Behmand Mojgan - Teaching big history

Six college professors and a librarian sat around a big oak table. At one side of the room, large picture windows opened onto a curated landscape of green lawn, gardens, and trees from around the world. On the rooms blue walls was painted a mural of the fox hunthorses and rifle-toting riders leaping fenceswith subtle religious subtexts. The room had been a dining room in the redwood mansion that now housed a dormitory and classroom space. The gathered faculty had been tasked with developing, after two years of attempts and failures, a new general education curriculum for first-year students at their university. They were at an inflection point: a decision had to be made.

The question was whether to use Big Historyin some fields it was called the Epic of Evolution, in others the New Storya meta-narrative that unified the sum of human knowledge in all disciplines, as the core of the general education program, a requirement for all students. Some of the faculty members were pushing for Big History as a radical rethinking of what a general education meant. Some were pragmatically resistant. The approach on the table was so fundamentally interdisciplinary that those who were to teach it would need to effectively go back to school themselves to master content from far outside their fields of expertise. Some members of the committee were certain that faculty would not go for it. Others felt that this was just the sort of challenge that professional intellectuals wouldand shouldrelish: a challenge to learn, to grow, to incorporate new knowledge and understanding.

The mood in the room was electric with possibility. The opportunity not only to revise a curriculum but to innovate in ways that completely re-envision what a basic education should mean doesnt come around often. Considering this, the faculty asked: can this work? And they set about to answer that question by modeling a new curriculum that would reframe students entire experience at the university, the whole of their education, and their understanding of the world and how it works.

One year later, in the fall of 2010, Dominican University of California began teaching Big History to all first-year students: first, in a semester-long survey of the history of the universe, our solar system, Earth, life, and humans; and second, in a more focused examination of that story through the lens of a particular discipline.