Big History Project and Colonizing Knowledges in World History Curriculum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This empirical study uses content and frequency analysis to investigate how the Big History Project (BHP) online curriculum represents different racial and cultural groups within its units fusing science and history.The prevalence of a Western Civilizations perspective in curricula offers a challenging irony: that world history could be culturally irrelevant, or inaccurate, for non-Europeans.Drawing on Indigenous, postcolonial and critical social studies scholarship, this study offers a new framework identifying five attributes of a Eurocentric World History curriculum and uses it to analyze BHP.Findings reveal that BHP materials promote Eurocentrism through its content and source selections, across all five attributes of the framework.Implications for curriculum and pedagogy in the social and natural sciences are discussed.Word Count: 1,949Objectives: What voices, knowledge and parts of the globe most matter within courses titled world or global history today?Can such courses engage the next generation of American students?The new Big History Project (BHP) proposes a universal, interdisciplinary solution, synthesizing modern knowledge from history, biology, chemistry, astronomy and other disciplines into an innovative, unified narrative of life on earth.Inspired by videos featuring Australian professor David Christian in 2008, billionaire Bill Gates funded its digital expansion into high school social studies courses.Since history courses remain "boring" to today's students and most curricula do not build historical literacy skills (Kahne and Middaugh, 2015; Levinson, 2016; Monte Sano, 2016), proponents offer this 21 st century, STEM-compatible approach from the big bang until the present.Currently, over 1500 schools worldwide use the online curriculum, including the United States, Australia, Canada, Scotland and others (Sorkin, 2014).A version of BHP replaced traditional World History classes across California after approval by the UC system (Sorkin, 2014) and International Baccalaureate schools are sponsoring a wide roll-out in their Middle Years Program (The IB, 2017).To support scholars and practitioners in assessing the cultural relevance of this curriculum, I draw on literature from postcolonial, Indigenous studies, and critical social studies to create a framework that identifies both implicit and explicit European cultural bias in world history curricula.Given the prevalence of Eurocentric perspectives within world history materials and standards (see, e.g.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".