



Teaching the Silk Road highlights the reasons to incorporate this material into courses and shares resources to facilitate that process. It 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 ‘world history’ view that shows impacts of other societies on Europe. The work explores both classroom and experiential learning and is intentionally interdisciplinary. Each essay focuses on pedagogical strategies or themes that teachers can use to bring the Silk Road into the classroom.

Table of Content

List of Illustrations



Introduction


Morris Rossabi




I. Disciplinary Approaches to the Silk Road



1. Weaving with Silk: Using the Silk Roads to Organize World History Surveys before 1500


Masako N. Racel



2. How to Use the Silk Roads in the European History Survey Course


Marybeth Carlson



3. The Silk Road and Chinese Identity, Past and Present


Robert W. Foster



4. Silk Road Studies in the Political Science Classroom


Rick Parrish



5. Teaching the Silk Road in Comparative Politics


Gang Guo



6. Art and the Silk Road


Joan O’Mara




II. Thematic Approaches to the Silk Road



7. Incorporating Nomads into the Curriculum, One Steppe at a Time


Ronald K. Frank



8. Philosophical Refl ections on National Identity


Tongdong Bai




III. Practicalities



9. Silk Roads, Service Learning, and Mythmaking


Hirsh Diamant



10. Taking Students along China’s Silk Road


Marcia J. Frost



11. Mapping the Silk Road


Rebecca Woodward Wendelken



12. Using Primary Sources to Teach the Silk Road


Jacqueline M. Moore




IV. A Personal Perspective



13. Flashes at the End of the Sky—My Personal Khotan on the Silk Road


Zhang He



About the Authors

Index

About the author

Jacqueline M. Moore is Professor of History at Austin College. She is the author of several books, including
Cow Boys and Cattle Men: Class and Masculinities on the Texas Frontier, 1865–1900.
Rebecca Woodward Wendelken is Associate Professor of History at Methodist University.