http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8904-9091
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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.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to these valuable thought partners, whose help and feedback was instrumental in moving this work forward at various stages: Patricia Ferreyra, Stephanie Forman, Lauren McArthur Harris, Jisoo Hyun, Sunun Park, Walter C. Parker, Chandan Reddy, Lisa Sibbett, Sooz Stahl, the anonymous reviewers of JCS, and Abby Reisman, for her encouragement.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jenni Conrad
Jenni Conrad is a doctoral student in Curriculum & Instruction in the College of Education at the University of Washington, 2012 Skagit Lane, Miller Hall, Box 353,600, Seattle, WA 98,195-3600, USA; email: [email protected].
Her interests include social studies education, critical and anticolonial pedagogies, and teacher education. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Ninety Seventh Annual Conference of the National Council for the Social Studies, College and University Faculty Assembly, San Francisco, 2017.