Making Big History: How U-M Added Billions of Years to Students' Education

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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, with support from Bill Gates, have helped develop Big History into a revolutionary program now taught in over 3,000 American schools and over 40 countries worldwide. Within the Project students travel over 14 billion years from the Big Bang to the rise of agriculture and beyond. Weaving together history, astronomy, biology, chemistry, and many other subjects into a single narrative the Projects 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 the University of Michigan. A high school history and social studies teacher for 26 years, he is the founding Director of the World History and Literature Initiative, co-founder of the award-winning Clinical Rounds Project, and chair of U-M’s Secondary Teacher Education Program.

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