Secondary Education Module: Overview

This Secondary Education Module (SEM) is a vital part of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative, providing teachers of grades 6-12 and community college with curriculum content, selected scholarship, and pedagogical resources. Survey courses provide many students with the most extensive and sometimes only exposure to content on these regions and people. These lasting impressions follow them into citizenship, further education, and careers. This initiative is intended to support educators’ teaching about the Middle East and North Africa with resources that reflect current scholarship and support courses in world history, regional studies, and global studies, or foreign policy units in U.S. History. These materials are classroom ready to incorporate readily into your course. In addition to topic-specific content, this pedagogical initiative engages structural and policy issues that affect global education, such as academic standards, testing, and textbooks. 

The SEM content was developed and curated as a collaboration among The Middle East Studies Program at George Mason University (GMU) and the K-14 Education Outreach program at The Center For Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University.

We invite educators to engage with the Secondary Education Module, provide feedback on the materials posted,, and suggest content for consideration. We hope you will browse this module and the MESPI site as a whole, contribute, and make it a resource you rely on to support your teaching.