Singapore University of Social Sciences

CCO107 World Histories and Issues explores the past from a global perspective and stresses the importance of historical connections and interactions across the vast span of modern human history. Its chief value lies in its quest for explanations beyond the narrow confines of historical specialisation in a particular time and place. Crucially, it involves exploring the patterns and connections in human history, not merely compiling and reciting key names, dates and events. It also involves developing several historical thinking skills.Students will progress from learning to define and frame an historical question to being able to explain and evaluate an historical event, before they hone more sophisticated skills like historical synthesis and criticism. Each of these historical thinking skills will assist students in gaining greater proficiency and better understanding in the methods and approaches that historians use to establish a dialogue between the past and the present.Historical thinking involves the ability to extract useful information, make supportable inferences and draw appropriate conclusions from historical evidence, while understanding such evidence in its historical context, recognizing its limitations and assessing the points of view that it reflects.CCO107 World Histories and Issues is a useful vehicle to develop such historical thinking skills because unlike more traditional fields in history, such as American History or European History, it challenges students to think about themes and events on a much wider time and geographical scale. Thus, the course is about connections and interactions among all parts of the world. It allows students to focus upon the interplay of events, actions, ideas and issues that transcend states, regions and cultures. As such, the narrative is eclectic in that it does not follow a natural historical progression, but rather decentralises the historical narrative by recognizing that in the story of human experience, there has always been a shifting pattern of dominance and ever refreshing current of diversity.