Teaching Big History - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520283546 ISBN 13: 9780520283541

Verlag: University of California Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Big History is a new field on a grand scale: it tells the story of the universe over time through a diverse range of disciplines that spans cosmology, physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, and archaeology, thereby reconciling traditional human history with environmental geography and natural history.

Weaving the myriad threads of evidence-based human knowledge into a master narrative that stretches from the beginning of the universe to the present, the Big History framework helps students make sense of their studies in all disciplines by illuminating the structures that underlie the universe and the connections among them.

Teaching Big History is a powerful analytic and pedagogical resource, and serves as a comprehensive guide for teaching Big History, as well for sharing ideas about the subject and planning a curriculum around it. Readers are also given helpful advice about the administrative and organizational challenges of instituting a general education program constructed around Big History. The book includes teaching materials, examples, and detailed sample exercises.

This book is also an engaging first-hand account of how a group of professors built an entire Big History general education curriculum for first-year students, demonstrating how this thoughtful integration of disciplines exemplifies liberal education at its best and illustrating how teaching and learning this incredible story can be transformative for professors and students alike.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Richard B. Simon is Adjunct Professor of English at Dominican University of California, instructor of English at City College of San Francisco, and Contributing Editor at Relix magazine.

Mojgan Behmand is Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at Dominican University of California. She is also Associate Professor of English and former Director of General Education and First Year Experience.

Thomas Burke is Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Dominican University of California.

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"Under Mojgan Behmand’s inspired leadership this large cohort of Dominican teachers have been at the forefront of designing and teaching innovative Big History courses for younger undergraduate university students. I know of no other Big History teachers who have thought about pedagogy and assessment in this field as systematically and rigorously as Behmand, et al."—Craig Benjamin, author of Big History: Between Nothing and Everything

"This book offers a great many illuminating insights into the practice of big history teaching and is an excellent, indispensable resource for all teachers of the thresholds' approach to big history."—Fred Spier, author of Big History and the Future of Humanity

"Rich, diverse and engaging, this is THE book for teachers new to Big History. Teachers at Dominican University tell what they learnt over four years as they collaborated to develop the world’s first foundation program in Big History." —David Christian, author of Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, and Director of the Big History Institute, Macquarie University, Sydney

"In the twenty-second century, when Big History is taught in every university around our planet, future scholars of intellectual history detailing the rise of this new vision will begin their story with the faculty at Dominican University. Teaching Big History is both the story of their pedagogical creativity and a how-to handbook filled with their distilled wisdom. For anyone interested in joining this major revolution in education, there is no better guide than their carefully crafted and deeply inspiring book."—Brian Thomas Swimme, coauthor ofThe Journey of the Universe

Aus dem Klappentext

"Under Mojgan Behmand s inspired leadership this large cohort of Dominican teachers have been at the forefront of designing and teaching innovative Big History courses for younger undergraduate university students. I know of no other Big History teachers who have thought about pedagogy and assessment in this field as systematically and rigorously as Behmand, et al." Craig Benjamin, author of Big History: Between Nothing and Everything

"This book offers a great many illuminating insights into the practice of big history teaching and is an excellent, indispensable resource for all teachers of the thresholds' approach to big history." Fred Spier, author of Big History and the Future of Humanity

"Rich, diverse and engaging, this is THE book for teachers new to Big History. Teachers at Dominican University tell what they learnt over four years as they collaborated to develop the world s first foundation program in Big History." David Christian, author of Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, and Director of the Big History Institute, Macquarie University, Sydney

"In the twenty-second century, when Big History is taught in every university around our planet, future scholars of intellectual history detailing the rise of this new vision will begin their story with the faculty at Dominican University. Teaching Big History is both the story of their pedagogical creativity and a how-to handbook filled with their distilled wisdom. For anyone interested in joining this major revolution in education, there is no better guide than their carefully crafted and deeply inspiring book." Brian Thomas Swimme, coauthor ofThe Journey of the Universe

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Teaching Big History

By Richard B. Simon, Mojgan Behmand, Thomas Burke

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-28354-1

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
List of Tables, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
PART ONE:THE CASE FOR BIG HISTORY, 
1. What Is Big History? Richard B. Simon, 
2. Big History and the Goals of Liberal Education Mojgan Behmand, 
3. Summer Institutes: Collective Learning as Meta-Education Thomas Burke, 
4. Assessing Big History Outcomes: Or, How to Make Assessment Inspiring Mojgan Behmand, 
5. Big History at Other Institutions Mojgan Behmand, Esther Quaedackers, and Seohyung Kim, 
PART TWO:A PRACTICAL PEDAGOGY FOR TEACHING BIG HISTORY, 
6. Teaching Complexity in a Big History Context Richard B. Simon, 
7. Teaching Threshold 1: The Big Bang Richard B. Simon, 
8. Teaching Threshold 2: The Formation of Stars and Galaxies Kiowa Bower, 
9. Teaching Threshold 3: Heavier Chemical Elements and the Life Cycle of Stars Richard B. Simon, 
10. Teaching Threshold 4: The Formation of Our Solar System and Earth Neal Wolfe, 
11. Teaching Threshold 5: The Evolution of Life on Earth James Cunningham, 
12. Teaching Threshold 6: The Rise of Homo sapiens Cynthia Taylor, 
13. Teaching Threshold 7: The Agrarian Revolution Martin Anderson, 
14. Teaching Threshold 8: Modernity and Industrialization Richard B. Simon, 
15. Threshold 9? Teaching Possible Futures Richard B. Simon, Martin Anderson, J. Daniel May, Neal Wolfe, Kiowa Bower, Philip Novak, and Debbie Daunt, 
16. Reflective Writing in the Big History Classroom Jaime Castner, 
17. Activities for Multiple Thresholds, 
18. Igniting Critical Curiosity: Fostering Information Literacy through Big History Ethan Annis, Amy Gilbert, Anne Reid, Suzanne Roybal, and Alan Schut, 
19. A Little Big History of Big History Cynthia Stokes Brown, 
PART THREE:BIG HISTORY AND ITS IMPLICATIONS, 
20. Big History at Dominican: An Origin Story Philip Novak, 
21. Teaching Big History or Teaching about Big History? Big History and Religion Harlan Stelmach, 
22. The Case for Awe Neal Wolfe, 
Conclusion, 
Annotated Bibliography of Big History Texts and Resources, 
List of Contributors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

What Is Big History?

RICHARD B. SIMON

On my first day as a college undergraduate, I walked into my freshman seminar, "The Gaia Hypothesis," a course on James Lovelock's groundbreaking theory that the biosphere, all life, interacts with all of Earth's systems—climate, oceans, and the rocks themselves—in ways that maintain temperature and chemical homeostasis on Earth. The course changed my understanding of how the Earth works, and of how everything works. It was disruptive, and transformative, and it framed the rest of my education so that when I studied astronomy, paleontology, sociology, climate science—and even literature—it all seemed to fit together, to make sense, in ways that were profound. It made me want not only to make art about big ideas, but to teach others how to make art about big ideas.

So, when the committee revising Dominican's first-year program asked me whether I could see how Big History might work as the core of a new curriculum, my answer was an enthusiastic "yes!"

Well, first I had to look up what, exactly, Big History was.

Then I said "yes."

WHAT IS BIG HISTORY?

Big History uses humanities-based storytelling to span cosmology, physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, archaeology, and a traditional human history that has been reconciled with natural history and environmental geography. Its aim is to weave the vast realm of evidence-based human knowledge into a master narrative that tells the story of human beings on Earth, from the beginning of the universe to the present.

Big Historians seek to place the wealth of human knowledge into a framework that allows us to see patterns that repeat on various levels of reality, from the subatomic to the political to the macrocosmic, and to seek the relationships among those levels of reality. Ultimately, the goal is to try to understand the nature of the universe, and our place in it.

Because the Big History framework illuminates the structures that underlie the universe, it is a powerful analytic tool. Because its structure binds together content from all human disciplines, it is a powerful pedagogical tool. Finally, because the structure of the Big History narrative parallels the structures of the physical universe, even as it tells the story of those structures, Big History is at once narrative and meta-narrative. All this makes Big History an intuitive vehicle for critical thinking, and for rich, innovative intellectual exploration within students' and teachers' home disciplines, as well as within Big History itself.

Perhaps most importantly, a Big History understanding, in reframing all of human knowledge in a way that makes intuitive, logical sense, prepares us to consider possible futures, premised on the patterns we see in the past, and empowers us intellectually to act to shape the future.

BIG HISTORY AS HISTORY

Thinkers from disciplines other than history are telling versions of this story, too. These thinkers include cosmologists, biologists, geologists, astrophysicists, theologians, and more. Some approaches are more academically rigorous than others. While the name "Big History" connotes the attempt by academic historians to frame the story of the universe as history, it has also become shorthand for all the versions of this story (for a meta-narrative history of the field and some discussion of its various threads, see chapter 19, Cynthia Stokes Brown's "A Little Big History of Big History").

What is remarkable about Big History as history is that, traditionally, the field of history privileges primary sources—firsthand accounts of events. But while surviving firsthand accounts might offer us a snapshot of roughly the last five thousand years, our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, has existed for two hundred thousand years. That means that 97.5 percent of the history of humans has been off-limits to human historians!

Instead, the study of our species in those years—the Paleolithic or Stone Age—has been termed "prehistory," considered the realm of archaeologists, anthropologists, and paleontologists, and kept academically separate from "recorded history."

For scale, if in 2014, we were to write an analogous account of the history of the United States of America, we might begin at the inauguration of President Barack Obama. We would not only maintain that nothing that happened before January 20, 2009, counts as American history (perhaps because it had not been broadcast via digital social networks); we would also assume that nothing that happened before that date bears any relevant causal relationship to the events that have occurred since.

Of course, that's absurd. Yet our academic disciplines have long worked in isolation from one another, even as they are writing different chapters of the same story. We've been like the five blind men who find something in the forest and argue over whether it is a snake, a worm, a giant bat, a tree trunk, or the side of a barn, never understanding that, together, they have found an elephant.

Big Historians posit that because human knowledge has...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520283546
• ISBN 13: 9780520283541
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 442
• Herausgeber: Behmand Mojgan, Simon Richard B., Burke Thomas
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland