Council on Foreign Relations
Current events in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are complex and rapidly evolving. Within the past week, the world saw a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah and a surprise rebel offensive in Syria.
To help you navigate these topics in your classroom, the Council on Foreign Relations is excited to share a new learning journey, Middle East & North Africa: The Essentials.
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 Winter Break Reads
In Fall 2024, three books hit the New York Times best-seller list with relevance for social science educators considering how the 2024 Social Science Standards create the opportunity for a more complete history and the need to examine how information shapes our social reality. Yuval Noah Harari's "Nexus," Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Message," and Malcolm Gladwell's "The Revenge of the Tipping Point" each explore the complex relationship between information networks, storytelling, and social change, offering crucial insights for educators and citizens navigating our information-rich world.
Harari, a trained historian and popularizer of the sweeping human history "Sapiens," turns his attention to information networks in "Nexus," challenging the premise that more information leads to better understanding. Through historical examples ranging from 16th-century witch trials to modern-day persecution of the Rohingya, Harari demonstrates how the mere abundance of information offers no protection against ignorance or violence.
Coates' "The Message" approaches similar themes through a more personal lens. Beginning as a letter to his writing students at Howard University, the book evolves into a meditation on storytelling's power to shape political possibilities. Coates wrestles with approaches to history (or current events) that focus on factual complexity rather than moral clarity.
In returning to the idea of social epidemics, Gladwell introduces the concept of the "overstory" - the meta-narratives that enable or prevent social change. He explores how carefully crafted stories can suddenly shift collective understanding. In the lightest of the three books, Gladwell romps through examples ranging from corporate boardrooms to pandemic spread patterns to examines how information and ideas reach critical mass to create social change.
Together, these works suggest that accumulating information is insufficient; we must also grasp how culture and belief in stories shape our perception of reality. Harari's warning about information networks, Coates' exploration of moral storytelling, and Gladwell's analysis of narrative tipping points offer interesting perspectives on how the 2024 Social Science Standards call to expand the narrative of Oregon, US, and World History also requires an examination of why and how current narratives were constructed. They demonstrate that critical thinking requires not just the ability to process information, but also the capacity to understand how stories shape our collective understanding and the power dynamics that determine which stories get told.
Do you have a book, podcast, or film that you think more Oregon Social Science teachers should check-out? Please let me know. Amit.Kobrowski@ode.oregon.gov
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