Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2019
Publication Title
International Journal for Students As Partners
Abstract
In teaching economics, the instructor scaffolds what they teach on an implicitly assumed or explicitly recognized ethical vision. Such a vision holds true even as economists often separate “positive economics” from “normative economics,” claiming positive economics finds its basis in data and theory whereas normative economics concerns the ought or ethical statements that data or theory may imply (Davis, 2016). Economics, furthermore, suffers from lack of diversity: from white men constituting the majority of researchers and teachers, to textbooks that fail to show the diverse range of real people participating in the economy (Aerni, Bartlett, Lewis, McGoldrick, & Shackelford, 1999). In contrast, students taking economics at the undergraduate level, and particularly at Smith College, a liberal arts college in Massachusetts where I teach as an assistant professor, are especially diverse. I believe, therefore, that the choices about what an instructor teaches in a course and how that instructor does so are ethical choices in teaching. These choices cohere around an instructor’s pre-analytic vision of what a course ought to achieve, how the instructor models for students what constitutes good economics, or how diverse voices improve economics (Schumpeter, 2006/1954).
Keywords
economics, statistics, partnership, ethics, pedagogy
Volume
3
Issue
1
First Page
182
Last Page
189
DOI
doi.org/10.15173/ijsap.v3i1.3623
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Rights
Copyright (c) 2019 Simon David Halliday
Recommended Citation
Halliday, Simon, "Promoting an Ethical Economics Classroom Through Partnership" (2019). Economics: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/eco_facpubs/13
Comments
Peer reviewed accepted manuscript.