Blog 1: Describe a social justice issue that you have observed and that you find particularly challenging.

 This past week, I took over my first two sections of ESL World Studies. The unit I started is on African Empires from around 600-1500. But I immediately noticed a problem when starting to write my unit and organize the curriculum. That problem is that there are so few resources on Africa at this time. From my brief research on the era while creating this unit, some of that is due to the lack of resources from Africa during this time. Many factors of African history are just unknown like the exact origins of the Ghana Empire. Many manuscripts from Timbuktu have been lost or are literally hidden in the desert. There are few teaching guides on these topics and even fewer quality videos on Youtube. If you search the Roman Empire on Youtbue you will get thousands of videos and many of them being of good quality. If you search the Songhai Empire on Youtube, you get a handful of videos and barely any reaching the same production quality as videos on the Roman Empire.


By even doing this unit and teaching my students about pre-colonial African history, I feel like I am shedding light and rectifying, in a very small way, the social justice issue at hand. To be specific, that social justice issue is a lack of quality sources on African history. Besides teaching our students the history of this era and shedding light onto the good resources out there, more Arabic texts on Africa from this time need to be translated into English and easily available on the internet through online libraries. 

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