Terrestrial Lessons

Prologue: Global itineraries, Earth inscriptions -- In pursuit of a global thing -- "As you live in the world, you ought to know something of the world"--The global pandit -- Down to Earth? Of girls and globes -- "It's called a globe. It is the Earth. Our Earth!" -- Epilogue: The conquest of the world as globe

Why and how do debates about the form and disposition of our Earth shape enlightened subjectivity and secular worldliness in colonial modernity? Sumathi Ramaswamy explores this question for British India with the aid of the terrestrial globe, which since the sixteenth century has circulated as a worldly symbol, a scientific instrument, and not least an educational tool for inculcating planetary consciousness. In Terrestrial Lessons, Ramaswamy provides the first in-depth analysis of the globe’s history in and impact on the Indian subcontinent during the colonial era and its aftermath. Drawing on a wide array of archival sources, she delineates its transformation from a thing of distinction possessed by elite men into that mass-produced commodity used in classrooms worldwide—the humble school globe. Traversing the length and breadth of British India, Terrestrial Lessons is an unconventional history of this master object of pedagogical modernity that will fascinate historians of cartography, science, and Asian studies.

Integrate academic vocabulary instruction into content-area lessons with this engaging new resource for Level 4, which provides teachers with 12 easy-to-implement strategies for teaching academic vocabulary. Included are 25 step-by-step standards-based lessons that each incorporate two vocabulary strategies. Also included are activity pages and assessments, an answer key, and a Teacher Resource CD. This resource is correlated to the Common Core State Standards. 176pp.