Back in February, I wrote about using the question “What don’t students need?” to help me redesign my course on economic development — a guiding principle that is very different from “What do I like to teach?”
This last question got me thinking about my history with the subject and how that has affected my preferences when teaching it. I can thank Dr. William Joseph for first introducing me to the political economy of Third World development in an undergraduate course that I took decades ago at Wellesley College. His course sparked an interest that would eventually become the foundation of my academic career. At the time, the field was transitioning away from the binary lenses of modernization theory and post-colonial thought and toward new institutional economics. A standard syllabus would begin with Western imperialism, progress through post-independence struggles in a global capitalist order, and end with the success stories of newly-industrialized states in East Asia. There would be some discussion of international financial institutions — the IMF and World Bank — along the way.
For today’s War on Terror generation, decolonization, the Green Revolution, and Japan’s post-World War II industrialization are ancient history. These topics are both relevant and fascinating for a historically-minded person like me, but I only have fourteen weeks in the semester and my students will probably never take another course on economic development.
I culled the reading list a second time while trying to keep the above in mind, and more readings went into the rubbish bin. In the process I created some parsimonious alignment between learning objectives and writing assignments, which in turn led to an easy set of meta-prompts to preface those assignments. Each meta-prompt begins with “Purpose of this response: learn about . . . ” and ends with the specific learning objective that the assignment targets. Here is the list of those objectives:
- The nature of poverty and perceptions of the poor.
- Foreign aid.
- Demographics and carrying capacity.
- Causes of economic growth.
- The role of agriculture in development.
- Human capital.
- The management of market externalities.
- Effects of and barriers to savings, credit, insurance, and entrepreneurship for the poor.
- The relationship between property regimes and natural resource management.
- The socioeconomic consequences of urban development policies.
- The effectiveness of public policy in a changing natural environment.
I’ll be posting more about redesigning this course in the coming weeks.
Links to the full series of posts on redesigning this course: