Moving forward, looking back - historical perspective, ‘Big History' and the return of the longue durée: time to develop our scale hopping muscles

‘Big history' is a term receiving a great deal of attention at present, particularly in North America where considerable sums of money have been invested in designing curricula and assessment tools to help teachers teach history at far larger scales of time than normal. Hawkey considers the pros and cons of incorporating components of ‘big history' into history curricula , recognising some of the limitations of the approach, but nevertheless finding important ideas upon which history teachers might draw. In particular, Hawkey identifies three ways in which teachers might start to think about how some of the ideas of ‘big history' might find a home in current history curricula...