In this activity, you will start to explore how examining the same event from different perspectives can result in drawing varied conclusions surrounding that event. This should help you better understand what it means to use interdisciplinary perspectives and how you can use a variety of disciplines to help you understand the Big History story.

Think about the event your teacher presents to you. Your job is to examine this event through the eyes of different people, and even through the eyes of different versions of yourself. Write down answers to the following questions:

1. What are the questions a historian would ask about what happened?
2. What would the kindergarten version of you ask about the event?
3. What would the fifth grade version of you ask about the event?
4. What would a doctor, a lawyer, a police officer, or a politician ask about this event? (Pick two.)

You’ll discuss your answers with the class when you’re done. Then, you’ll take a look at the Disciplines Chart, which you can use as a resource throughout the course. Be sure to consider the idea that when you put all of these different perspectives together to create a narrative, that story will be a combination of all the perspectives. In fact, this is how Big History put together its own story.

You’ll think about the unit driving question, and then you’ll respond to it in writing. Remember, the driving question exists to help you really focus on the big idea of the unit, and to help you connect all the knowledge you’re acquiring. You’ll revisit the driving question at least twice in every unit. You should think about these questions from many perspectives using your understanding of varied disciplines—and even your new appreciation of scale!—to really explore them deeply.

Your teacher will let you know which of these questions you should think about:

• How and why do individuals change their minds?
• How and why did human understanding of the Universe change?

Use DQ Notebook Worksheet – Unit 2 to respond to the assigned question as best you can. Be prepared to talk about these ideas with your class.

In this final vocab activity of the unit, as with all of the final vocab activities in each unit, you will engage in a deeper exploration of the unit’s vocabulary. You’ll move beyond defining words to representing them in a variety of ways, including acting them out, drawing pictures, defining them in sentences, providing antonyms, and connecting them to course content.

Your teacher will give you a vocab card. Once everyone in the class has their cards, hold your card up to your forehead (with the word facing out), and try to find the other students in the room that have synonyms of your card. You and your synonyms are a group.

Now, you’re going to play a few rounds of the Word Wheel Game. The Word Wheel game works like this:

• Your teacher spins the wheel and calls out the action.
• For each spin, one person in your group has to complete the action related to where the spinner has landed. The actions are as follows for each word:
• Use it in a sentence: Come up with a sentence that uses the word.
• Think of an antonym: Come up with a word that is the opposite of the card you have.
• Draw it: Create a quick sketch of the word.
• Act it out: Act out the definition of the word. (Don’t just act out the word itself!)
• Explain how your word relates to course content: Relate your word to an activity, a lesson, a concept, the unit driving question, or even one of the practices. This one can be hard!
• You choose!: You can do any of the above.
• You and the rest of the people in your group determine if the student whose turn it was gave a correct answer. If your group can’t decide, ask your teacher to help.
• Each time a student gets a correct answer, they get a point.
• The teacher spins the wheel again and it’s the next person’s turn to go.
• Once all of the word in the group have been explained (after two or three rounds), your teacher will collect the cards, shuffle them, and redistribute them.
• Repeat the process as many times as your teacher says!

The possibility that life—even complex life—exists out there, possibly on billions of planets in our galaxy alone, is a relatively new idea. Physicists and astronomers ask these questions: Are we alone in the Universe? Why? Why is life so rare?

This short video looks at the question of why, if the Universe is so enormous, are occurrences of life on other planets proving so hard to find? This tricky question would be asked and answered quite differently by members of different disciplines or even “regular” people (nonscientists) who simply have different interests and beliefs.

Preview

Why are we alone? There could be billions of planets just like Earth out there. However, we still haven’t proven that life exists anywhere else in the Universe. The sky seems to be empty of life even though there are so many stars and what seems like so many opportunities for life.

Thinking Conceptually

At the end of the video, Clifford Johnson suggests that the answer to the question, “Why are we alone?” is at the heart of Big History. What does he mean? And do you agree that this question is at the heart of Big History?

Cosmology is the study of the origins of the Universe, as well as its structure, and is one of the many disciplines that help us more deeply understand the Big History story.

This video should give you a deeper understanding of what cosmology is, what cosmologists do, and what kinds of questions they ask. Gaining a better sense of the practices and goals of different disciplines helps us understand how to examine phenomena from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Preview

Cosmologists study the vast history of the Universe by using telescopes to look back in time. Light travels incredibly fast, but just the same, it takes a long time to get from the far reaches of the Universe to Earth. Looking at the stars is like looking back millions and millions of years.

Key Ideas – Factual

Think about the following questions as you watch the video:

1. What is cosmology?
2. What do cosmologists do?
3. What are the remaining mysteries of the Universe for cosmologists?

Thinking Conceptually

Discuss the answers to the following questions with your class. What do cosmologists mean when they say they can look at and observe the history of the Universe? What exactly are they looking at and how do they look at it? What kinds of questions do they ask about those things? If needed, use the Discussion Quick Guide to remind yourselves how to engage in accountable and academic discussions.

Astrophysicists look at the physical properties of the stars and the deep, underlying principles of nature. While they do spend a lot of time observing nature, they also spend a lot of time looking for ways to mathematically describe what they observe.

As the last video did, this one should give you a deeper understanding of what astrophysics is, what astrophysicists do, and what kinds of questions they ask. Gaining a better sense of the practices and goals of different disciplines helps us understand how to examine phenomena from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Preview

Creating experiments, using telescopes to look into the night sky, and puzzling over mathematical and physical theories—these are some of the things astrophysicists do to help learn about the Big Bang and the Universe.

Key Ideas – Factual

Think about the following questions as you watch the video:

1. What is astrophysics?
2. What are the different types of astrophysicists and how do they inform us about the Universe?

Thinking Conceptually

How is astrophysics different from cosmology? Compare what each discipline examines in order to answer questions about the history of the Universe and universal change.

As a young girl, Vera Rubin made her own telescope and looked to the stars. She kept looking her whole life, and along the way, her observations transformed astronomy. Dr. Rubin’s work on spiral galaxies revealed that they behaved in unexpected ways, which could only be explained if they contained great quantities of matter we cannot see. We call this matter “dark” because we cannot see it, but Dr. Rubin argued that it made up as much as ninety percent of our Universe. Despite her brilliance, her research was often met with skepticism over the course of her career.

As you continue your journey through Threshold 1, this graphic biography will help you recognize how collective learning has helped scientists better understand the fundamental structures and origins of our Universe. Vera’s story will provide you with evidence to respond to the Unit 2 driving question, “How and why did human understanding of the Universe change?”

Read 1: Observe

As you read this graphic biography for the first time, review the Read 1: Observe section of your Three Close Reads for Graphic Bios Tool. Be sure to record one question in the thought bubble on the top-right. You don’t need to write anything else down. However, if you’d like to record your observations, feel free to do so on scrap paper.

Read 2: Understand

On the tool, summarize the main idea of the comic and provide two pieces of evidence that helped you understand the creator’s main idea. You can do this only in writing or you can get creative with some art. Some of the evidence you find may come in the form of text (words). But other evidence will come in the form of art (images). You should read the text looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the main idea, and key supporting details. You should also spend some time looking at the images and the way in which the page is designed. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. What does the portion of the comic involving bathroom doors tell you about Vera’s experience as a scientist?
2. What does the comic mean by saying that Vera’s most important observation was something we can’t see?
3. What evidence did Vera use to uncover the existence of dark matter?
4. What does Vera mean in the quote at the top of the page: “We’re out of kindergarten, but only in about third grade”?
5. How has the artist designed the page, text, and illustrations to tell you about Vera’s observations and career?

Read 3: Connect

In this read, you should use the graphic biography as evidence to support, extend, or challenge claims made in this unit of the course. On the bottom of the tool, record what you learned about this person’s life and how it relates to what you’re learning.

1. What does this biography tell you about how our understanding of the Universe has changed? How did perceptions of Vera’s observations change over time?

To Be Continued…

On the second page of the tool, your teacher might ask you to extend the graphic biography to a second page. This is where you can draw and write what you think might come next. Here, you can become a co-creator of this graphic biography!

This activity is a follow up to the opening activity where you decided what different people would ask about a significant event (including some younger versions of you!). Now we’re going to make things tricky... instead of asking questions from your perspective, or from the perspective of professions that you probably know a lot about, you’re going to ask the questions from the viewpoint of the new disciplines that you just learned about earlier in this lesson. This will help you solidify your understanding of the different kinds of questions people from different disciplines ask, as well as allow you to get a sense of how well you understand those disciplines.

Make sure you have the What Do You Know? What Do You Ask? Worksheet. Your job is to think about how you could assemble a research team to best understand if humans could ever survive on Mars. The worksheet will help walk you through that process. Once you’ve assembled a team, you’ll have to explain why your team is the best team for this job.

Once you’ve completed the worksheet, be prepared to share your answers with the class. Then, think about why understanding this event as an interdisciplinary team is better than doing it from an individual perspective.

In this lesson, you’ll continue your quest to improve your writing by getting down and dirty with the elements of Analysis and Evidence from the BHP Writing Rubric. As you did in the writing activity in Lesson 1.3, you’ll analyze a piece of writing. This time, your analysis will give you a better understanding of how evidence should be used when you write. And this time, you’ll analyze an awesome piece of student writing. Yep, you read that right—an honest to goodness real Investigation essay from a real BHP student, just like you. (You know, as opposed to all the fake BHP students running around out there.)

Reading, claim testing
Think about the Three Close Reads process when you analyze the student essay in this activity. Additionally, any time you encounter assertions and claims in the course, be sure to claim test whether those assertions have been appropriately supported. Use the language of claim testing in classroom conversation whenever possible and call out your teacher and fellow classmates when they make claims without supporting them!

This activity is going to be a lot like one you did in Unit 1. This time, you’ll focus on a different row of the BHP Writing Rubric. You’re going to read a piece of student writing and look at how they used evidence.

Take out the BHP Writing Rubric (it’s included in the Use of Evidence Worksheet, as is the essay you’ll be reading) and look at the Analysis and Evidence row. The three main ways you need to use evidence in Investigation writing are:

1. Sources: You must use the texts from the Investigation library to support your essays, and you should use as many as you can as long as the texts actually support the point you’re trying to make.
2. Analysis: You must analyze the texts. In other words, show that you understand the sources and, if you use multiple sources, show the connections between them, including similarities and differences.
3. Connection to claim/thesis: Show how your sources connect to the thesis/major claim in your essay.

Now, look at your Use of Evidence Worksheet and read the essay, keeping in mind how the writer used texts as evidence in their essay. The essay provided is in response to the Unit 1 Investigation question: Why do we look at things from far away and close up? Note that the Investigation Library for Unit 1 contains five sources (plus two optional sources). Discuss what you found with your class. Now, work through each section of the worksheet, keeping the following information in mind.

Sources: 
Remember, good historical writing uses texts to support the claims being made by the writer. It’s not enough to just mention a source. A good historian will provide quotes and properly cite the source. For example, it’s not enough to just write, “Text 4 says….” All quotes should begin with a short phrase that introduces the author and her credentials: “Professor David Christian, the founder of the Big History Course, states that….” By appropriately introducing the source, you are providing authoritative evidence to support your argument. Once you’ve talked about this as a class, reread the essay, circling anywhere you find that source texts have been used.

Analysis: 
Once you’ve found the source material, go through the essay and underline any text that might be considered an analysis of the sources used. Analysis is a bit trickier to spot in an essay than source material, but you can find it by looking for cues, such as an explanation of a quote used or statements that compare the similarities and differences between texts.

Connection to Thesis/Major Claim: 
Now that you have looked at sources and analysis, look for text where sources are connected to the thesis/major claim. Before you do this, pick out the thesis of the essay. Once you have that, start highlighting the connections.

Note: Some sentences in the essay might end up being underlined and highlighted or underlined and circled.

Once you’ve finished highlighting the connections, discuss what you found with your class.

You’ll have the opportunity to show off your evidence-using skills in Investigation 2, which is up next.

Carefully read the Investigation essay prompt you will be responding to. Be sure to have read and analyzed the documents using historical thinking skills such as sourcing or contextualizing prior to doing this warm-up activity.

Make sure you have drafted the thesis/major claim you intend to use in response to the essay prompt.

As you develop your close reading, critical thinking, and historical thinking skills, you will also develop writing skills that will serve you well in all classes that ask you to do any kind of writing. The concepts and skills you will work on in this activity may be new to you, but don’t worry, they’re designed to help you in your future studies and even in your future jobs. This warm-up will help you better understand how to address the Analysis and Evidence row of the BHP Writing Rubric and will give you an opportunity to practice supporting your thesis/major claim. This will help prepare you to more effectively respond to a writing prompt, and to generally be a more effective writer.

In this quick warm-up activity, you’ll practice engaging in analysis and using evidence to support your thesis/major claim when writing an essay. First, you’ll review the Analysis and Evidence row of the BHP Writing Rubric, and then, you’ll work through a three-step process to help you use evidence-backed supporting claims in support of your thesis/major claim. Your teacher may have you do this for one supporting claim or for many, depending upon your familiarity with this process.

First, take out the BHP Writing Rubric and review the Analysis and Evidence row and discuss it with your class. Next, take out the Analysis and Evidence Prewriting Tool, and work through the tool together, using the Investigation prompt you’ll be responding to when you write your essay.

In Step 1, come up with a supporting claim—or reason—that supports the thesis/major claim statement you’ll be working on. Then, for Step 2, go back to the documents you reviewed or researched before this activity to find the best source to support the first subclaim. Once you’ve found the evidence, add the citation to the tool. Then, write down the specific evidence you’ll use from that document. Finally, write a reason why this evidence supports the supporting claim.

Now you’re ready for Step 3 – Reason. Write a sentence or two explaining how the evidence you found supports your supporting claim. Remember that if you aren’t quoting directly from the source, you should be sure to paraphrase and use your own words to describe the supporting evidence.

Once you have completed the steps, it’s time to write!

Investigation 2 Prompt: How and why do individuals change their minds?

This is the first of a series of Investigations that focus on the development of collective learning, a central theme not only in the Big History course, but in the history of ideas as well. In this Investigation, you will use intuition, logic, and empirical evidence to develop an argument for how and why people change their minds. This Investigation will help you develop your claim-testing practices and question how the new information you encounter in the course supports, extends, or challenges your understanding. In addition, this assessment helps prepare you to use evidence to support your arguments in document-based questions you will encounter on standardized exams.

Day 1
In this activity, you’re going to respond to a question using texts to support your thinking in the form of an Investigation. In this course, Investigations give you a question along with several source documents, and you will use the information in those documents (and perhaps additional knowledge) to respond to the question. Your responses will be written in essay format, and will be five- or six-paragraphs long. This Investigation asks you to respond to question, How and why do individuals change their minds?

First, your teacher will ask you to write down your conjectures—or your best guesses made without lots of evidence—about the following questions: When and why do you think people should change their minds, particularly about things that most other people believe? What do you think made Copernicus and Galileo change their minds about the Earth being the center of the Universe?

You’ll have about 5 to 10 minutes to make notes and think about what causes individuals to change their minds.

With your class or in small groups, share your list of ideas about why people change their minds. Next, your teacher will either hand out or have you download the Investigation 2 Document Library. As you review each document, you’ll use the graphic organizer to record the major claims about the structure of the Universe in the texts and to document which claim testers support those claims.

Day 2
Now it’s time to write! You’ll develop a five- to six-paragraph essay arguing how and why individuals change their minds, using evidence from the case study of Copernicus and Galileo to support your argument. Remember to use information from the Investigation 2 Document Library along with BHP concepts and other information you’ve learned in this unit as evidence to support your argument or opposing point of view. It’s also important that you cite the sources you use as evidence in your essay.

In order to improve your writing skills, it is important to read examples—both good and bad—written by other people. Reviewing writing samples will help you develop and practice your own skills in order to better understand what makes for a strong essay.

Your teacher will provide sample essays for this unit’s Investigation prompt and provide instructions for how you will use them to refine your writing skills. Whether you’re working with a high-level example or improving on a not-so-great essay, we recommend having the BHP Writing Rubric on hand to help better understand how you can improve your own writing. As you work to identify and improve upon aspects of a sample essay, you’ll also be developing your own historical writing skills!

This is the first of a series of DBQs that focus on the development of collective learning, a central theme not only in the Big History course, but in the history of ideas as well. In this DBQ, you’ll use intuition, logic, and empirical evidence to develop an argument for how our understanding of the Universe changed over time. This DBQ will help you develop your claim-testing practices and question how the new information you encounter in the course supports, extends, or challenges your understanding. Additionally, this assessment helps prepare you to use evidence to support your arguments in document-based questions you will encounter on standardized exams.

Day 1
In this activity, you’re going to respond to a question using texts to support your thinking in the form of an DBQ. In this course, DBQs give you a question along with several source documents, and you will use the information in those documents (and perhaps additional knowledge) to respond to the question. Your responses will be written in essay format, and will usually be five- or six-paragraphs long. This DBQ asks you to respond to the question, How has our understanding of the Universe changed over time?

First, your teacher will ask you to write down your conjectures—or your best guesses made without lots of evidence—about the following questions: Can you think of any discoveries that have changed the way we understand the Universe? How did people discover this new information and when did people begin to accept it? You’ll have about 5 to 10 minutes to make notes and think about these questions.

With your class or in small groups, share your answers. Next, your teacher will either hand out or have you download the DBQ 2 Document Library. As you review each document, you’ll use the graphic organizer to record the major claims about the structure of the Universe in the texts, and you’ll document which claim testers support those claims.

Day 2
Now it’s time to write! You’ll develop a five- to six-paragraph essay arguing how our understanding of the Universe has changed over time, using evidence from the DBQ 2 Document Library. Remember to use information from the documents along with BHP concepts and other information you’ve learned in this unit as evidence to support your argument or opposing point of view. It’s also important that you cite the sources you use as evidence in your essay.

Have your graded essay ready to use for annotation and revision purposes.

A good way to improve your writing skills is to analyze and edit writing samples using peer drafts or even your own essay. In this activity, you are given a tool to use that gives you a strategy for evaluating and revising the use of analysis and evidence in a piece of writing based on the BHP Writing Rubric. As you think critically about the criteria in the rubric and evaluate a piece of writing against it, you will develop a stronger understanding of all of the factors that make a piece or writing “good.”

In this activity, you’ll first review the Analysis and Evidence row of the BHP Writing Rubric with your class. Then, you’ll review the Analysis and Evidence Revision Tool and learn how to use it to improve upon the use of analysis and evidence in an essay. Finally, you’ll use the Analysis and Evidence Revision Tool to review and revise an essay that has been graded by your teacher or peers.

Start by reviewing the Analysis and Evidence row of the BHP Writing Rubric with your class and discuss why this is important to attend to in writing. Remember, well-placed and well-explained evidence can make all the difference in making a convincing and compelling argument.

Next, take out the Analysis and Evidence Revision Tool and walk through it with your class. First, note the directions at the top, which ask you to review the feedback from an essay. This is a helpful step because it gives you a general sense of how the essay fared in terms of analysis and evidence and where improvement is needed.

Now it’s time to go through each item on the checklist to make sure all criteria related to analysis and evidence were included in the essay. Work through the list with your class, and be sure to ask questions if you aren’t clear about what an item is asking for. Then, look to see if everything in the list is included in the essay. Only check the boxes if the criteria are met. If any criteria from the checklist were not met, leave those boxes blank. The final step is to revise the essay based on all the blank checkboxes. Use the unchecked boxes as guidance for what can be done to improve the essay. You can use the Analysis and Evidence Prewriting Tool to help structure revisions.

To give you more practice with the Analysis and Evidence Revision Tool, your teacher might have you review and revise a sample graded essay. Once you have a solid grasp on how the tool works, you’ll repeat the process on your own graded essay.