Course Structure
Big history is a true history course. It weaves concepts and themes from chemistry, physics and biology, to help students understand a historical narrative and ultimately human civilizations past, present and future. Collectively, this prepares students to address many challenging contemporary issues.
Course units
Big history is broken down into three parts across ten teaching units, bringing together the insights, methods and skills of academic disciplines that are normally taught in isolation from each other.
Each of the ten units is cast around an investigation, a single question to contextualize the study in that unit. Content has been designed to aid student exploration while calling on the student to devise the actual answer. In parallel, the content unveils the historical narrative, tying events, evolution and discovery into eight thresholds at which complexity increases dramatically, fueling further development and complexity. This interconnection between the narrative and investigation is designed to promote literacy across disciplines and content types - two key elements of the Common Core standards.
Take a peek at the structure of the course:
