UG Expeditionary Thursday Update

In the Big History Project, students zoom all the way out to a cosmic scale. They consider timeless questions such as

• “Where did everything come from?”
• “Where are we heading?”
  

To consider these questions, students explored different rooms in the American Museum of Natural History: Universe, Earth, Dinosaurs, Human Origins. There they searched for evidence of how changing scales in time and space helps us better understand our place in the Universe.

In the second year of the Big History Project, students are learning about early humans, connection to primates, and collective learning. Thursday's fieldwork provided students with the opportunity to use the American Museum of Natural History as a research resource. They created a fieldwork journal full of evidence that will help further their understanding of early humans prior to starting Investigation 6.

Our juniors are working on reading & writing from another person’s perspective. To develop this empathetic stance, they (figuratively) walked in their character’s shoes. Students traveled across the city, stopping to ruminate on a particular group of people at each destination.

• Federal Hall
  
• Staten Island Ferry
  
• 9/11 Memorial
  
• Museum of the Native Americans

Taking the streamlined theme of "Inclusion," our study of the 14th Amendment, we invited Council Member Brad Lander for his final address (He has been term-limited out of his seat) to speak to the entire senior class about his greatest challenge in this council district: inclusion. In the afternoon, students researched inclusion in arts and culture around the city:

• Fraunces Tavern (inclusion in the American Revolution),
• The Met Breuer (inclusion in American political theory),
• The AMNH (inclusion on American Indian Reservations), and
• El Museo del Barrio (inclusion in inclusion in Puerto Rican politics)