Teaching statement

I have been teaching full-time at Vanier College since February, 2004, with the exception of one year’s leave while I did the coursework for the Ph.D., and another year at 40% workload for the same reason. Over this period, I taught a median of eight sections per year, or 13 hours of class-time per week.

Vanier is a CEGEP (Centre d’Éducation Générale et Professionnelle), an institution I believe unique to Quebec. To provide some idea of the level of education it provides, its students enter at 18 years of age, and the programme is designed to take two years to complete. All students pass through CEGEP before moving on to university. Essentially, it combines what in the rest of North America is the last year of secondary and the first year of undergraduate university education. For example, a bachelor’s degree in Quebec requires three years’ study after CEGEP, but four for those who come from North American high school. The required qualification to teach in CEGEP is a post-graduate degree in the discipline, rather than a teaching degree, although Vanier encourages post-secondary pedagogical training.

Teachers at CEGEP have nearly full autonomy, which requires us to develop strong pedagogy. Directives from the relevant government body, the Ministry of Education, Leisure and Sport (MELS) are competency-based, which leaves very wide leeway for what is actually taught. Course content is determined collaboratively at the departmental level, and the organization and delivery of the class is entirely at the teacher’s discretion. As can be imagined, this leads to some worry about equity across sections. In our case, this is particularly problematic in the macroeconomics courses. All incoming social science students must take this course, so there are many sections concurrently taught by different teachers. In addition, macro by its nature is more heterogeneous than micro; a teacher’s own ideological position tends to have much more influence in which kinds of theories are presented. This is an important aspect of the sub-discipline, and therefore raises a serious dilemma: how to ensure equity across sections, while allowing faculty full academic freedom to present material they feel comfortable with? While this issue remains contentious, in my work with the curriculum committee I have elaborated a framework based on Bloom’s taxonomy, by which teachers would have freedom over content, but would be constrained in the “level of thinking” they assess. The MELS competencies are easily assessed by this taxonomy, and thus induce a balance of knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation in the assessments. Pilot tests with this breakdown have been very positive as to its capacity to create diverse, yet equitable, courses.

One of the main obstacles to making economics accessible, I find, is students’ lack of so-called “prior knowledge” about the concepts involved. This is a disadvantage, for instance, compared to many other social sciences. Students have social roles, so they can relate intimately to sociology; they have brains, so recognize the patterns described by psychologists. GDP and inflation, on the contrary, are further from their daily lives. I have developed three different kinds of activity to address this. First, and most simply, I have them read and summarize news articles on a regular basis. We may be living in the “interesting times” of the Yiddish curse, but at least it’s easy to relate economics to many of the major news stories now current.

Second, I engage the class with participatory “games”. These range from the simple two-player games such as the Prisoner’s dilemma or the Centipede game, with random students drawn to play, up to an Excel-based simulation game in which three different sections of a class operate as different “countries,” each with a monopolist (representative) firm that hires labor from the student “households”, to produce a different good. Students are required to choose a percentage of their income to spend (this could be extended to choosing a Cobb-Douglas maximizing consumption bundle), and a labor supply. There are also relatively fully articulated firms and governments, as well as banks. The set-up is quite flexible, and can be used to illustrate many different macroeconomic principles. I also designed a modified version for the course I developed in Ecological Economics, which had the form of a dynamic public goods game with a logistic-growth renewable resource and individual decisions about how much to harvest, on a scale from 0 (theoretical Maximum-Sustainable Yield) to 1 (individually rational Nash-Cournot reaction). These simulations are designed to give students experience with the effects of different economic policy tools such as changes in the interest rate, direct stimulus spending, and social safety nets. I find that these games are quite successful in raising student engagement, and also in illustrating the behavioral implications of different theories and policy measures.

The third kind of prior-knowledge activity I have adopted is a version of the “invention” technique. To give one example, the class before discussing equilibrium I ask students to consider a carnival game with a plastic duck in the middle of an enclosed dome. Players around the dome shoot pop guns through small openings, trying to push the duck towards the opposite side. If the duck hits the side, the player opposite wins a prize. The question is how to get the duck to move automatically back into the middle of the floor for the next game. Students are quite inventive, often using magnets or water or springs – someone usually thinks of a bowl-shaped floor. Discussion of the inventions reveals that they all have some force pushing the duck, such that when the duck is in the middle of the floor, the forces balance out. Students seem to be able to make the connection to the forces of supply and demand, and thereby to gain some intuition for market equilibrium.

One of the features which distinguish my teaching from that of my colleagues is technological integration. The simulation described above is an example; one term I had students enter their decisions via a Web-based survey form on Google Docs. I often use formulas in Excel on overhead projectors to show national accounting or inflation calculations, or illustrate multiplier effects. Excel’s highlighting of the cells used in calculations makes this very graphically intuitive. I have also been experimenting with “clickers”, and so far have found them a very good tool for general, day-to-day assessment of student understanding. One technological platform I largely avoid is PowerPoint; I don’t particularly like learning from it, so I don’t teach from it. (That said, I do have a weakness for the free-form custom animations.)

My strongest quality as teacher is patience. While we all succumb occasionally to teaching to the top of the class – and nor does it make much sense to do the opposite – I often make a point of stopping to “pick up the fallen apple”. Serious problems of miscomprehension are almost never as isolated as one hopes, and I am still often struck by how one direct question, dealt with fully, can turn a non-responsive audience member into a participative student for at least the rest of the hour.