Curriculum / Global Curriculum / Grade 12

Grade 12 World Studies.

10textbooks

250lessons

137competencies

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The whole year, lesson by lesson.

Textbook 1Advanced Geographic Analysis and Mapping Global Systems

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Spatial Questions, Scale, and Geographic Evidence

Chapter 2

Map Forms, Representation, and Uncertainty

Chapter 3

Mapping Global Networks and Unequal Effects

Chapter 4

Independent Global-System Mapping Project

Textbook 2Culture Within Global Systems

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Cultural Production, Transmission, and Mediation

Chapter 2

Cultural Power, Representation, and Authenticity Claims

Chapter 3

Migration, Diaspora, Heritage, and Public Memory

Chapter 4

Independent Comparative Cultural Analysis

Textbook 3Global Governance, Political Systems, Law, and Justice

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Global Governance and Multilevel Authority

Chapter 2

Institutional Design, Legitimacy, and Accountability

Chapter 3

Global Law, Rights, and Justice

Chapter 4

Comparative Governance Analysis and Defense

Textbook 4Advanced Global Economics and Development

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

National Economies, Indicators, and Macroeconomic Relationships

Chapter 2

Trade, Exchange Rates, Finance, and Systemic Risk

Chapter 3

Global Value Chains, Technology, and Development

Chapter 4

Inequality, Externalities, Policy Frameworks, and Economic Defense

Textbook 5Religion Within Global Systems

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Transnational Religion, Migration, and Sacred Geography

Chapter 2

Religion, Law, Governance, and Human Rights

Chapter 3

Religion, Development, Environment, Conflict, and Peace

Chapter 4

Advanced Comparative Religion Research and Defense

Textbook 6Independent Historical Research I — Question, Historiography, and Source Architecture

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

From Topic to Researchable Historical Question

Chapter 2

Historiographical Literature Review

Chapter 3

Designing the Primary-Source Corpus

Chapter 4

Method, Ethics, and Research Architecture

Textbook 7Independent Historical Research II — Interpretation, Writing, and Defense

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Evidence Analysis and Thesis Development

Chapter 2

Writing the Independent Historical Study

Chapter 3

Peer Review, Revision, and Research Communication

Chapter 4

Oral Defense and Final Research Portfolio

Textbook 8The Human Story I — First Cities, Empires, Belief, and Exchange

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

From Farming Communities to Cities and States

Chapter 2

Classical Empires, Political Thought, and Universal Traditions

Chapter 3

Post-Classical Networks, Cities, and Institutional Change

Chapter 4

Long-Run Patterns and Turning Points Before 1500

Textbook 9The Human Story II — Global Integration, Revolution, Industry, War, and Decolonization

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Oceanic Connection, Empire, and the Early Global World

Chapter 2

Revolutions, Industrialization, Nationalism, and Imperialism

Chapter 3

World Wars, Genocide, Decolonization, and International Order

Chapter 4

Cold War, Globalization, Digital Systems, and the Contemporary World

Textbook 10Global Citizenship Capstone — Contemporary Systems and Independent Reasoning

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Define the Contemporary System

Chapter 2

Evidence, Frameworks, and System Mapping

Chapter 3

Scenarios, Independent Position, and Counterargument

Chapter 4

Capstone Presentation, Defense, and Graduate Synthesis

Every coin is a 15-minute lesson.

Explained simply, shown with pictures, then put to the test. Stars are chapter reviews. The trophy is the final review.

See how a lesson works

Every competency, covered.

The 137 competencies set for Grade 12 World Studies, and every one has lessons behind it.

Advanced Geographic Analysis and Mapping Global Systems

23 competencies

Formulate a geographic research question with a defined place, scale, timeframe, system, and evidence requirement.
Distinguish node, route, corridor, territory, region, network, flow, boundary, hub, periphery, and system.
Select an appropriate local, national, regional, transregional, or global scale for a geographic question.
Explain how conclusions may change when the geographic scale or unit of analysis changes.
Evaluate map projection, classification, normalization, aggregation, color, symbols, labels, and missing data.
Interpret flow maps, network maps, choropleth maps, cartograms, proportional-symbol maps, accessibility maps, and vulnerability maps.
Combine physical, political, demographic, economic, cultural, infrastructural, and environmental evidence in one spatial analysis.
Explain the difference between spatial correlation and geographic causation.
Identify scale effects, ecological fallacy, boundary effects, and misleading averages at an introductory level.
Map flows of goods, people, finance, information, energy, disease, or environmental effects through a global system.
Analyze the geographic distribution of system benefits, burdens, risks, and vulnerabilities.
Explain how infrastructure, institutions, technology, and political authority reshape geographic relationships.
Develop alternative spatial explanations for the same pattern.
Represent uncertainty, disputed data, changing borders, and incomplete coverage honestly.
Construct an independent global-system map with clear data sources, design choices, limitations, and interpretation.
Critique a geographic argument and revise it in response to evidence.
Apply ethical standards when mapping vulnerable populations, sacred sites, disputed territories, or sensitive infrastructure.
Defend a geographic conclusion while distinguishing evidence, interpretation, uncertainty, and value judgment.
Map feedback loops, externalities, bottlenecks, thresholds, path dependence, resilience, and unintended consequences.
Explain how one global system creates different local effects.
Construct an advanced global-system map.
Define scope through time, place, actors, concepts, and source availability.
Revise argument, structure, and evidence after peer and instructor critique.

Culture Within Global Systems

20 competencies

Formulate an advanced cultural question focused on institutions, power, transmission, change, or global connection.
Analyze cultural production, transmission, interpretation, consumption, and adaptation as distinct processes.
Explain how states, markets, schools, religions, media industries, tourism, migration networks, and digital platforms shape cultural circulation.
Analyze cultural power through visibility, prestige, official recognition, commercial reach, access, and representation.
Explain how translators, interpreters, educators, artists, merchants, migrants, religious leaders, and digital creators mediate culture.
Compare cultural standardization, hybridization, revival, commercialization, appropriation, resistance, and localization.
Evaluate authenticity claims as historically and politically situated arguments.
Analyze how cultural systems operate differently at local, national, diasporic, regional, and global scales.
Explain how language, law, citizenship, education, class, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and generation shape cultural access and recognition.
Compare cultural-policy approaches including official language, heritage protection, museum practice, educational curriculum, censorship, and cultural funding descriptively.
Analyze public memory through monuments, museums, commemorations, heritage sites, textbooks, archives, film, and digital media.
Explain how transnational families and diaspora institutions maintain and transform identity.
Evaluate cultural data, surveys, media samples, oral histories, and institutional records for scope and bias.
Construct a comparative analysis of culture within a global system.
Represent internal disagreement and diversity within every cultural community studied.
Apply ethical standards to cultural research involving living communities.
Defend a cultural interpretation while acknowledging alternative explanations and limits.
Identify source dependence, archival silence, unequal survival, missing voices, and institutional collection practices.
Construct and test rival explanations.
Revise argument, structure, and evidence after peer and instructor critique.

Global Governance, Political Systems, Law, and Justice

21 competencies

Explain global governance as coordinated rule-making, administration, cooperation, and dispute management beyond a single government.
Distinguish domestic, regional, international, transnational, municipal, corporate, customary, and civil-society authority.
Explain multilevel governance and the allocation of authority across institutions and scales.
Analyze sovereignty, jurisdiction, delegation, subsidiarity, compliance, and enforcement.
Compare intergovernmental, supranational, treaty-based, networked, private, and hybrid governance arrangements.
Analyze institutional legitimacy through consent, legality, expertise, representation, performance, transparency, and accountability.
Compare majority voting, weighted voting, veto, unanimity, consensus, delegation, and judicial resolution as decision rules.
Explain collective-action and free-rider problems in global governance.
Analyze the roles of states, international organizations, courts, firms, nongovernmental organizations, communities, and expert bodies.
Compare constitutional structures through executive authority, legislature, judiciary, territorial power, rights, amendment, and emergency procedure.
Analyze judicial review, administrative oversight, legislative scrutiny, audit, election, media, and civil society as accountability mechanisms.
Compare international human-rights, humanitarian, refugee, trade, environmental, maritime, and criminal-law frameworks descriptively.
Explain tensions among sovereignty, universal legal claims, nonintervention, enforcement, and institutional capacity.
Compare procedural, retributive, restorative, distributive, and transitional justice within complex cases.
Evaluate institutional performance through stated mandate, legal authority, resources, compliance, outcomes, and unintended effects.
Distinguish institutional reform from political advocacy.
Construct an advanced comparative governance or legal-system analysis.
Present competing institutional-reform arguments accurately without prescribing one.
Reach and defend a qualified institutional judgment based on declared criteria.
Revise a governance analysis after receiving evidence-based criticism.
Distinguish evidence, inference, causal mechanism, interpretation, speculation, and unsupported assertion.

Advanced Global Economics and Development

22 competencies

Explain gross domestic product, productivity, inflation, unemployment, interest rates, exchange rates, and public debt conceptually.
Explain the difference among nominal, real, total, and per-capita economic measures.
Evaluate the limitations of national averages and economic indicators.
Explain fiscal policy through taxation, expenditure, borrowing, and budget balance at a conceptual level.
Explain monetary policy through money, credit conditions, interest rates, inflation, and central-bank institutions at a conceptual level.
Explain business cycles, recession, recovery, and economic shocks without forecasting.
Analyze international trade through specialization, comparative advantage, market access, strategic dependence, and distributional effects.
Explain tariffs, quotas, subsidies, standards, trade agreements, and sanctions as economic-policy instruments.
Explain exchange rates, current-account transactions, capital flows, and balance-of-payments relationships at an introductory level.
Explain banking, bond finance, equity finance, sovereign debt, and international financial institutions descriptively.
Explain financial contagion, liquidity problems, solvency problems, leverage, and systemic risk at an introductory level.
Analyze global value chains through ownership, intellectual property, production, logistics, labor, taxation, finance, sale, and disposal.
Explain platform economies, digital services, data, automation, and network effects descriptively.
Compare productivity, structural transformation, human capital, infrastructure, institutional quality, and technology as development factors.
Analyze poverty, inequality, informality, regional disparity, and access to public services using several indicators.
Explain externalities, public goods, common resources, monopoly power, and information problems in global systems.
Compare fiscal, monetary, industrial, trade, welfare, labor, and regulatory frameworks neutrally.
Evaluate claims about economic policy through evidence, assumptions, time horizon, distribution, institutions, and uncertainty.
Construct an advanced global economic-system model.
Defend and revise a qualified economic interpretation without giving financial advice.
Map feedback loops, externalities, bottlenecks, thresholds, path dependence, resilience, and unintended consequences.
Explain how one global system creates different local effects.

Religion Within Global Systems

22 competencies

Compare international human-rights, humanitarian, refugee, trade, environmental, maritime, and criminal-law frameworks descriptively.
Explain tensions among sovereignty, universal legal claims, nonintervention, enforcement, and institutional capacity.
Analyze states, markets, international organizations, firms, civil society, communities, households, and individuals as distinct actors.
Explain how transnational families and diaspora institutions maintain and transform identity.
Formulate an advanced comparative question about religion within a global system.
Analyze transnational religious networks through migration, pilgrimage, media, education, charity, finance, and institutions.
Evaluate religious-demography data through category definitions, survey design, self-identification, state classification, and missing data.
Explain how diaspora communities preserve and transform religious practice.
Analyze relationships among religion, state law, international law, human rights, and local custom.
Explain how religious institutions participate in humanitarian aid, education, health care, development, and welfare.
Analyze religion’s roles in conflict, nationalism, reconciliation, mediation, and peacebuilding.
Explain how religious and nonreligious actors address environmental stewardship and responsibility.
Analyze religious media, digital communities, broadcasting, publishing, and public representation.
Compare revival, secularization, conversion, pluralization, institutional decline, and institutional transformation.
Explain how pilgrimage, sacred geography, and heritage tourism connect local sites with global communities.
Compare official institutional teaching with lay, household, regional, reformist, dissenting, and secular practice.
Evaluate religious texts, statistics, institutional statements, testimony, art, law, and material evidence for different questions.
Compare religious and nonreligious frameworks without ranking truth, morality, or worth.
Construct an advanced comparative account of religion within a global system.
Apply ethical standards to sacred, restricted, traumatic, and living-community sources.
Distinguish descriptive historical analysis from theological or devotional judgment.
Defend and revise a qualified comparative-religion interpretation.

Independent Historical Research I — Question, Historiography, and Source Architecture

17 competencies

Formulate an independent, focused, significant, feasible, and ethically appropriate historical research question.
Define scope through time, place, actors, concepts, and source availability.
Produce a research proposal containing question, rationale, preliminary thesis, method, sources, schedule, and ethical considerations.
Conduct a bounded historiographical literature review.
Identify major interpretations, debates, methods, and evidentiary differences within the selected literature.
Select a primary-source corpus and justify its relationship to the research question.
Select secondary sources according to expertise, relevance, evidence, method, and scholarly contribution.
Evaluate provenance, context, genre, audience, purpose, transmission, translation, preservation, and access.
Identify source dependence, archival silence, unequal survival, missing voices, and institutional collection practices.
Develop an evidence-coding or annotation system appropriate to the inquiry.
Use chronology, comparison, spatial analysis, quantitative analysis, discourse analysis, or process tracing appropriately.
Distinguish evidence, inference, causal mechanism, interpretation, speculation, and unsupported assertion.
Construct and test rival explanations.
Explain uncertainty, incomplete evidence, numerical ranges, and translation limits.
Produce an annotated bibliography and research log.
State the project’s limitations, unresolved questions, and possible future research.
Apply ethical and academic-integrity standards throughout the research process.

Independent Historical Research II — Interpretation, Writing, and Defense

17 competencies

Represent uncertainty, disputed data, changing borders, and incomplete coverage honestly.
Defend a geographic conclusion while distinguishing evidence, interpretation, uncertainty, and value judgment.
Defend a cultural interpretation while acknowledging alternative explanations and limits.
Develop an evidence-coding or annotation system appropriate to the inquiry.
Distinguish evidence, inference, causal mechanism, interpretation, speculation, and unsupported assertion.
Construct and test rival explanations.
Use counterevidence to revise rather than merely defend a thesis.
Explain uncertainty, incomplete evidence, numerical ranges, and translation limits.
Construct an original interpretation grounded in the available evidence and historiography.
Organize a sustained historical argument with introduction, context, analytical sections, counterargument, and conclusion.
Cite all sources accurately using a consistent academic system.
Produce an annotated bibliography and research log.
Revise argument, structure, and evidence after peer and instructor critique.
Present the research orally using appropriate maps, evidence, quotations, data, and visual sources.
Defend the interpretation by responding directly to evidence-based questions and alternative explanations.
State the project’s limitations, unresolved questions, and possible future research.
Apply ethical and academic-integrity standards throughout the research process.

The Human Story I — First Cities, Empires, Belief, and Exchange

14 competencies

Construct an advanced comparative governance or legal-system analysis.
Analyze global value chains through ownership, intellectual property, production, logistics, labor, taxation, finance, sale, and disposal.
Explain how conclusions may change when the geographic scale or unit of analysis changes.
Map flows of goods, people, finance, information, energy, disease, or environmental effects through a global system.
Develop alternative spatial explanations for the same pattern.
Conduct a bounded historiographical literature review.
Use chronology, comparison, spatial analysis, quantitative analysis, discourse analysis, or process tracing appropriately.
Distinguish evidence, inference, causal mechanism, interpretation, speculation, and unsupported assertion.
Construct and test rival explanations.
Explain uncertainty, incomplete evidence, numerical ranges, and translation limits.
Construct an original interpretation grounded in the available evidence and historiography.
Defend the interpretation by responding directly to evidence-based questions and alternative explanations.
Analyze transnational religious networks through migration, pilgrimage, media, education, charity, finance, and institutions.
Compare religious and nonreligious frameworks without ranking truth, morality, or worth.

The Human Story II — Global Integration, Revolution, Industry, War, and Decolonization

18 competencies

Compare international human-rights, humanitarian, refugee, trade, environmental, maritime, and criminal-law frameworks descriptively.
Compare procedural, retributive, restorative, distributive, and transitional justice within complex cases.
Construct an advanced comparative governance or legal-system analysis.
Compare productivity, structural transformation, human capital, infrastructure, institutional quality, and technology as development factors.
Construct an advanced global economic-system model.
Map flows of goods, people, finance, information, energy, disease, or environmental effects through a global system.
Define a contemporary issue as a bounded system containing actors, institutions, resources, rules, flows, incentives, values, and outcomes.
Identify local, national, regional, transregional, and global scales within one issue.
Map feedback loops, externalities, bottlenecks, thresholds, path dependence, resilience, and unintended consequences.
Compare cultural standardization, hybridization, revival, commercialization, appropriation, resistance, and localization.
Explain how language, law, citizenship, education, class, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and generation shape cultural access and recognition.
Use chronology, comparison, spatial analysis, quantitative analysis, discourse analysis, or process tracing appropriately.
Construct and test rival explanations.
Explain uncertainty, incomplete evidence, numerical ranges, and translation limits.
Construct an original interpretation grounded in the available evidence and historiography.
Organize a sustained historical argument with introduction, context, analytical sections, counterargument, and conclusion.
Defend the interpretation by responding directly to evidence-based questions and alternative explanations.
Apply ethical and academic-integrity standards throughout the research process.

Global Citizenship Capstone — Contemporary Systems and Independent Reasoning

25 competencies

Define a contemporary issue as a bounded system containing actors, institutions, resources, rules, flows, incentives, values, and outcomes.
Distinguish descriptive, causal, predictive, legal, institutional, and normative questions.
Identify local, national, regional, transregional, and global scales within one issue.
Map feedback loops, externalities, bottlenecks, thresholds, path dependence, resilience, and unintended consequences.
Analyze states, markets, international organizations, firms, civil society, communities, households, and individuals as distinct actors.
Identify stakeholder interests, capacities, legal authority, knowledge, risks, and constraints.
Evaluate quantitative indicators, projections, models, maps, case studies, testimony, and historical analogies.
Distinguish factual disagreement, causal disagreement, value disagreement, institutional disagreement, and predictive uncertainty.
Present competing positions in terms their informed supporters would recognize as accurate.
Identify internal disagreement within each major position.
Evaluate policy or institutional proposals through objectives, mechanisms, resources, legality, implementation, distribution, risk, and uncertainty.
Develop several evidence-based scenarios without claiming certainty.
Explain how one global system creates different local effects.
Construct an advanced global-system map.
Form an independent reasoned position grounded in evidence and declared values.
Address the strongest counterargument to the student’s position.
Revise a position when evidence or reasoning requires change.
Communicate disagreement accurately, respectfully, and without false equivalence.
Distinguish informed reasoning from activism, campaigning, and personal identity disclosure.
Complete a capstone defense demonstrating informed independent judgment rather than a curriculum-prescribed verdict.
Formulate an independent, focused, significant, feasible, and ethically appropriate historical research question.
Present the research orally using appropriate maps, evidence, quotations, data, and visual sources.
Defend the interpretation by responding directly to evidence-based questions and alternative explanations.
State the project’s limitations, unresolved questions, and possible future research.
Apply ethical and academic-integrity standards throughout the research process.

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Start Grade 12 World Studies tonight.

Free to download at launch, on the App Store and Google Play.

The whole year, lesson by lesson.

Textbook 1Advanced Geographic Analysis and Mapping Global Systems

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Spatial Questions, Scale, and Geographic Evidence

Chapter 2

Map Forms, Representation, and Uncertainty

Chapter 3

Mapping Global Networks and Unequal Effects

Chapter 4

Independent Global-System Mapping Project

Textbook 2Culture Within Global Systems

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Cultural Production, Transmission, and Mediation

Chapter 2

Cultural Power, Representation, and Authenticity Claims

Chapter 3

Migration, Diaspora, Heritage, and Public Memory

Chapter 4

Independent Comparative Cultural Analysis

Textbook 3Global Governance, Political Systems, Law, and Justice

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Global Governance and Multilevel Authority

Chapter 2

Institutional Design, Legitimacy, and Accountability

Chapter 3

Global Law, Rights, and Justice

Chapter 4

Comparative Governance Analysis and Defense

Textbook 4Advanced Global Economics and Development

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

National Economies, Indicators, and Macroeconomic Relationships

Chapter 2

Trade, Exchange Rates, Finance, and Systemic Risk

Chapter 3

Global Value Chains, Technology, and Development

Chapter 4

Inequality, Externalities, Policy Frameworks, and Economic Defense

Textbook 5Religion Within Global Systems

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Transnational Religion, Migration, and Sacred Geography

Chapter 2

Religion, Law, Governance, and Human Rights

Chapter 3

Religion, Development, Environment, Conflict, and Peace

Chapter 4

Advanced Comparative Religion Research and Defense

Textbook 6Independent Historical Research I — Question, Historiography, and Source Architecture

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

From Topic to Researchable Historical Question

Chapter 2

Historiographical Literature Review

Chapter 3

Designing the Primary-Source Corpus

Chapter 4

Method, Ethics, and Research Architecture

Textbook 7Independent Historical Research II — Interpretation, Writing, and Defense

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Evidence Analysis and Thesis Development

Chapter 2

Writing the Independent Historical Study

Chapter 3

Peer Review, Revision, and Research Communication

Chapter 4

Oral Defense and Final Research Portfolio

Textbook 8The Human Story I — First Cities, Empires, Belief, and Exchange

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

From Farming Communities to Cities and States

Chapter 2

Classical Empires, Political Thought, and Universal Traditions

Chapter 3

Post-Classical Networks, Cities, and Institutional Change

Chapter 4

Long-Run Patterns and Turning Points Before 1500

Textbook 9The Human Story II — Global Integration, Revolution, Industry, War, and Decolonization

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Oceanic Connection, Empire, and the Early Global World

Chapter 2

Revolutions, Industrialization, Nationalism, and Imperialism

Chapter 3

World Wars, Genocide, Decolonization, and International Order

Chapter 4

Cold War, Globalization, Digital Systems, and the Contemporary World

Textbook 10Global Citizenship Capstone — Contemporary Systems and Independent Reasoning

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Define the Contemporary System

Chapter 2

Evidence, Frameworks, and System Mapping

Chapter 3

Scenarios, Independent Position, and Counterargument

Chapter 4

Capstone Presentation, Defense, and Graduate Synthesis

Every competency, covered.

The 137 competencies set for Grade 12 World Studies, and every one has lessons behind it.

Advanced Geographic Analysis and Mapping Global Systems

23 competencies

Formulate a geographic research question with a defined place, scale, timeframe, system, and evidence requirement.
Distinguish node, route, corridor, territory, region, network, flow, boundary, hub, periphery, and system.
Select an appropriate local, national, regional, transregional, or global scale for a geographic question.
Explain how conclusions may change when the geographic scale or unit of analysis changes.
Evaluate map projection, classification, normalization, aggregation, color, symbols, labels, and missing data.
Interpret flow maps, network maps, choropleth maps, cartograms, proportional-symbol maps, accessibility maps, and vulnerability maps.
Combine physical, political, demographic, economic, cultural, infrastructural, and environmental evidence in one spatial analysis.
Explain the difference between spatial correlation and geographic causation.
Identify scale effects, ecological fallacy, boundary effects, and misleading averages at an introductory level.
Map flows of goods, people, finance, information, energy, disease, or environmental effects through a global system.
Analyze the geographic distribution of system benefits, burdens, risks, and vulnerabilities.
Explain how infrastructure, institutions, technology, and political authority reshape geographic relationships.
Develop alternative spatial explanations for the same pattern.
Represent uncertainty, disputed data, changing borders, and incomplete coverage honestly.
Construct an independent global-system map with clear data sources, design choices, limitations, and interpretation.
Critique a geographic argument and revise it in response to evidence.
Apply ethical standards when mapping vulnerable populations, sacred sites, disputed territories, or sensitive infrastructure.
Defend a geographic conclusion while distinguishing evidence, interpretation, uncertainty, and value judgment.
Map feedback loops, externalities, bottlenecks, thresholds, path dependence, resilience, and unintended consequences.
Explain how one global system creates different local effects.
Construct an advanced global-system map.
Define scope through time, place, actors, concepts, and source availability.
Revise argument, structure, and evidence after peer and instructor critique.

Culture Within Global Systems

20 competencies

Formulate an advanced cultural question focused on institutions, power, transmission, change, or global connection.
Analyze cultural production, transmission, interpretation, consumption, and adaptation as distinct processes.
Explain how states, markets, schools, religions, media industries, tourism, migration networks, and digital platforms shape cultural circulation.
Analyze cultural power through visibility, prestige, official recognition, commercial reach, access, and representation.
Explain how translators, interpreters, educators, artists, merchants, migrants, religious leaders, and digital creators mediate culture.
Compare cultural standardization, hybridization, revival, commercialization, appropriation, resistance, and localization.
Evaluate authenticity claims as historically and politically situated arguments.
Analyze how cultural systems operate differently at local, national, diasporic, regional, and global scales.
Explain how language, law, citizenship, education, class, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and generation shape cultural access and recognition.
Compare cultural-policy approaches including official language, heritage protection, museum practice, educational curriculum, censorship, and cultural funding descriptively.
Analyze public memory through monuments, museums, commemorations, heritage sites, textbooks, archives, film, and digital media.
Explain how transnational families and diaspora institutions maintain and transform identity.
Evaluate cultural data, surveys, media samples, oral histories, and institutional records for scope and bias.
Construct a comparative analysis of culture within a global system.
Represent internal disagreement and diversity within every cultural community studied.
Apply ethical standards to cultural research involving living communities.
Defend a cultural interpretation while acknowledging alternative explanations and limits.
Identify source dependence, archival silence, unequal survival, missing voices, and institutional collection practices.
Construct and test rival explanations.
Revise argument, structure, and evidence after peer and instructor critique.

Global Governance, Political Systems, Law, and Justice

21 competencies

Explain global governance as coordinated rule-making, administration, cooperation, and dispute management beyond a single government.
Distinguish domestic, regional, international, transnational, municipal, corporate, customary, and civil-society authority.
Explain multilevel governance and the allocation of authority across institutions and scales.
Analyze sovereignty, jurisdiction, delegation, subsidiarity, compliance, and enforcement.
Compare intergovernmental, supranational, treaty-based, networked, private, and hybrid governance arrangements.
Analyze institutional legitimacy through consent, legality, expertise, representation, performance, transparency, and accountability.
Compare majority voting, weighted voting, veto, unanimity, consensus, delegation, and judicial resolution as decision rules.
Explain collective-action and free-rider problems in global governance.
Analyze the roles of states, international organizations, courts, firms, nongovernmental organizations, communities, and expert bodies.
Compare constitutional structures through executive authority, legislature, judiciary, territorial power, rights, amendment, and emergency procedure.
Analyze judicial review, administrative oversight, legislative scrutiny, audit, election, media, and civil society as accountability mechanisms.
Compare international human-rights, humanitarian, refugee, trade, environmental, maritime, and criminal-law frameworks descriptively.
Explain tensions among sovereignty, universal legal claims, nonintervention, enforcement, and institutional capacity.
Compare procedural, retributive, restorative, distributive, and transitional justice within complex cases.
Evaluate institutional performance through stated mandate, legal authority, resources, compliance, outcomes, and unintended effects.
Distinguish institutional reform from political advocacy.
Construct an advanced comparative governance or legal-system analysis.
Present competing institutional-reform arguments accurately without prescribing one.
Reach and defend a qualified institutional judgment based on declared criteria.
Revise a governance analysis after receiving evidence-based criticism.
Distinguish evidence, inference, causal mechanism, interpretation, speculation, and unsupported assertion.

Advanced Global Economics and Development

22 competencies

Explain gross domestic product, productivity, inflation, unemployment, interest rates, exchange rates, and public debt conceptually.
Explain the difference among nominal, real, total, and per-capita economic measures.
Evaluate the limitations of national averages and economic indicators.
Explain fiscal policy through taxation, expenditure, borrowing, and budget balance at a conceptual level.
Explain monetary policy through money, credit conditions, interest rates, inflation, and central-bank institutions at a conceptual level.
Explain business cycles, recession, recovery, and economic shocks without forecasting.
Analyze international trade through specialization, comparative advantage, market access, strategic dependence, and distributional effects.
Explain tariffs, quotas, subsidies, standards, trade agreements, and sanctions as economic-policy instruments.
Explain exchange rates, current-account transactions, capital flows, and balance-of-payments relationships at an introductory level.
Explain banking, bond finance, equity finance, sovereign debt, and international financial institutions descriptively.
Explain financial contagion, liquidity problems, solvency problems, leverage, and systemic risk at an introductory level.
Analyze global value chains through ownership, intellectual property, production, logistics, labor, taxation, finance, sale, and disposal.
Explain platform economies, digital services, data, automation, and network effects descriptively.
Compare productivity, structural transformation, human capital, infrastructure, institutional quality, and technology as development factors.
Analyze poverty, inequality, informality, regional disparity, and access to public services using several indicators.
Explain externalities, public goods, common resources, monopoly power, and information problems in global systems.
Compare fiscal, monetary, industrial, trade, welfare, labor, and regulatory frameworks neutrally.
Evaluate claims about economic policy through evidence, assumptions, time horizon, distribution, institutions, and uncertainty.
Construct an advanced global economic-system model.
Defend and revise a qualified economic interpretation without giving financial advice.
Map feedback loops, externalities, bottlenecks, thresholds, path dependence, resilience, and unintended consequences.
Explain how one global system creates different local effects.

Religion Within Global Systems

22 competencies

Compare international human-rights, humanitarian, refugee, trade, environmental, maritime, and criminal-law frameworks descriptively.
Explain tensions among sovereignty, universal legal claims, nonintervention, enforcement, and institutional capacity.
Analyze states, markets, international organizations, firms, civil society, communities, households, and individuals as distinct actors.
Explain how transnational families and diaspora institutions maintain and transform identity.
Formulate an advanced comparative question about religion within a global system.
Analyze transnational religious networks through migration, pilgrimage, media, education, charity, finance, and institutions.
Evaluate religious-demography data through category definitions, survey design, self-identification, state classification, and missing data.
Explain how diaspora communities preserve and transform religious practice.
Analyze relationships among religion, state law, international law, human rights, and local custom.
Explain how religious institutions participate in humanitarian aid, education, health care, development, and welfare.
Analyze religion’s roles in conflict, nationalism, reconciliation, mediation, and peacebuilding.
Explain how religious and nonreligious actors address environmental stewardship and responsibility.
Analyze religious media, digital communities, broadcasting, publishing, and public representation.
Compare revival, secularization, conversion, pluralization, institutional decline, and institutional transformation.
Explain how pilgrimage, sacred geography, and heritage tourism connect local sites with global communities.
Compare official institutional teaching with lay, household, regional, reformist, dissenting, and secular practice.
Evaluate religious texts, statistics, institutional statements, testimony, art, law, and material evidence for different questions.
Compare religious and nonreligious frameworks without ranking truth, morality, or worth.
Construct an advanced comparative account of religion within a global system.
Apply ethical standards to sacred, restricted, traumatic, and living-community sources.
Distinguish descriptive historical analysis from theological or devotional judgment.
Defend and revise a qualified comparative-religion interpretation.

Independent Historical Research I — Question, Historiography, and Source Architecture

17 competencies

Formulate an independent, focused, significant, feasible, and ethically appropriate historical research question.
Define scope through time, place, actors, concepts, and source availability.
Produce a research proposal containing question, rationale, preliminary thesis, method, sources, schedule, and ethical considerations.
Conduct a bounded historiographical literature review.
Identify major interpretations, debates, methods, and evidentiary differences within the selected literature.
Select a primary-source corpus and justify its relationship to the research question.
Select secondary sources according to expertise, relevance, evidence, method, and scholarly contribution.
Evaluate provenance, context, genre, audience, purpose, transmission, translation, preservation, and access.
Identify source dependence, archival silence, unequal survival, missing voices, and institutional collection practices.
Develop an evidence-coding or annotation system appropriate to the inquiry.
Use chronology, comparison, spatial analysis, quantitative analysis, discourse analysis, or process tracing appropriately.
Distinguish evidence, inference, causal mechanism, interpretation, speculation, and unsupported assertion.
Construct and test rival explanations.
Explain uncertainty, incomplete evidence, numerical ranges, and translation limits.
Produce an annotated bibliography and research log.
State the project’s limitations, unresolved questions, and possible future research.
Apply ethical and academic-integrity standards throughout the research process.

Independent Historical Research II — Interpretation, Writing, and Defense

17 competencies

Represent uncertainty, disputed data, changing borders, and incomplete coverage honestly.
Defend a geographic conclusion while distinguishing evidence, interpretation, uncertainty, and value judgment.
Defend a cultural interpretation while acknowledging alternative explanations and limits.
Develop an evidence-coding or annotation system appropriate to the inquiry.
Distinguish evidence, inference, causal mechanism, interpretation, speculation, and unsupported assertion.
Construct and test rival explanations.
Use counterevidence to revise rather than merely defend a thesis.
Explain uncertainty, incomplete evidence, numerical ranges, and translation limits.
Construct an original interpretation grounded in the available evidence and historiography.
Organize a sustained historical argument with introduction, context, analytical sections, counterargument, and conclusion.
Cite all sources accurately using a consistent academic system.
Produce an annotated bibliography and research log.
Revise argument, structure, and evidence after peer and instructor critique.
Present the research orally using appropriate maps, evidence, quotations, data, and visual sources.
Defend the interpretation by responding directly to evidence-based questions and alternative explanations.
State the project’s limitations, unresolved questions, and possible future research.
Apply ethical and academic-integrity standards throughout the research process.

The Human Story I — First Cities, Empires, Belief, and Exchange

14 competencies

Construct an advanced comparative governance or legal-system analysis.
Analyze global value chains through ownership, intellectual property, production, logistics, labor, taxation, finance, sale, and disposal.
Explain how conclusions may change when the geographic scale or unit of analysis changes.
Map flows of goods, people, finance, information, energy, disease, or environmental effects through a global system.
Develop alternative spatial explanations for the same pattern.
Conduct a bounded historiographical literature review.
Use chronology, comparison, spatial analysis, quantitative analysis, discourse analysis, or process tracing appropriately.
Distinguish evidence, inference, causal mechanism, interpretation, speculation, and unsupported assertion.
Construct and test rival explanations.
Explain uncertainty, incomplete evidence, numerical ranges, and translation limits.
Construct an original interpretation grounded in the available evidence and historiography.
Defend the interpretation by responding directly to evidence-based questions and alternative explanations.
Analyze transnational religious networks through migration, pilgrimage, media, education, charity, finance, and institutions.
Compare religious and nonreligious frameworks without ranking truth, morality, or worth.

The Human Story II — Global Integration, Revolution, Industry, War, and Decolonization

18 competencies

Compare international human-rights, humanitarian, refugee, trade, environmental, maritime, and criminal-law frameworks descriptively.
Compare procedural, retributive, restorative, distributive, and transitional justice within complex cases.
Construct an advanced comparative governance or legal-system analysis.
Compare productivity, structural transformation, human capital, infrastructure, institutional quality, and technology as development factors.
Construct an advanced global economic-system model.
Map flows of goods, people, finance, information, energy, disease, or environmental effects through a global system.
Define a contemporary issue as a bounded system containing actors, institutions, resources, rules, flows, incentives, values, and outcomes.
Identify local, national, regional, transregional, and global scales within one issue.
Map feedback loops, externalities, bottlenecks, thresholds, path dependence, resilience, and unintended consequences.
Compare cultural standardization, hybridization, revival, commercialization, appropriation, resistance, and localization.
Explain how language, law, citizenship, education, class, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and generation shape cultural access and recognition.
Use chronology, comparison, spatial analysis, quantitative analysis, discourse analysis, or process tracing appropriately.
Construct and test rival explanations.
Explain uncertainty, incomplete evidence, numerical ranges, and translation limits.
Construct an original interpretation grounded in the available evidence and historiography.
Organize a sustained historical argument with introduction, context, analytical sections, counterargument, and conclusion.
Defend the interpretation by responding directly to evidence-based questions and alternative explanations.
Apply ethical and academic-integrity standards throughout the research process.

Global Citizenship Capstone — Contemporary Systems and Independent Reasoning

25 competencies

Define a contemporary issue as a bounded system containing actors, institutions, resources, rules, flows, incentives, values, and outcomes.
Distinguish descriptive, causal, predictive, legal, institutional, and normative questions.
Identify local, national, regional, transregional, and global scales within one issue.
Map feedback loops, externalities, bottlenecks, thresholds, path dependence, resilience, and unintended consequences.
Analyze states, markets, international organizations, firms, civil society, communities, households, and individuals as distinct actors.
Identify stakeholder interests, capacities, legal authority, knowledge, risks, and constraints.
Evaluate quantitative indicators, projections, models, maps, case studies, testimony, and historical analogies.
Distinguish factual disagreement, causal disagreement, value disagreement, institutional disagreement, and predictive uncertainty.
Present competing positions in terms their informed supporters would recognize as accurate.
Identify internal disagreement within each major position.
Evaluate policy or institutional proposals through objectives, mechanisms, resources, legality, implementation, distribution, risk, and uncertainty.
Develop several evidence-based scenarios without claiming certainty.
Explain how one global system creates different local effects.
Construct an advanced global-system map.
Form an independent reasoned position grounded in evidence and declared values.
Address the strongest counterargument to the student’s position.
Revise a position when evidence or reasoning requires change.
Communicate disagreement accurately, respectfully, and without false equivalence.
Distinguish informed reasoning from activism, campaigning, and personal identity disclosure.
Complete a capstone defense demonstrating informed independent judgment rather than a curriculum-prescribed verdict.
Formulate an independent, focused, significant, feasible, and ethically appropriate historical research question.
Present the research orally using appropriate maps, evidence, quotations, data, and visual sources.
Defend the interpretation by responding directly to evidence-based questions and alternative explanations.
State the project’s limitations, unresolved questions, and possible future research.
Apply ethical and academic-integrity standards throughout the research process.