Download Submitting information to the UC regarding your intention to teach

Submitting information to the UC regarding your intention to teach Big History
Once your course plan has been submitting and approved, you need to notify the UC that you are
planning to teach a previously approved course. To find the necessary form, go to the following link:
http://www.ucop.edu/agguide/updating-your-course-list/submitting-courses/previouslyapproved/index.html
Here is some text that should be helpful in completing your application.
Course Title:
Big History Project World History (BHP-WH)
Brief Course Description:
Big History Project’s World History (BHP-WH) is a course that places the human past within the largest
context possible. It investigates the history of humanity, crossing all scales of time and space, from the
cosmic to the personal. The first quarter of the course focuses on our changing understanding of the
Universe and the Solar System, and sets the stage for the study of change in human cultures, societies,
networks of exchanges, and collective learning. Students will investigate how life changed as humans
moved from foraging to agrarian societies, and then up to modern society, using the past to understand
the present and to think about the future.
Pre-Requisites:
None
Co-Requisites:
None
Context for Course (optional):
BHP World History is a unique world history course in that it starts billions of years before most world
history courses begin, focusing initially on the intellectual history of our changing ideas about the
Universe, Solar System, Earth, and life. In addition to drawing its central concepts from social sciences
such as geography, economics, sociology, anthropology and political science – as do most history classes
– this course also draws upon ideas taken from biology, chemistry, physics, geography, and Earth
science. Thus, BHP World History offers students a historical study of Homo sapiens’ interaction with
each other and the environment, while also providing a coherent introduction to a number of ideas and
concepts taken from multiple disciplines.
In using ideas from other disciplines and extending its scale of inquiry, BHP-WH fits within the
discipline’s long tradition as an integrated field of study. It was not long ago that history departments
argued that world history was not a field of history because no one could master all world languages in
order to do research in native tongues. Yet today, most professional historians recognize the value that
world history has brought to the study of the past. Through world history, broader perspectives and new
forms of evidence have deepened and sharpened our understanding of historical processes, themes,
and patterns—revealing macro-relationships that cannot be seen with the close-up lens of more narrow
fields of history. BHP-WH embraces that perspective.
The course design team also recognized the potential this course offers teachers to engage their
students in the multidisciplinary reading, writing, and research practices called for in the Common Core
Literacy Standards, the 21st Century Standards, and the College Readiness Standards. So, during the first
year of our course pilot program, we added text-based investigations and a research project—the Little
Big History project—to provide students structured opportunities to frame researchable questions,
manage a range of multidisciplinary informational texts, and create evidence-based explanations or
arguments.
Finally, as the resources and materials live online, the course offers schools the opportunity to instruct
students on use of technology.
History of Course Development (optional):
Since at least the mid-1980s, many universities around the world have been offering courses in history
that begin with the Big Bang and end with the present, or in some cases the future. Universities offering
such courses include the University of California at Berkley, San Diego State University, Dominican
University, University of Michigan, University of Amsterdam, and Macquarie University in Sydney, where
David Christian first designed and offered the course he named “Big History.”
The Big History Project (BHP) is bringing this approach to studying history to secondary schools around
the globe. The project launched after Bill Gates viewed David Christian’s Teaching Company lecture
series and read Christian’s Maps of Time. Gates recognized Big History’s potential for igniting students’
interest in learning how various disciplines have investigated the “big questions,” and how historians
have used ideas to understand change over time. Gates believes that content taught in an elegant,
relevant way could help establish a framework that makes subsequent study more understandable and
engages students who otherwise might get lost in a traditional classroom.
Gates and Christian established the Big History Project, and created a project team that includes
Christian, a historian at Macquarie University; and Bob Bain, a historian and history educator at the
University of Michigan. Drawing on the ideas found in the university courses and scholarship in relevant
fields, the BHP has developed two different courses appropriate for secondary students: BHP Big History
and BHP World History.
Over 250 schools globally, including 11 in California, have piloted the course during three design cycles
between 2011 and 2014. The project team has gathered data from students and teachers in a wide
range of instructional contexts to improve the course, seeking to meet the instructional needs of
teachers and increasing access to the variety of students enrolled in BHP courses without reducing rigor.
BHP World History, a unified history of humanity, is a global history course appropriate for UC. Rather
than studying civilizations in serial fashion, BHP World History reflects an approach fostered and
modeled by historians such as William McNeil, Edmund Burke, Patrick Manning, and the World History
Association, as well as educational programs including the National World History Standards, the
Advanced Placement World History course, and the World History for Us All curriculum project. A
growing number of states have also instantiated this global approach. In BHP World History, students
spend 80 percent of instructional time studying the history of humanity, particularly the past few
centuries, and 20 percent studying the changes in our understanding of the origins of of the Universe,
Solar System, Earth, and life.
The Big History Project (BHP) website (www.bighistoryproject.com) offers everyone free and instant
access to the online, digitally downloadable textbook, built by the project team for a high school
audience. This digital textbook is the primary text of the course.
Textbooks:
Textbook 1
Title:
The Big History Project Online Textbook
Edition:
2
Publication:
2013
Publisher:
The Big History Project
Authors:
BHP-WH Curriculum Team
URL Resources:
http://school.bighistoryproject.com
Usage:
Primary Text
Supplemental Instructional Materials:
Christian, David. This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity. Great Barrington, Mass.: Berkshire,
2008.
McNeill, William and J.R. McNeil. The Human Web: A Bird’s Eye View of World History. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 2003.
Reference materials
Christian, David. Maps of Time. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
Stearns, Peter. World History: The Basics. Cambridge: Routledge Press, 2011.