[G03-11] 教養教育における統合科学としてのビッグヒストリー
キーワード：ビッグヒストリー 、学際融合科目、大学初年次教育
Big history is a multidisciplinary subject covering the entire history of the Universe (from 13.8 billion years ago to the present) by integrating ideas from disciplines such as cosmology, chemistry, biology, geoscience, and history (https://school.bighistoryproject.com/bhplive). It provides a broad description of how the past has unfolded. David Christian of Macquarie University in Australia was the first to offer a university-level course of Big History in 1989, together with colleagues from diverse fields in sciences, humanities and social sciences. Since the 2010s, Big History has been offered as a standard course for high school and university students in Australia, the United States, Europe, and Asia. At UC Berkeley, ChronoZoom was developed as an intuitive, visual approach to organize and aid the comprehension of time relationships between Big History events (http://eps.berkeley.edu/~saekow/chronozoom). In Japan, a similar multidisciplinary research project had begun as a national project of “Decoding the history of the Earth” in 1995. Although lots of new findings came from the research project, few undergraduate education and/or high school-level STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) courses have been developed. Most of the present geoscience education courses correspond to “zooming in” lectures to understand key concepts through the lens of different disciplines. Alternatively, Big History provides an opportunity for students to broaden their horizons by integrating different disciplines within the sciences and humanities and providing an interconnected view to address social issues. This is important to equip students to resolve complex and interconnected problems on a global scale, which do not neatly fall into isolated disciplines. In 2015, one of the authors first offered a Big History course for international students at Tohoku University. Then, in 2016, Oberlin University began to offer a Big History course for undergraduate students with two professors from social science and physics. In 2017, our institution, Tohoku University started offering a Big History course (mixing Japanese and English) for first-year students taught by an astrobiologist, a biologist, a geologist and an archeologist. In this presentation, we introduce our course concept and some of the interactive activities related to Big History to share our experience with JpGU scientists and instructors. Our course aims to reveal the entire story of the Universe from the Big Bang to the present and to show how scientists interconnect ideas from entirely different disciplines to unfold a coherent narrative of the past. Among other things, we use interactive communication tools, such as Socrative and Mentimeter to engage students in class and hold an outdoor lecture. Big History connects geoscience to past events in cosmology and also leads students to understand the deep connections of their lives to our planet. We hope that such multidisciplinary instruction done in an interactive, student-centred fashion can attract more JpGU scientists and instructors to offer their own version of a Big History course.