First, before reading the lessons below,
please discover more about our newest
discrepant event lesson, on DVD.
Presentation about Discrepant Event Lesson:
Humanity's Journey
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Models of Teaching, example
Models of Teaching/Instruction
The teaching method used in the DVD movie lesson,
Discrepant Event Lesson: Humanity's Journey,
is based on the work of Bruce Joyce, Marsha Weils,
and Emily Calhoun.
Proceeds from the lesson film,
Discrepant Event Lesson: Humanity's Journey,
will go to The Bruce Cultural Diversity Scholarship.
The scholarship is also funded by a grant from the
Jean and Bill Bruce Foundation for the Empowerment
of Diversity Understanding (FEDU).
Humanity’s Journey
Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond is the author of "Guns, Germs and Steel" and the current New York Times' best selling "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." This lecture examines the factors that caused great civilizations of the past to collapse and what we can learn from their fates. Series: "Voices"
William C. Bruce
Associate Dean and Professor
College of Education and Psychology
Phone: (903) 566-7048
e-mail: wbruce@uttyler.edu
http://www.hometreemedia.org
Fax: (903) 566-7036
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teachers have permission.
Click on D.E. Lesson Slide on the side menu, or go to:
A quick Discrepant Event Lesson: # 2
Title: Guns, Germs, and Steel
This quick lesson is shorter and less structured than the discrepant event lessons in Mindtronics! and Inquiry Alive! by William C. Bruce and Jean K. Bruce.
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Discrepant Event
During the four hundred years following the voyage of Columbus to the New World, Europeans conquered most of the known world. European nations subjugated most of the indigenous people in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Europeans expropriated the resources of the indigenous people. The people of Asia, Africa, and the Americas failed to conquer European nations.
Problem Statement:
European nations conquered the known world. Why were the European nations the subjugators instead of the subjugated?
NOTE:
To use this discrepant event lesson read Jared Diamonds Pulitzer Prize-winning book and national best seller, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.
To gain insight into conducting discrepant event lessons, read our books: Mindtronics! and Inquiry Alive!
Is the balance of power in the world, the essentially unequal distribution of wealth and clout that has shaped civilization for centuries, a matter of survival of the fittest or merely of the luckiest?
Reference:
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, W.W. Norton, New York, 2005.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a national bestseller: the global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of human development based on race.
Guns, Germs and Steel, REVIEWS:
"No scientist brings more experience from the laboratory and field, none thinks more deeply about social issues or addresses them with greater clarity, than Jared Diamond as illustrated by Guns, Germs, and Steel. In this remarkably readable book he shows how history and biology can enrich one another to produce a deeper understanding of the human condition." Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino University Professor, Harvard University
"Guns, Germs and Steel lays a foundation for understanding human history, which makes it fascinating in its own right. Because it brilliantly describes how chance advantages can lead to early success in a highly competitive environment, it also offers useful lessons for the business world and for people interested in why technologies succeed."Bill Gates
In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religionas well as nasty germs and potent weapons of warand adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history.
Guns, Germs and Steel, RESOURCES:
National Geographic
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/07/0706_050706_diamond.html
"Guns, Germs and Steel": Jared Diamond on Geography as Power
Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News
July 6, 2005
Why did his story unfold differently on different continents? Why has one culturenamely that of Western Europedominated the development of the modern world?
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs and Steel, scientist Jared Diamond argues that the answer is geography. The physical locations where different cultures have taken root, he claims, have directly affected the ability of those societies to develop key institutions, like agriculture and animal domestication, or to acquire important traits, like immunity to disease.
Now the book has been turned into a three-part National Geographic Special, which airs on PBS on three consecutive Mondays, July 11, July 18, and July 25, at 10 p.m.
A conversation with Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs & Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Diamond won this year's Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: ...Your book, I believe, grew out of a question posed to you by a politician in New Guinea. What was that question?
JARED DIAMOND: I'd been studying bird evolution in New Guinea for 34 years. New Guineans used stone tools until relatively recently. And eventually in 1972, a politician that I ran into on a beach in New Guinea asked me straight out, why is it that we New Guineans were the people using stone tools and you Europeans and Americans were the people who brought steel tools and writing and ships to us. It's a straight question. I couldn't tell 'em the answer, and I've spent much of the last five years trying to understand the reason.
_____
JARED DIAMOND
Professor, Geography and Physiology
David Geffen School
of Medicine
at UCLA
Faculty Member Since: 1966
Ph.D., University of Cambridge, England
http://149.142.237.180/faculty/diamond.htm
Research Interests:
Regulation of nutrient transport; integrative and evolutionary physiology.
Recent Awards:
Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, 1998
Japan's Cosmos Prize, 1998
Representative Publications:
J. M. Diamond. Logic of Life: The Challenge of Integrative Physiology. In: Evolutionary Physiology (D. Noble and C.A.R. Boyd, eds.), Oxford University Press, (1993), pp.89-111.
S. L. Pimm, J. Diamond, T.M. Reed, G.J. Russell and J. Verner. (1993). Times to extinction of small populations of large birds. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.A.) 90:10871-10875.
S.M. Secor, E.D. Stein and J. M. Diamond.(1994). Rapid up-regulation of snake intestine in response to feeding: a new model of intestinal adaptation. Am. J. Physiol. 266(4):G695-G705.
Disease and death have plagued indigenous communities in South America since they first came into contact with outsiders from Europe in the 1500s. The indigenous populations had no immune protection against smallpox, measles, and flu, which wiped out thousands of communities. By 1984, when this photograph was taken of Indians who appeared from the forest one day at an oil exploration camp in eastern Peru, only a few isolated uncontacted communities survived. Today, the last remnants of indigenous Indians cling to their ancient way of life in secret isolation.
_____
National Geographic News
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/05/0512_050512_leprosy.html
Leprosy Was Spread by Colonialism, Slave Trade
Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News
May 12, 2005
It is an infectious disease that dates back at least to biblical times, yet leprosy has puzzled scientists since the identification, in 1873, of the bacterium that causes it.
Known for its disfiguring skin lesions and potentially debilitating nerve damage, leprosy, or Hansen's disease, is a very difficult disease to transmit. It also has a long incubation period, making it hard for a doctor to determine where a leprosy patient contracted the disease.
But now a team of French scientists has discovered how the disease evolved and how it was spread across the continents by human migrations.
The scientists found that leprosy infections were caused by a single bacterial clone, which spreadbut barely mutatedfor centuries. Such behavior is highly unusual.
_____
PBS
PBS PreviewS
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs_and_Steel
Teachers using the inquiry method of teaching can easily
convert and update discrepant event lessons.
Learning, using the Mindtronics! and Inquiry Alive!
discrepant event method, works best.Why?
Mindtronics! and Inquiry Alive! will show you how to get the
most from your student-centered lessons.The two books also show your students how to solve problems, not just by
question asking, also by using the scientific process, and by using
teamwork.
Would you like some proof before you use more discrepant
events in your teaching?The
following brief text presents findings from a new study.The study examined complex problem
solving.
Problem Solving: Teamwork May Be Best
Teams of 3-5 People Better at Solving Complex Problems Than
Individuals
April 25, 2006 -- Got a thorny problem? You might want to call in your
problem-solving squad.
A new study shows
that complex problems are best solved by teams of three, four, or five people,
compared to people who tackle the same problems by themselves or with one other
person. Just ask Patrick Laughlin, PhD, and colleagues from the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.They
published a study on the topic in the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology.
The study included 760 university students.All were given a complicated code in
which the letters A through J randomly represented the numbers 1-10.Laughlin's team asked the students to
try to crack the code as presented in a series of equations.
Go It Alone or Get Help?
The researchers randomly assigned students to work by
themselves or in groups of two, three, four, or five.Everyone got plenty of scratch paper and the same ground
rules.
Teams or individuals worked on the equations and then
submitted their answers.If their
answer wasn't right, they tried again.
Teams of three, four, or five people were better at solving
the problems than the individuals, submitting fewer wrong answers before
arriving at the solution.Even the
top-performing individuals didn't match the teams of three, four, or five
students.After the tests,
participants generally rated the challenge as enjoyable, whether they had
worked alone or in groups.
Groups of Three
What about the two-person teams? They were about as good as
the individuals who were best at problem solving.Brainstorming seemed to work best in groups of at least
three people, the researchers note."Group members combined their abilities and resources" to
outperform individuals on the task, write Laughlin and colleagues.The researchers point out that the
problems, while complex, obeyed the rules of math and logic and had clear
answers.The students weren't
tackling personal or emotional problems, which may be harder to nail down or
prove correct.
SOURCES: "Copyright (c) 1996 - 2004, WebMD,
Inc.All rights reserved"
Laughlin, P. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, April 2006; vol 90:
pp 644-651.News release, American
Psychological Association.
Mindtronics! and Inquiry Alive!,
two books sharing one title
The newest version of Learning Social Studies Through Discrepant Event Inquiry AND Learning the Inquiry Method: A Learner's Permit to Inquiry: Student Workbook (ISBN 1565060032), Alpha Publishing Co., Inc., Annapolis, Maryland, 1992, by Bruce and Bruce.
Now, you never need to order the Bruces' earlier discrepant event books from book resellers. The two old books are often confused with the new books. Book resellers sell the old book, Learning Social Studies Through Discrepant Event Inquiry, in the $130.00 range. For less than half that price you can order the updated version: Mindtronics! and Inquiry Alive! ISBN: 0970480156.
You can order the Bruces' titles from Amazon.com, other online bookstores, and now when you search under Entertainment, Target online.
http://www.target.com/
William C. Bruce
Associate Dean and Professor
College of Education and Psychology
Phone: (903) 566-7048
e-mail: wbruce@uttyler.edu
http://www.hometreemedia.org
Fax: (903) 566-7036
Would you like to know more about our main book authors, Dr. William C. Bruce and Jean K. Bruce? For instance: Dr. Bruce, and his wife Jean, first authored a discrepant event book entitled: Learning Social Studies Through Discrepant Event Inquiry.
Go to the following URL addresses to learn more about William C. Bruce and Jean K. Bruce through their blogs:
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Reference:
