Diversifying the ‘Great Economists’: An Assignment to Promote Inclusivity and Belongingness in Introductory Economics Courses

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I present an innovative assignment designed to promote inclusivity and belongingness in the undergraduate economics classroom while also allowing students to gain familiarity with prominent economists and understand how their economic contributions are embedded within social, historical, and political contexts. Students are asked to create a presentation in which they give a biography of a ‘Great Economist,’ explain in detail one of the economist’s major contributions, and relate that concept to current course content, the economist’s life, and their own lives. To diversify who is considered a great economist, I have students choose from a pre-set list of economists and associated contributions. Purposefully curating a list of economists allows for the representation of a wide range of pluralistic and mainstream economic perspectives in addition to social identities and lived experiences, which students discover through their research. The assignment is structured to promote significant learning following Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning and informed by key principles of feminist and critical pedagogy. I provide an instructional overview of the project, including recommendations for implementation in a face-to-face or online learning environment, considerations for crafting a list of economists, and end with observations from my own experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Economics education
• diversity and inclusion
• economics pedagogy
• feminist pedagogy
• race and gender

JEL CODE:

• A2

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editorial team for their insightful comments and suggestions for improving this manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Following the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession (2020), underrepresented racial/ethnic minority groups are defined in this paper as Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino/Latinx, and/or Native American, American Indian, or Alaska Native based on their historical underrepresentation in the economics profession.

2 Freire describes the banking concept of education as a passive learning strategy, specifically, as an ‘act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor,’ (2014, p. 72).

3 This assignment would work best in classes of up to about 50 students, which would require 10 groups and therefore, require class time for 10 15-minutes presentations. Modifying the assignment so that groups complete videos and upload them to online discussion boards where students watch the videos on their own could be one way of modifying the activity for a larger class size.