Big History: Helping Students Understand Dinosaurs, AI, and the World
If you’ve been in the OER Project universe for a while, you know that Big History is our origin story. We’ve crossed many thresholds and scaled up in the last 14 years, and we’re more confident than ever in the value of Big History. Students of Big History learn how to think in ways that will prepare them for a world in which information is instant, overwhelming, and often dubious. The Big History story may be 13.8 billion years old, but it’s as relevant as ever.
I first taught Big History in 2015. And while many of my students loved it (I’m not going to pretend that all 150 high school sophomores I taught were head-over-heels for a history class), the student who was most excited about it was… me. I was very much a student, and not just because it was my first year teaching the course. I found that Big History changed the way I think (yes, I know how hyperbolic that sounds). But ask my friends, parents, colleagues and they’ll confirm: That first year, I couldn’t stop talking about Big History. More than 10 years later, nothing much has changed.
Soon after I left the school where I was teaching Big History, the course was replaced by a world history class—a response to the pressures placed on both teachers and students related to New York’s Global History Regents exam. Unfortunately, this is a relatively common situation. Districts and schools prioritize national and state testing. Students are pushed to take as many AP classes as possible. These pressures mean that Big History is often viewed as a “tough fit” in high school course catalogs. But in this post, I want to make the argument that it’s worth finding the time in your curriculum for Big History because of what it offers your students and the ways it prepares them to navigate our world—today and in the future.
What is Big History?
Big History is flexible and offers important learning at any age and in any discipline. The fact that it changed my thinking when I was in my early twenties illustrates that. But as I reflect not only on my time as a teacher but on my time as a grade-school student, I ask myself, when would I have liked to learn Big History? The answer may surprise you: In middle school. I would have loved to take both the skills and the interdisciplinary way of thinking the course helps develop into high school and beyond.
As you likely know, we revised our Big History course to work better for middle-school students (for more on that pivot, check out this blog post). But as with all OER Project materials, there are numerous opportunities for modification and adaptation, regardless of grade level. We believe so strongly in the core skills and concepts of Big History that we even offer a lifelong learner course. Whether you’re in middle school, are middle aged, or in mid-retirement, Big History is ageless.
In a world where teachers must be ever-mindful of every standard and learning objective, and students often feel like learning is equivalent to memorizing, the open-ended inquiry at the heart of Big History is refreshing and meaningful. It provides what we like to call a “framework for all knowledge”—a unified story of the Universe that connects disciplines—from astrophysics and biology to archaeology and history. This story is organized into thresholds of increasing complexity—turning points where the Universe became more complex. Big History helps students (and adults) think about scale and connections across time and space while also inviting causal thinking. It reveals that our knowledge is interdisciplinary, not contained by the discrete categories we see on our class schedule (history, science, math, English). It encourages questioning and claim testing. And it establishes a critical-thinking approach that students will remember and use long after they leave the classroom.
From SUE to Claude: Test my Big History claim
But don’t just take my word for it. Let’s test my claim that Big History helps students of any age use historical thinking skills to understand the present and prepare for the future. We’ll use two very different events, separated by millions of years: the extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago and the rapid escalation of AI since 2022.
Use these questions with students, or answer them yourself. I think they illustrate how Big History’s framework allows us to move beyond “what” and toward “so what” and “what’s next?”
- Causation: What was the straw that broke the dinosaurs’ backs? Was it an asteroid impact? The climate change that followed? The collapse of food systems? Volcanoes in India?
- Scale: What was the immediate impact of the asteroid? Zoom out millions of years, after life recovered and evolved. How does a 66-million-year-old impact continue to shape life today?
- Interdisciplinarity: What disciplines have contributed to our understanding of what happened to the dinosaurs?
- Claim testing: Our understanding of this event has shifted over time. Did extinction begin 65 million years ago? 66? How can we be sure about something that happened so long ago? How do we decide which theories and experts to believe?
- Thresholds of increasing complexity: What does the extinction of the dinosaurs say about progress? In this case, complexity was greatly reduced, but the eventual regrowth and evolution of life led to remarkable new complexities.
A Big History takeaway: Taken as a singular event, the extinction of dinosaurs was negative (and it certainly was for the descendants of SUE and Scotty). But scale and thresholds are particularly important here—they help us frame the overall impact of this event against the new complexity it created as mammals finally crawled out of the shadows and started building the world we live in today.
The AI revolution
- Causation: When did humanity set off down the path to AI? Thousands of years ago with mythical imaginings? In the pioneering work of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Or are more-immediate causes more important, such as the launch of OpenAI?
- Scale: How does the impact of AI shift when you look at it from different scales? How do AI tools impact your students’ work? How do debates on data centers affect your community? How is AI changing the way we run global financial and communication systems?
- Interdisciplinarity: Which different disciplines contributed to creating AI models available today? Which disciplines are needed to help us understand and regulate them in the future?
- Claim testing: What steps should a user take to test claims made by AI? When a Google search spits out an AI answer, how much verification do you need before you can trust its claims? How do you know which models to trust? How do we test claims about AI? Is it a golden goose or an existential threat?
- Thresholds of increasing complexity: Is the advent of generative AI propelling us across a new threshold of increasing complexity? If so, how do you know? What do you think it will change about us?
A Big History takeaway: News about AI is everywhere. AI is everywhere. It’s overwhelming. Causation, scale, interdisciplinarity, and thresholds of increasing complexity help us think about what AI means to ourselves and humanity, and claim testing is a vital skill for navigating a world of AI.
These two examples highlight the value proposition of Big History and make an argument for finding a spot for it in your course catalog.
Whether students are exploring an event, an idea, a life, or a whole geologic epoch, Big History’s lenses and skills will help them see the connections that link disciplines and connect all of us. Introducing these ideas in middle school gives students a distinct advantage when they take courses like earth science, world history, or AP literature later in school. Students leave Big History with the tools to use the past to make meaning in the present in ways that prepare them for the future.
About the author: Chelsea Katzenberg is the Academic Lead at OER Project where she is responsible for managing the content development and updates for all OER Project courses. Before joining OER Project, Chelsea was a founding member of a charter high school in the South Bronx, where she taught world history (before OER Project’s World History courses existed) and Big History.
Header image: Composite of SUE the T. rex, courtesy Field Museum and a T. rex skeleton generated by Google Gemini.