From Challenging the Text to Constructing It in a Large Economics Classroom: Revealing the Not-So-Common Sense of the Capitalist Mode of Production

1. Introduction

In a large economics class, I invite students to organize themselves around the imaginary production of a capital good, and contract for its ownership and distribution of future output. The instructions are simple: negotiate among yourselves in small groups the terms of a contractual arrangement that would provide the builder of the capital good with the consumption goods needed to sustain her for the extended period of time she is engaged in the building process. Student groups most often negotiate shared ownership with the builder of the capital good. Students otherwise well steeped in the capitalist culture avoid the standard labor contract; worker-builders in each group are never simply paid for their labor and left with no claim on the output at the end of the production process. This student-generated outcome presents the class with an opportunity to discuss principles of fairness in the distribution of resources.

As this exercise can work in even the large classroom, it offers one example of how the persevering instructor might encourage active student learning around a broader, more pluralistic possibility of economics despite the considerable obstacles posed by the sheer size of a class. This paper explains my attempt to engage shades of a critical pedagogy in a large (80 to 120 students) elective economics course in money and banking. Orienting the reader first to my teaching objectives and then to the structure of both the course and the class in the context of students’ expectations, I examine the teaching process in a large classroom setting by elaborating on the above example. A brief reflection on some of the student concerns and a discussion of assessment strategies conclude the paper.

2. Broader Teaching Objectives, Focus, and Methods

As economics entails human decisions about the organization of production, distribution, and consumption for our material well-being, a particular focus of my teaching is on that decision making: what factors one need take into account, the bases upon which choices are made, defense of those choices, and translation into policy. Where neoclassical economics offers one possible outcome, my ideal of a university economics education sees active student engagement in the examination of pluralist economic content around a multiplicity of possible outcomes.

Since 2008, increasing attention has been devoted to renewed calls for pluralism in economics education. Janice Peterson (2013: 401), for example, argues that “the goals of a post-crisis economics education can be… pursued through approaches to economics education that are pluralistic in content and pedagogy, historically-based, and emphasize the role of institutions and institutional analysis.” As I argue elsewhere (Spotton Visano 2016a), active student engagement in an examination of pluralist economic content is not just a desirable pairing, it is a necessary one. Offering students an effective educational experience demands an organic consistency across the message, the delivery, and the goals in the heterodox economics classroom. A classroom experience centered on either pluralist content but passive student participation or one with active student participation shoehorned into precise neoclassical conclusions is otherwise a contradiction.

The attempt to introduce debate around broader content into an economics course through lecturing on that content retains the authoritative single voice. Attempts to broaden the pedagogical approach while restricting content to the neoclassical economics framework similarly thwarts the higher educational objective of equipping students with the knowledge they need to exercise their own judgment as future economists. And where scholars of economics education advocate pluralism in either form for advancing critical thinking skills, critical thinking skills alone reinforce the individualism inherent in the dominant ideology. Rather, for ensuring that the message, its delivery, and its educational aim are organically consistent. . . [I argue] for the hope inherent in unleashing the interrogative possibilities of critical pedagogy in a pluralist economics classroom. (Spotton Visano [2016a: 13]) ¹

The course director seeking a consistent message across both the content and the delivery of an economics education will explore pedagogical practices that encourage and enable students’ voices by developing students’ ability to critique, debate, and become active participants in their own learning. “To respect different discourses and to put into practice the understanding of plurality (which necessitates both criticism and creativity in the act of saying the word and in the act of reading the word) require a political and social transformation… as a transformative act [discourse] begins to assume an active and decisive participation relative to what to produce and for whom. The reinvention of power that passes through the reinvention of production cannot take place without the amplification of voices that participate in the productive act” (Freire and Macedo 2003: 359). The rather daunting challenge confronting the instructor of a large economics class is, though, how to engineer this possibility when the constraints imposed by class size limit the possibility of all students contributing equally to a single-threaded conversation?

3. The Setting

Money and banking is a third-year economics course offered by a traditional economics department at a large urban university in Canada. It is one semester in length, with thirty-six contact hours. The sections I teach are often those offered in three-hour blocks of time from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Students enrolled in the course are either economics or business program majors. Some have nonacademic full-time or day-time responsibilities (approximately ⅓), and most of the others pursue paid work at least part-time. Socioeconomic backgrounds vary across income and country of family origin, with a balanced gender composition.

Students come to this course having completed prior economics courses in which much of that content is solidly neoclassical, taught from a single textbook with the mode of delivery predominantly a lecture format—that is, the “stimulus-response” method of conventional pedagogy. Evaluation of student learning in these other courses relies heavily on invigilated examinations comprised of multiple-choice and possibly short answer/essay questions. Their prior economics experience is, in short, representative of the traditional economics education described by Michael Watts and Georg Schaur (2011). One significant deviation from the average educational experience they describe is the size of the class. Whereas the median class size in the 2010 survey that Watts and Schaur (2011: 299) examine “increased to 25 for… other upper-division courses,” the average class size in this university for these courses is much larger in all dimensions (see Spotton Visano and Petrie 2003). Furthermore, cost constraints limit the teaching support to “marker/grader” support only; no tutorials or other structured opportunities to discuss course material exist beyond that which the instructor is able to introduce in the time he or she has with the students.

Students begin the money and banking course with not just a familiarity but an expectation that the homogeneous and exclusive content delivered by an authority figure is the “right” way to experience their university education. As Brent Kramer (2007: 322) notes, the challenge to introduce heterodox content is considerable, but “an even bigger challenge is finding ways to incorporate the principles of popular education.” ² Additional challenges confront the woman instructor seeking to introduce these students to broader content, alternative delivery modes, in a more egalitarian classroom—challenges that are specific to her location in both the discipline and in the classroom. Indeed, these challenges have changed little from when Amy Bridges and Heidi Hartmann (1975) addressed the issue in this journal more than four decades ago. ³

With students expecting and valuing a process that “negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry” (Ford and Leclerc 2000: 484), engineering the necessary shift to a classroom preferred by educators seeking to advance student learning beyond passive reproduction of the status quo demands patience, experimentation, and considerable commitment. In the discussion that follows, I explain my attempt to bring about a shift in course content, as well as the large classroom dynamic and students’ expectations. ⁴ The course is loosely designed to scaffold both building on the students’ own experiences in the manner described by Ford and Leclerc (2000) and, with relatively more success, building the students’ confidence to assume increasing responsibility for the course in the manner outlined by Schneider (2010). The opportunity to adopt the full benefits of these two approaches is considerably constrained, however, by the sheer size of the class and requires careful preparation at the outset to encourage the needed shift in students’ perspective on their economics education. ⁵

The example introduced briefly above and elaborated on below offers the instructor—as a “guide on the side”—an opportunity to facilitate the students’ own exploration of their chosen outcomes to a problem posed by the instructor. It also happens to offer a response to Kramer’s (2007: 325) question about how we might introduce students to a system in which capital is not individually owned.

4. Beginning the Process—First-Class Objectives and Activities

The course begins with some introductory “meet and greet” exercises. Adaptation of the exercises suggested by Nancy Rose (2005: 342–43) to the larger classroom sees students first convene informally in pairs or small groups (see below, note 7, for mechanics). In this format, students address the following questions/prompts designed to encourage a familiarity with each other; an intentional focus on preferences concerning educational experience (including course delivery, content, and outcomes); and an awareness of their own priors with respect to economic circumstances and social dynamics.

The class then reconvenes as a whole, and students voluntarily share with the large group a sampling of their small group responses. The exercise serves as a springboard for a brief class discussion about teaching and effective learning methods. In the debriefing session, students are reminded that course instruction will use alternative methods and that course content will include a combination of institutional and mathematical approaches to the subject matter. The exercise helps to shape students’ expectations, bringing those expectations more in line with what they will encounter in the course.

The statements for discussion (3a, 3b, and 3c) offer students an opportunity to reflect concretely on the possibilities and the limitations of human decision and agency shaping circumstance. This opportunity confronts directly, if briefly, any priors they may hold about the assumed “naturalness” of a given process or outcome. One advantage of a large class is that there is a greater chance of at least one student offering an extreme viewpoint in the discussion of the statements, if only to be provocative. Extreme views introduce controversy that serve well to spark vigorous and fruitful debate on such foundational topics as income distribution, the causes of poverty, social or economic power balance, and individual versus social responsibility. These broader topics offer a contextual perspective on economics and finance to be recalled in later discussions of financial institutions, financial markets, and financial regulation.

Further encouragement of student attentiveness to the monetary economy as an intentional outcome of human decisions centers on the “Take a Walk” exercise (Stanford 2015). The exercise makes the study of money, banking, and finance relevant and widely accessible rather than remote, esoteric, and abstract, at least that is the intention. Guided by a series of prompts, students might reflect on the structure of work (inside and outside the home, paid and unpaid), the organization of movement, the provision of marketed and nonmarketed goods and services, and the use of money and credit in facilitating these transactions. Practically speaking, introducing the exercise in a large class means encouraging students to undertake a voluntary (ungraded) assignment outside of class time.

5. The Large Group Exercise

These first class activities set the stage for jointly developing our own monetary economy in the next (second) class. Adapted to the large group via a Q&A format, we recover the experiential dimension of the “Take a Walk” exercise in the development of a simple monetary economy through a series of questions posed (initially by the instructor) as problems to be solved. ⁶ In this second class, students imagine a situation of subsistence living, as a small group living in a wilderness environment. Their goal is to organize their production for the consumption of basic goods for survival. Notions of absolute and comparative advantage in allocating resources for production of basic goods and services are revisited (from earlier courses), as is exchange (marketed and nonmarketed), relative prices as terms of trade in the absence of money, and the instrumental advantages of a medium of exchange over barter. Here, as elsewhere, the Q&A focus the students’ attention on a sequence of decision problems (and rationales for each decision), underscoring that economics is not a force of nature; it is driven by series of human decisions. The exercise makes clear that decisions are complex, difficult, and always finally about people. As one colleague from the humanities (Professor Leslie Sanders, sitting in as a peer observer in the classroom) describes it,

On the evening I was present they were constructing a “metaphoric” economy, working out such questions as “What are the benefits of specialization?”, “What are the benefits of introducing a medium of exchange?” (a method familiar to readers of Plato, except with more latitude allowed the responders to the question, and much more humour). The students were fully engaged, many despite themselves… They were challenged, annoyed, impatient, fascinated. When I arrived, they had, apparently collaboratively, established a principle of “everyone according to their need” as long as they worked. But what if someone couldn’t work? A few were willing to say that they then could not eat. As soon as it was out of their mouths, they were visibly uncomfortable.

There is, in this second class, the opportunity to observe a connection between such outcomes and the previous class discussion of individual versus social responsibility, for example. At this point in the course, most students express a preference for a system that privileges the private ownership of resources and resulting distribution of output, open to negotiating exceptions only for extraordinary circumstances.

6. The Small Group Exercise—Negotiating Capital Ownership

Moving beyond simple production for immediate survival, I pose the creative possibility of producing a capital good in the form of an “idea” for a boat. The boat would permit more effective fishing and the possibility of more output (fish) for consumption but comes with the problem of how to feed the boat builder while she is devoting her productive hours to designing and building the boat for an extended period of time. Students are invited to form small groups of four or five per group. ⁷ Their task is to negotiate the collective group contract between the members of the small group, each of which includes one “boat-builder.” If the group wants the boat builder to work on the boat, they need to produce more food to feed not only themselves but the boat builder as well for the duration of the boat’s construction. What is the nature of the agreement reached? Students usually need only about fifteen to twenty minutes to work out the contract details.

7. Discussion

In the critical education and feminist pedagogy literature, there exist several texts discussing the challenges educators encounter in adopting nonconventional pedagogies (see, for example, Jakubowski and Visano 2002; Piovani and Togrul 2012). These challenges occur at every level of educational engagement, from the professional, through the institutional, and on into the classroom. In the brief discussion here, I restrict my comments to the classroom’s student-centered challenges.

As Garnett (2009: 65) reminds us, “[p]luralist education can create added uncertainty and emotional risks for students. To the extent that every step in the process of intellectual development ‘involves not only the joy of realization but also a loss of certainty and an altered sense of self,’ resistance is to be expected from most learners at some point” (Perry cited in Kloss 1994: 157). The uncertainty plays out in anxiety over how to perform well; resistance may appear in the form of criticism.

8. Soliciting Students’ Feedback

In keeping with the goal of more student-led participation in the course, I conduct a formative evaluation exercise halfway through the course, about three or four class meetings after the boat-building exercise. ⁹ In the form of either a “one-minute paper” or a short four- or five-question survey, the primary objectives are to poll students for their experience in the first half of the course as well as solicit their suggestions for the remaining half. ¹⁰ Participation is voluntary. At the time of encountering the survey, the students have, the previous week, completed an in-class exam comprised of short answer/essay on which they themselves provided input (see next section). Of the ninety-two students enrolled in one course, fifty-four (58.7 percent) chose to complete the midterm survey. Of those responding, forty-nine (90.7 percent of respondents; 52.3 percent of all enrolled) stated that they had come to value the class discussions. Only a handful of those responding maintained a clear preference for more traditional content and delivery with suggestions to return to the lecture format and mathematical calculation content to “help them understand the real world of finance.” Of course, the thirty-eight students who chose to not respond may have shared these conventional views.

One often repeated suggestion for improvement is a clearer connection between class discussion and the assigned reading material. (“Go straight to the material; skip discussions, more math, less class discussions and less open question please”; “More structured format please!!; Limit class discussions; I found the last class [on expected yield and risk] was the best so far.”) An important trade-off when seeking to engage students in more class discussion and small group problem solving is that less time remains for covering a wider range of topics. In class time, I am seeking to motivate and provide the foundation for their independent study of assigned readings covering course topics in more depth. Students familiar with the single authoritarian voice of a textbook struggle, however, to make connections between the class discussions and the readings, especially when offered a variety of readings by a variety of authors in a variety of media (popular business and economics press materials, central bank reports, and simpler scholarly articles).

As an instructor, I still struggle to find the right balance between (1) students’ preference for expediency, with clear and direct links to assigned reading material, preferably, they say, from a single textbook; (2) my desire to introduce them to the many different voices and perspectives on money, banking, and finance; and (3) my desire to see them take up problems of their own design. Although I believe that it is valuable per se to maintain a mindfulness of the tension, addressing students’ anxiety is always necessary. One strategy is to ensure that students have an opportunity to raise questions about assigned readings in the brief review of the previous class that begins each class meet. A second strategy is implicit in the overall guidance provided by the course outline and supplementary notes. I compile a minimum of two to three articles per class identified as either “required” or “supplementary.” A brief outline/summary of class notes (available to students on a course webpage just before the class meets) offers navigational guidance; when (many) students express a preference for additional guidance, it is a simple matter of expanding the content of the notes to make more connections explicit.

9. Assessing Student Performance

Assessment of students’ performance includes both examinations and short two- to three-page essay assignments designed to encourage an application of the functional principles discussed in class (“Is Bitcoin ‘money’?” “Will payday loans enable the production of greater economic output?”). Whereas the capital goods example invites students to work a problem from first principles on out to a functional solution in the form of a financial contract, the assignments invert the thought process by inviting students to examine a contemporary financial contract or institution in terms of its functional contributions.

With exams forming a component of the evaluation, developing the contours of the final exam collectively works well as a strategy to both reduce anxiety and promote deeper learning. As part of the in-class exam review exercise, students identify the material covered, propose a distribution of test marks across the identified material, and propose various exam topics and loosely structured questions. I set the exam and finalize the exam questions informed by their suggestions. This collective exam setting exercise helps allay students’ fears of any additional uncertainty introduced by the alternative modes of delivery and serves to remind students of good study and test-taking strategies.

In general, opportunity presents itself easily and naturally here for the class to debate briefly the pros and cons of different types of evaluation questions (closed- vs. open-ended, multiple choice vs. short answer, take home vs. in class) and different instructor expectations. The class decisions emerge gradually. On introduction of the possibility of joint exam setting, students are agog at what they anticipate will be “an easy A.” Often initial suggestions are for factual or definition-type questions in a take-home format. It only takes a brief exploration of the implications of this exam option to see most students oppose it and agree instead to a structure that will permit a better demonstration of their knowledge and the differentiable assessment of their learning. Most times too, the majority of students will come to eschew the take-home format when they reason among themselves that the exercise will require more work given that the questions should be more challenging and my expectations of content and presentation will be higher. Where take-home test questions might reasonably expect some research and possibly creative thought, such extensions of the material would be inappropriate for an in-class timed test. My expectation is that the in-class test should be an opportunity to demonstrate an understanding of the assigned material only rather than any extension and creative application of it.

Continuing with the capital goods example, students initially propose a take-home test comprised of such questions as “Define a capital good and give one example.” After some discussion, they settle on an in-class test with questions addressing the structure and purpose of different types of financial instruments or institutions and some paired economic function (money-exchange, equity-investment, banks-lending, for example). Whereas they propose the general parameters of a question (and so know on what to focus their studying), I alone draft the final wording of the questions. For example, “Evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of shared equity contracts (‘stocks’ or ‘shares’) for enabling the production of capital goods and economic output. What is a ‘bubble’ in stock prices? What are its potential economic consequences?”

10. Conclusion

The ideal of exploring pluralist content with more engaged modes of delivery in today’s large economics classroom confronts significant challenges from multiple sources. Content expectations driven by a profession that stubbornly adheres to the monism of a neoclassical paradigm is one source of pressure. Professional incentives discouraging the extra effort needed to move beyond the conventional “chalk-and-talk” lecture mode is another source. ¹¹ The challenges facing a woman instructor trying to promote a more egalitarian classroom can be even more overwhelming. With many, predominantly male, instructors adhering to the view that the teacher is a single “authority” in the classroom, students themselves come to expect this packaged approach as the “right” approach to their economics education. As class sizes grow with each new cut to university funding, the possibility of engaging students in anything but the passive learning lecture method covering traditional content becomes that much more remote. The upshot is considerable pressure on the heterodox instructor to conform, and especially so if that instructor is a woman.

Yet, the benefits of a more engaged classroom studying more pluralist economic content remain considerable. This paper sketched a teaching process for the large classroom designed to encourage student critique, debate, and active participation in their own learning. In either the large or small group format, posing open-ended decision problems to which students negotiate solutions is a technique that can work in even the large economics classroom. The summary presented here of an instructor-framed, student-led, small group exercise negotiating ownership of a capital good offers one example of a decision-making exercise that instigates lively debate. Student-negotiated outcomes include shared ownership of the capital good and so present the persevering instructor with a wonderful opportunity to encourage student reflection on the principles of “fairness” in resource ownership that underpin different economic structures.