Teaching the Uprising

I was directed to three on-line lesson plans on the Egyptian uprisings by the latest issue of the Brown Alumni Newsletter. The lessons are offered by the Watson Institute for International Studies. The first, Egypt’s Uprising, offers basic information about the causes of the uprising, the role of new media, and the U.S response. The second, After Mubarak, asks students to consider the possible positive and negative effects of a Mubarak ouster. The third, Protests, Revolutions, and Democratic Change, puts the Egyptian uprising into the larger context and considers the potential effects of the protests on democracy and stability in the Middle East and North Africa.

All three lessons offer course objectives, teaching resources (powerpoints, maps and handouts), video lectures cleverly times to contemporary student attention spans (i.e. the person in the vid talks for three minutes, then you have a class discussion; then you play the second video, then have a discussion, and so on). There are also plenty of resources for expanding the lesson.

It’s mostly out of date now, and biased toward political science–as so much of international studies is, alas–but still impressive. The sheer quantity of resources on the internet continues to amaze me–even as it dismays me how we always find this stuff  a couple of weeks after you could have used it the most…