Category: Economics

Posted on

Changing a Course on Development, Part 5

In my last post in this series, I discussed integrating the SCAMPER technique with student game design via a writing assignment and in-class presentations. I’m a firm believer in the benefits of iteration when it comes to learning, so I’m including a second round of game design. For the second round, students will again use SCAMPER, but this time they will actually build new games. Here is the preparatory writing assignment:

Problem

People frequently do not understand the relationships between economics, politics, and the environment. Games are powerful learning tools, but there are few high-quality games about these relationships.

Solution

Design a game that illustrates a relationship between economics, politics, and the environment.

Apply SCAMPER to an existing game other than the California Water Crisis game  — for example, Risk, Mahjong, Settlers of Catan, or Monopoly — to design a framework for a new game. Choose a topic of interest. Put the game in a specific context, such as “the effects of sea level rise in Boston” rather than “climate change.”

Audience

Write a proposal to Hasbro’s Product Development Division in which you discuss the new game you have designed by using SCAMPER on an existing game. Identify the topic of the new game, what features of the existing game will change, how they will change, and why these changes are beneficial.

After students have submitted their individual proposals, I will again cluster the class into teams. The members of each team will discuss their ideas, decide on a single design to pursue, and create and deliver in-class presentations. I’ve devoted a subsequent class session for teams to physically construct the games and another one for students to actually play the games. Debriefing will occur via another writing assignment, which will be the subject of my next post.

Links to the full series of posts on redesigning this course:

Posted on

Changing a Course on Development, Part 4

Despite varying degrees of success in my first-year seminar — which I decided to stop teaching — I’m going to again have students design board games based on course content. But I’m going to organize this process differently than before. 

There will be two rounds of game design and each will use SCAMPER, an acronym for a design thinking technique that I will demonstrate with an in-class exercise. In the first round, each student will complete a writing assignment that applies SCAMPER to the California Water Crisis (CWC) game used by Andrew Biro. Here is what SCAMPER looks like in this context:

  • Substitute: what part of the game can be substituted for some other part?
  • Combine: can two separate processes in the game be integrated into one?
  • Adapt: can an aspect of some other game be adapted for use in this game?
  • Modify: can a process that is part of the game be modified, enhanced, or simplified?
  • Put to other use: can a part of the game serve some other function within the game?
  • Eliminate: can any part of the game can be removed/omitted?
  • Reverse: what happens if some process in the game is reversed?

Here are the directions for the first round’s writing assignment: Continue reading “Changing a Course on Development, Part 4”

Posted on

Changing a Course on Development, Part 3

As a follow-up to Part 2 in this series, here are specific examples of how culling learning objectives and readings led to better alignment with assignments.

My old version of the course included the topics of poverty, aid, economic growth,  economic geography, corruption, and ethnic conflict. For the new version, I abandoned the last three of these as learning objectives. This allowed me to discard corresponding chapters from William Easterly’s The Elusive Quest For Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (MIT Press, 2001), plus other, shorter readings.

The old course had content organized under headings like “economic institutions” and “economic behavior.” While I am intricately familiar with these terms, students are not. As learning objectives, they are too broad. “Barriers to entrepreneurship” is more useful. As I mentioned in Part 2, students will see each of these objectives as a meta-prompts for reading responses, which are also now more specific. For example, in the portion of the syllabus where I am still using Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (Public Affairs, 2011):

Old assignment A

Why don’t the poor create their own microfinance institutions, instead of “waiting” for outsiders to do it for them?

New assignment A

Purpose of this response: learn about the role of insurance in mitigating economic risk.

  • Bannerjee and Duflo, Ch. 6, p. 133-156.
  • Gardiner Harris, “Borrowed Time on Disappearing Land,” New York Times, 28 March 2014.
  • Brooke Jarvis, “When Rising Seas Transform Risk Into Certainty,” The New York Times, 18 April 2017.

Can insurance help Bangladeshis minimize economic risk? Why? What about people living in Norfolk and Houston? Why?

Old assignment B

  • Bannerjee and Duflo, Ch. 10 and Conclusion, p. 235-274.

Is the pessimism of the Acemoglu and Robinson development model correct? Why?

New assignment B

Purpose of this response: learn about the effectiveness of public policy in a changing natural environment.

  • Bannerjee and Duflo, Ch. 10 and Conclusion.
  • Richard Conniff, “The Vanishing Nile: A Great River Faces a Multitude of Threats,” Yale Environment 360, 6 April 2017.
  • Community Water Solutions, “Empowering Women Entrepreneurs to End the World Water Crisis,” 5 April 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zUBOLzfrQo.

Will small, decentralized, community-based changes lead to large-scale sustainable economic development? Why?

Links to the full series of posts on redesigning this course:

Posted on

Changing a Course on Development, Part 2

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:

Posted on

Getting Rid of Everything But the Kitchen Sink

This post was inspired by the ideas that Erin Baumann, Harvard, and John Fitzgibbon, Boston College, presented at the APSA Teaching & Learning Conference two weeks ago. They pointed out that instructors, myself included, often begin the course design process from the content-centric position of what we want students to learn. We collect resources for student consumption that illustrate principles and facts that we think are relevant to the subject of the course. Content for learning triumphs over the process of learning.

When engaging in this sort of scavenger hunt for content, a potentially much more useful question to ask is “What don’t students need?” The value of this approach hit home during a redesign of my course on economic development. I’ve taught this course for years at a variety of universities, and while I always make it a practice to update the readings, the learning objectives with which they were associated remained a fairly static and not very well thought out conglomeration. For the fall 2018 semester, the course is being consolidated with another course on environmental politics, and I’ve been forced to think hard about how I can adequately serve both subjects simultaneously.

I concluded that my existing course design wasn’t very elegant. Though I was fairly satisfied with what students were doing in terms of assignments and exercises, my predilection for the subject material had caused me to fall into the trap of “it would be nice if I covered . . . ” rather than ruthlessly restricting my syllabus to only the most essential content.

I needed a new design process, so I tossed everything about the existing course into a spreadsheet. Then I identified old and new topics — learning objectives actually — that I thought were critical to the new course, and deleted everything else. Same for readings — I discarded whatever didn’t narrowly correspond to the now smaller number of learning objectives, and found a few new ones that did.

I’m sure students will be pleased with the shorter reading list, even though their ability to skip over the most important, more-difficult-to-digest material in favor of breezier newspaper and blog articles has been greatly reduced. I’m happier because the course will be less of a bugaboo to teach given the pared-down content.

Links to the full series of posts on redesigning this course:

Posted on

Food Matters

The Agricultural History Society has extended its call for proposals for panel sessions and papers for its May 2018 meeting in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA. The new deadline for proposal submission is January 1. The conference’s theme is Tropicana: Commodities across Borders. The theme locates the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America in a global history of commodity production and consumption. Full details on the CFP can be found here.

Since I have shepherded a new minor on food studies through our faculty governance system, and applied for a federal grant on the same subject, food as a field of academic study has been occupying a growing — pun intended — amount of my time and energy. I’ll probably be writing more on this blog about teaching food production and consumption systems during the spring semester, but for now here is a simple assignment that uses food to get at socioeconomic inequality, public health, globalization, and environmental sustainability:

  • First, ask students to collect grocery receipts, either from their parents or from members of the off-campus community.
  • Second, have the students go into the markets where the foods listed on the receipts were purchased to identify the origin of these foods. Fruits and vegetables, at least in major U.S. supermarkets, are labeled by country of origin. For processed foods, like canned soup, additional research into corporate supply chains will be required.
  • Using some guiding questions, have students analyze — either through discussion, an individual writing assignment, or a team project — what they have discovered about who buys certain foods, where, and why.  What broader conclusions can students reach about the effects of people’s food choices?

 

Posted on

Teaching Political Development with Imaginary Travel

Today we have the first of two more guest contributions by Gigi Gokcek of the Dominican University of California.

credit: Chad Raymond

Political development courses are inherently interdisciplinary, drawing upon economics, history, anthropology, sociology, geography, and political science. For students, however, this is a course about the politics of less-developed countries. I first taught this subject in a traditional way: readings on theory, methods, and cases about the Global South, with exams and a final research paper. This approach left me unsatisfied, despite positive teaching evaluations from students. I wanted to deliver a more animated, meaningful experience, the kind that comes from actually traveling to the places being studied. I also felt it was important that students understand the usefulness of creativity, discovery, and expression across a variety of disciplines. How could I do this without turning the course into a study abroad program that would exclude students who couldn’t afford the extra cost?

Albert Einstein once said that, “imagination is more important than knowledge.” I wondered if a thorough re-imagining of this course might allow it to better engage students in the analysis of development problems in the Global South. I redesigned the course as if I were the CEO of an international consulting firm, with students as employees who were regional and disciplinary experts on development issues. Working in pairs, their task for the semester was to investigate a specific development challenge in a country of their choice and offer a viable solution to the challenge to the country’s government. As the CEO, I required that each group present an oral and written report on their project. A pair of students even came up with a name for this imaginary firm: Gokcek Global Consulting.

Student projects included access to clean water, providing high quality public education in rural areas, safe travel through roads for children in gang-infested areas, and local policing of terrorism. Coincidentally all regions of the Global South (Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and Asia) were represented, even though this was not something I set out to achieve. Students selected countries or topics based on their own familiarity or curiosity. In most cases students already had traveled to or studied the selected country. Students learned about the multiplicity of factors that need to be considered when addressing a development problem, and the need to take a holistic approach to the study of any country. In short, without getting on a plane, students gained an appreciation and empathy for people living in the Global South.

Posted on

Ethnography of Consumption – A Twist

Buying is believing

The spring semester is ending here, and as usual everyone is dragging themselves across the finish line. There is not much left for students to do in my globalization course, but — given the structure of the U.S. higher education system — we still have to meet in the classroom. So, in search of something to fill time, I created an activity based on the last paragraph in my response to Leanne’s scavenger hunt exercise.

I collected some random products from home, all branded: running shoes (Saucony), cell phone charger cord (Samsung), bag of lentils (Jack Rabbit), hand towel (Cannon), and a tote bag to transport everything (London Review of Books). In class I laid all these items on a table and lied about getting them from a friend. I then told students to examine everything and write an answer to “What story is the owner of these things trying to tell others about the kind of person he or she is?” Students had already completed ethnographies of consumption, so they had some understanding of the connection between identity construction and consumption choices.

After five minutes, I grouped students into teams to create presentations, which they delivered during the second half of class. I got to listen to them unknowingly analyze my self-image as practical, value-oriented, and health conscious. (I would have been just as happy with other adjectives.) Once the last team had presented, I revealed that the items were my own by plugging my cell phone into the wall socket with the charger cord.

As a last minute invention, this activity worked fairly well. Students got to practice collaborating, communicating to an audience, and applying concepts. And all I had to do was bring a tote bag to class.

Posted on

A Place For My Stuff

Here is a quick report on using Leanne’s international trade scavenger hunt and a related exercise:

I awarded five points to any student who found an item from all five regions and five points for each unique item; all other rules were the same. In a class of thirteen students, nine posted photos to the online discussion. Points earned ranged from zero to twenty-five, for a course with a grading scale of 1,500 points. One student said he was unable to upload his photos; my response was “not my problem.”

As Leanne experienced, my class found very few items from sub-Saharan Africa. Two students took photos of clothing made in Mauritius, which really isn’t part of Africa, but I counted it as such anyway. When I asked what the scavenger hunt revealed about trade flows, they were for the most part clueless, and it took a lot of prodding on my part to get them to see the possible implications of the scavenger hunt’s results.

I found this a bit disappointing because the class had engaged in a similar exercise the week before, in which teams of students tried to identify the country of origin for every item they had with them in the classroom. After about ten minutes of students searching for labels, I compiled a digest of what they had discovered by writing on the board categories of items — such as “clothing” — and the countries from which the items originated. The purpose of the exercise, which I communicated to students after some discussion, was to demonstrate that everyone in the room was a participant in globalization, whether they were conscious of it or not.