Tag Archives: questioning/inquiry

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Buddha; this is a half-page document I’ve used as a do-now to get lessons started–particularly lessons on the civilization and culture of India.

I don’t think most people realize that Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha, was born into an Indian aristocratic clan, the Shakya, and arrived at his compassionate philosophy (Buddhism really isn’t a religion) by self-abnegation, voluntary poverty, prayer, and meditation. One gets a sense of this, as I recall (it’s over forty years since I read it), in Siddartha, the classic 1922 novel by Herman Hesse–and a high school literary staple, if memory serves. Anyway, this short document (two questions) serves as a very basic introduction to this relatively complex topic.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Manchu Dynasty, also known as the Qing Dynasty. This is a half-page worksheet with three questions. In other words, it is only a general introduction to the subject of this last imperial dynasty of China.

The Manchu Dynasty is a complicated topic–worthy of a great deal more than a short reading and three questions. It ruled china for almost three hundred years (established in 1636, the dynasty ruled from 1644 to 1912, with a brief restoration in 1917) created the fourth largest empire in world history, and immediately preceded the Republic of China. In other words, the Manchus ruled China in the modern period, and left its stamp on the nation in terms of territoriality. It also, in its decline, suffered the humiliations of the Opium Wars and the indignity of the “unequal treaties” imposed by the British.

So, again, this Manchu Dynasty and its decline in the nineteenth century, presents an opportunity for a case study of Western colonialism and its discontents.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Indonesia. The most populous Muslim-majority nation in the world and the fourth-most populous country in the world is an archipelago of over seventeen thousand islands, among them Java, to most populous island in the world.

Indonesia, by way of its Maluku (“Spice”) Islands, is the world’s leading producer of cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. These export commodities attracted, inevitably one must suppose, the Dutch East India Company, which competed with the Portuguese Empire for dominance in Indonesia, became the dominant colonial power in the islands. Indonesia’s post-colonial history is bumpy to say the least.

In other words, Indonesia is a perfect case study for building analytical skills in historical inquiry, particularly in the fields of colonial and post-colonial studies.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Saddam Hussein. This is a full-page document with a total of ten questions.

I’ll assume I needn’t belabor the relevance of the late authoritarian ruler of Iraq and war criminal, who remains au courant for a variety of reasons. He is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq and elsewhere. He has the two distinctions worth discussing, I think: he served to destabilize the Middle East while both in and out of power, and he was both an ally and an enemy of the United States in the course of a generation.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Gang of Four. This is half-page worksheet on the political faction of the Chinese Communist Party that rose to prominence (and included in its small number Jiang Qing, also known as Madame Mao, owing to her marriage, of course, to Mao Zedong) during the Cultural Revolution, and not the highly esteemed British post-punk band.

If you know anything about post-revolutionary China, you may know that the Cultural Revolution was another highly ideologized social and cultural movement which aimed to extirpate all vestiges of capitalism and Chinese traditionalism from the nation’s culture. Like the Great Leap Forward, it was an unmitigated disaster. As many as 20 million people died during the Cultural Revolution.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Emperor Hirohito, the longest-lived and longest-reigning Japanese emperor and one of the longest-reigning monarchs in the history of the world.

Emperor Showa, as he is now known in Japan, ascended to the throne on Christmas Day, 1926. He sat on the throne, therefore, during Japan’s imperial expansion, the nation’s militarism in the 1930s, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and, of course, the “Day of Infamy,” the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In other words, he was culpable in the acts that drew the United States into World War II. He was also culpable, then, in Japanese war crimes during that conflict as well. However, the degree of his culpability appears to be subject of intense and ongoing scholarly debate.

So he presents an interesting case study in war crimes, guilt, culpability and historical memory among other concepts and topics.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Hagia Sophia, an august building which has actually been in the news recently.

Hagia Sophia rose in late antiquity, the year 537 to be exact, as the patriarchal cathedral of the city of Constantinople and one of the centers of the Eastern Orthodox Church. After Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453, Hagia Sophia became, for nearly 500 years, a mosque in the rechristened city of Istanbul. In 1935, the secular Turkish Republic converted it to a museum. In 1985, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), added Hagia Sophia to its list of World Heritage Sites.

Just last year, Turkish authorities decided to convert Hagia Sophia back to a working mosque. As you might imagine, this was controversial: UNESCO announced that it “deeply regretted” this move; The Orthodox Church petitioned the United Nations to intervene and prevent Turkey from attempting to “erase the cultural heritage of Orthodox Christians.” Christians in Turkey fear marginalization–not exactly a new source of anxiety in this part of the world, but clearly not desirable if one wishes to avoid, say, religious strife.

So, this full-page worksheet (five questions) introduces a torn-from-the-headlines story that makes the history of this fraught building relevant to students, and a source of thought and discussion about a wide range of concepts and topics, including monotheism, paganism, Christianity and Islam, religious strife, conflicts rooted in philosophy, religion, and ideology, winners and losers in conflict, and nationalism, to name a few.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Black Hole of Calcutta–a topic which fascinated me as a kid.

In fact, I think we kids used a potential stay in the Black Hole of Calcutta, or its equivalent on the east side of Madison, Wisconsin, as a deterrent to misbehavior. In other words, one had better not commit pranks on Halloween night lest one end up cast into the Black Hole of Calcutta. I may have gotten onto the Black Hole while reading through the reams of Classics Illustrated Comics my father accumulated as a child, then conveyed to me. But it was part of the lingua franca of my crowd, so we may have also gotten onto it by way of cartoons, or something else.

We probably assumed it was a mythological place. As it happens, the Black Hole was in Fort William, in Calcutta. The British East India Company (which if memory serves, the CUNY–John Jay College of Criminal Justice, to be exact–historian Mike Wallace, characterized as “Wal-Mart with Guns” in Ric Burns’ magisterial eight-part documentary series on New York City) built Fort Williams to protect its trade in India. In other words, a colonial, mercantilist endeavor designed to enrich England at the expense of India.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.