Dear PEN-L, Thanks to everyone who replied to my questions about the practices that people use in their teaching. I'm not an economist or a college teacher, but I wanted to respond a little bit and to pose a few additional questions. I'm curious about whether or not people have read any of the material that's been written over the past couple of decades about "critical pedagogy," "empowering education," etc.. Although I don't think I'm very well-versed in the different theoretical aspects of this stuff, I've read several books and articles this summer, and I think that the basic principles (at least those articulated by people like Paulo Freire, Ira Shor, and Myles Horton) are extremely important and useful. Shor's work in particular addresses college teaching. I'm also wondering to what extent people structure their classes around some of the basic concepts of political economy--class, exploitation, alienation, etc.. In the spring of 1998, I took a 16-credit, one quarter class at Evergreen called "Micro- and Macroeconomics, the Neoclassical vs. the Political Economy Paradigm." The class examined neoclassical economics from a critical perspective and at the same time examined different concepts from ecological economics and from radical political economy. One of our main texts throughout the quarter was a draft of a political economy textbook by Robin Hahnel, which set out a set of values--solidarity, equality, self-management, efficiency, diversity--and then examined the different ways in which economies can be organized to see how well each one satisfied those values. The book criticized private enterprise, and also market allocation, by looking at how they produced alienation and exploitation, persistent externalities (which Hahnel argued exist everywhere in capitalism and are not just special cases), etc.. It also evaluated different variations of central planning and "market socialism" as well as the "participatory economics" model that he and Michael Albert created. Towards the end of the class, we spent some time talking about the participatory economics model, and a section of the final paper was devoted to describing our own models for an ideal economic system. Although I think there were problems with the class, I think the goal of the class was a very good one. It sounds like people are doing really good work to help students think critically about neoclassical economics, but I think that it's important to help students go beyond criticizing neoclassical economics to putting forward their own values and analyzing for themselves how different policies or institutions will embody or contradict those values. In order to go as far as possible in helping students to develop the confidence and the ability to pose far-reaching questions, to think through problems for themselves and to create their own analysis, it seems classes should (1)be structured democratically--so that students can participate in shaping the syllabus; (2) use "problem-posing," so that students work as much as possible to analyze things for themselves, and to appropriate the skills and concepts that they need in order to solve problems rather than to absorb information simply because it's part of a syllabus; (3) go beyond criticizing neoclassical economics, and work overtly to develop concepts that help students to understand how what goes on in the economy reflects various interests, to think deeply about their own interests, and to propose changes that serve those interests. I don't mean any of this as a criticism of people's teaching, and I have no idea what's possible to do within the constraints of a single class or of an academic program. I guess I just don't have a clear idea of how people's goals compare to my own, and I'm curious to know more about what people hope to accomplish as teachers and how they hope to accomplish it. Ok, thanks again to everyone who's responded. It sounds like you're all doing good work. --Mitch Chanin ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
