Project Citizen Through the Lens of Big History

The future of civic education may just lie in the past - the deep past that is. Here at the PEAR Lab we are hard at work weaving a new thread within the acclaimed civics curriculum Project Citizen - to enable to students to explore public policy issues through the lens of Big History. Let me briefly review Why we must do this, How we plan to get it done, and finally, What it is looking like.

Why do we need to integrate Project Citizen & Big History?

Looking at public policy issues through
Big History enables engaging STEAM Education!

When societies create public policies, we do so to coordinate collective action, ostensibly towards the aims of human well-being. No one then disagrees that public policy should be informed on our latest and greatest understanding of the human condition. But - who's understanding is best?

Is homo economicus, the rational-human of neo-classical economics the field we should listen to? What about behaviorists and their insights into conditioned stimulus-responses? Maybe neuroscientists, anthropologists, sociologists, primatologists, or even theologists have something of import to shape our understanding of humanity relevant to public policy?

Few readers (my self included) respect all of the above fields with equal footing, some might have outright contempt for some of these disciplines. Yet - when we shape public policy (or ask High School students to study public policy), there appear to be no hard-and-fast rules to determining which disciplines are most appropriate for a given issue. This is a problem for civics education!

Adding to these challenges is time - the simple limits of classroom time. Content must be covered (for example: Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts & Mathematics [STEAM]) and civic education too often gets pushed to the sidelines as the emotional idealism of bleeding-heart liberal education activists. This too, is a problem for civics education!

Let us now look at Project Citizen Through the Lens of Big History to see How such a curricular synthesis might begin to solve these two onerous challenges facing the future of civic education.

How are we going to do it?
Project Citizen has an established, time-tested classroom process to engage High School students in exploring, analyzing, developing, and advocating any given public policy issue. Big History, through the Big History Project, now has a rich diversity of flexible resources to engage High School students in understanding our changing universe and their place within it! It may very well be that there are High School students as I write, experiencing both of these curriculum within their school year - yet experiencing them in complete isolation. What Educators need is both a theoretical and methodological toolkit, an overly of concepts and processes that function as a glue to bind the worlds of civics and big history into one. The PEAR Lab is at the forefront of designing this toolkit.

It is well beyond the scope of this post to detail every tool in the kit, more information can be found on our expanding website. Here, let me just give you a preview of two tools in the theoretical box, and two tools in the methodological box.

Theoretical Tool #1: 

The Unified Human Science (UHS) Chart

This UHS chart allows educators to fully meet Next Gen Science Standards
through the unique entry point of public policy discourse!

The answer to the problem of which discipline to use to examine public policy is obviously "all that are helpful"...but this doesn't get us very far. Students need a road map to the disciplines of human sciences, and this UHS chart provides just that. Based on the classic 1963 paper from Ethologist Niko Tinbergen, and integrating multiple levels of analysis - this chart offers endless fodder for discourse about the nature and needs of research related to any given public policy issue.

Theoretical Tool #2: 

The PROSOCIAL Design Principles

As described, public policy issues are issues of coordinated collective action for human well-being. Evolutionary sciences have been making stunning advances in this field - advances that clearly can be made accessible to High School students around the world (we are doing it here in Madagascar already! The US/EU better catch up ;). Nobel Prize winner, the late Elinor Ostrom discovered eight principles of group design that support groups in the egalitarian management of their natural resources. In 2013, Ostrom - working with David Sloan Wilson and Michael Cox, generalized these principles to support the effective coordination of any group. These principles have enormous value for both the identification of public policy issues, and the evaluation of public policy solutions. Not surprisingly, these eight principles flow from evolutionary theory more generally, as well as our human species uniquely cooperative history itself.

Methodological Tool #1: 

Crossing the Thresholds of Complexity - Backwards

"We are stardust playing under the stars"
Carl Sagan would have said had he been
helping us analyze the Policies of Play
in local schools!

At the Big History Project, David Christian and colleagues have done a wonderful job providing resources about each of the Thresholds of Complexity comprising the Big History of our universe. In Project Citizen, after students have selected one of many possible public policy issues to work on, they must then carefully analyze said policy. The PEAR Lab approach suggests students use the framework of Thresholds of Complexity, to work their way backwards from the current-day complexities of the policy issue. Back through the agricultural revolution, further on to before the times of humanity's collective learning capacity, and yes- further on still! Back through the evolution and origins of all of life - and yes - even back to the Big Bang itself!

Now wait a minute! Most people say to me at this point - it is clear that taking a general historical perspective on public policy is valid (and already included in some current civics curriculum). Some others can see the value of perhaps exploring whether a given policy issue has parallels or lessons to be learned from the broader animal kingdom. But surely - most folks tell me - surely it's a waste of everyone's time to try to connect the public policy concerns of today with the deep-space void of eons ago!

Not so - I reply! For any given policy issue, it is at a minimum - fascinating to be reminded that we are truly stardust made conscious - experiencing challenges of cosmic proportion! We can and should use a context of continuity in nature as a means for exploring the Big History of Brains, Schools, and Society!

Let me illustrate with our second methodological tool:

Methodological Tool #2: 

Keeping Our Brains in Mind

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt claims our minds evolved to
function "like a rider on an elephant" - Neuroscience confirms
our rationality (the rider) sits atop a beastly influential
emotionality (the elephant). We can and should teach this
to kids studying public policy! 

Going backwards in time, after we cross the Big History Project's Threshold of Collective Learning in Humans, we begin to increase our focus on the brain - which means decreasing the scale of our inquiry down to the level of neurons and ultimately to the molecule.

Public policies seek to regulate human behaviors - and therefore to shape human brains. Good public policies seek to create environments that move us towards feelings of security, empathy, and creativity, and to move us away from feelings and situations of fear, danger, and poor-health. A great deal is known on each of these subjects at the scale of the the brain, brain systems, and neurochemistry. A great deal is also known about the evolution of many of these brain systems. Yet - advances in neuropsychology and it's many related disciplines are not standard or easy fair in most secondary school classrooms!

I am NOT suggesting that studying the evolution or bio-chemistry of, for example, cortisol and dopamine systems, will or necessarily, or radically reshape the specific policy issue a student is looking at. What I am suggesting is that studying the evolutionary trajectory of critical psycho-physiological systems within the context of student-driven public policy issues is a powerful new approach to authentic integration of STEAM & Civics. It is my contention that the Next Generation Science Standards are best approached by starting with public policy - we should begin by looking at Project Citizen Through the Lens of Big History

Ok -  What is this actually looking like?
To be sure - at the PEAR Lab we are only dabbling in this approach for about 1 year now, and we do not as yet have a fully integrated case study to present (coming soon)! But we are dialing in on one specific topic area that offers profoundly authentic opportunities for K-16 classrooms around the world.

Kids love to play! Let's use that love to teach them
STEAM content - while transforming their school climate!

This is the educational public policy domain of play & sport. Students love to play around! When I was in High School I sure as anything wanted to be outside playing with my friends rather than being forced to solve the chemistry equations that I grew to despise.

What if we turn the tables?

What if we become honest with students about our current abilities and weaknesses to use science to inform the design and policies of modern-day schools? The rising science of play & sport offers a perfect opportunity to engage and empower students in improving their own school climate. What's more - the science of play & sport presents a model for transcending disciplines to look at real world issues. The science of play is evolutionary science, it is brain science, it is social science - and it is fun science! The science of play & sport is not monolithic - with live debate and discourse among high-level scientists - that can and must be made accessible for students as well.

By developing Project Citizen focused on the educational policies of play and sport - by viewing this issue through the lens of Big History and continuously keeping our brains in mind - it becomes clear this model represents a highly promising model to fuel student engagement, social-emotional development, and high quality STEAM education all within a single, generalized, and workable package. That's not to say it will be easy. PEAR Lab resources are in there early stages, and as we continue to argue - this work will require University-Assistance in collaboration with regional Secondary Schools.

I invite all students and faculty within EvoS Consortium Universities, and any educator passionate about evolution, brains, and/or civic engagement to join the efforts of the PEAR Lab and help to make this generalized model standard fare around the world!