In today’s schools, students are frequently taught a variety of specialized subjects with little sense of how they relate to each other or the world around them.
The Big History Project seeks to change this by building off students’ natural curiosity about our world and its nature. Over the last fifteen years U-M faculty in the Marsal Family School of Education have helped develop Big History into a revolutionary program now taught in over 40 countries worldwide. Weaving together history, astronomy, biology, chemistry, and many other subjects into a single narrative spanning 14 billion years the Project has helped elementary and high school students better understand people, civilizations, and how we are connected to everything around us. Bob Bain is Associate Professor in the Marsal Family School of Education and in the Department of History at U-M.