John Hasse and Rich Federman: Integrating Big History and Geography

John Hasse
PhD in Geography
Professor of Geography and Director of the Geospatial Research Lab in the Department of Geography, Planning & Sustainability, Rowan University

Rich Federman
M.S., Environmental Science & Policy
Associate Teaching Professor, Program Director, Environmental and Sustainability Studies, GEOClub Advisor, Department of Geography, Planning & Sustainability, Rowan University

Integrating Big History and Geography to more effectively teach the Anthropocene
This paper documents the experience of integrating Big History with geography at Rowan University in a curriculum designed to place students within Anthropocene earth. The course titled Earth, People & Environment (EPE), has been in development for well over a decade and has become one of the most popular departmental courses with over 35 sections taught per year. The course tells the story of how the world became the way it is today following many of the narrative precepts of Big History including goldilocks conditions, thresholds and emergent properties. Geography equally anchors the course by offering a rich set of tools including maps, environmental systems frameworks and place-based knowledge essential for grounding Big History. In this manner, Big History provides the contextual narrative glue weaving together the often seemingly disparate, systematic and thematic topics within the discipline of geography making the combination more than the sum of its Big History and geography “component parts”. Through forging a synergistic coalescence of one of the oldest academic disciplines with one of the newest and by working across-disciplines, embracing multiple scales and integrating the natural and social sciences, the course animates the world for students and provides a narrative bridge for them to engage their own lives within it. Through a special emphasis on storytelling, the course places students within a story that allows them to make sense of the dizzying array of changes, crises, and technologies of our modern Anthropocene. As such, we aim for the course to more holistically teach students about the current state of the world and the emerging prospects for the future.As a university sanctioned “core” course, EPE exposes many students to Big History, far more than would likely occur with Big History as a stand alone course. The paper reviews the evolution of the course’s development and provides insights to what has worked well and what has not. Student feedback and assessment results are provided as evidence of the course’s impactfulness. While this course is at the introductory university level, it has implications for elementary, secondary as well as advanced curricular courses. Suggestions are also made for how this course may offer a model for integrating Big History with other fields and disciplines.

https://bighistory.org/