ABSTRACT
The Big History Project (BHP) has been more than a curriculum in big history. It has been a design experiment in teaching and learning. 1 In addition to providing a course in big history for thousands of schools and hundreds of thousands of students around the world, the BHP team 2 used research and theory to engineer, study, and revise forms of learning to help meet some enduring challenges that history teachers and students face in “doing” the teaching and learning of history. While embracing BHP’s central goal of teaching effectively a modern origin story that, as David Christian explained, students will “understand the challenges that face us and the opportunities that face us…[so] big history will become a vital intellectual tool”, the project team recognized the chance to do even more. 3 In creating a syllabus to teach Christian’s elegant narrative of increasing complexity, 4 we also seized the opportunity to engineer a syllabus that could increase the complexity by which students could engage in disciplinary thinking. 5 More specifically, the BHP design team used theory and research on thinking and learning to improve the way students could read historical and scientific sources, write evidence-based arguments, reason about causation, and use concepts drawn from multiple disciplines while learning the big history story and its concepts.
