Hi everyone! I wanted to share a framework I use for teaching the evolution of communities and that frame, which has been a big hit with my students and continues to evolve.
We start with the Individual, focusing on the basic needs for survival. From there, we explore the Family as the next stage of the community. To make this engaging, I show the first 10 minutes of The Croods, it works great with talking about Foraging because the first 10 minutes is a scene of them hunting with incredible athletic ability.
Next, we discuss Villages and debate a key question:
"Did villages form because of farming, or did farming come because of villages?" (I tie this in with the Archaeology Comparison Activity from the OER resources.)
After villages, we move on to Cities, and our working definition of a civilization is "life in cities." From there, we expand to States (what students know as countries) and finally to Empires, which we define as the largest form of community.
We use this “frame within a frame” throughout the semester, adding to it as we move through history and on the board it just looks like this: I->Family->Village->City->State->Empire. Bob Bain's old video on here for the kick off to Era 3 was the start to presenting it this way for students.
Any ideas or things you think I might be missing with this approach to the community framework?
