Experiencing the Medieval World in a Seventh-Grade Classroom

This presentation will not be a paper or a lecture, but a chance to experience lessons from the Sites of Encounter in the Medieval World unit as a participant.  Delgado will guide the audience through a seventh-grade lesson which compares the map of the world drawn by al-Idrisi in the twelfth century with maps in the Catalan Atlas of the fourteenth century.  Using a modified gallery-walk teaching strategy, the lesson has students examine specific features of the two maps, such as the amount of detail written on the coastlines and knowledge of the western Atlantic islands (the Canaries and Azores), as evidence for their analysis.  For the second lesson, Delgado will demonstrate strategies for helping students with low reading skills access and analyze difficult primary sources.  She will demonstrate the literacy activities designed to support students in analyzing descriptions of Cairo’s souk, caravanserais, and surrounding trade routes written by Ibn Khaldun, al-‘Umari, Frescobaldi, and Ibn Battuta.  As students assess the literal “structures” of the medieval entrepôt of Cairo, the lesson also emphasizes that through trade cities like Cairo the Muslim world was united by a network of roads and travel accommodations for merchants and pilgrims on the hajj.  Stretching from Morocco to Southeast Asia, the network provided the crucial middle connection of Afro-Eurasia, and facilitated the exchange of products, technologies and ideas.  The demonstration lessons direct students to analyze primary sources and make interpretations and give them the literacy supports to accomplish this analysis.