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.Bain, 2010;Dunn, 2015;Dunn, Mitchell, & Ward, 2016;Girard & Harris, 2013;Marino, 2011), educators need tools to identify whether such a bias exists in their curriculum.Using that framework to conduct a content analysis of Big History curriculum, this study addresses these research questions: What cultural and racial perspectives does this curriculum center or prioritize, and how? What are the implications of centering or prioritizing these groups and perspectives over others? Theoretical Framework:To identify Eurocentrism at work in world history curriculum, scholarship from critical Indigenous and postcolonial studies proves critical.Both fields argue that Eurocentrism and its
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".