I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, but given the recent bummers in eduction (crazy profiteering Brits, death of tenure certified), I thought it was a a good time to point out that there are people out there doing things right.
Here’s one example: Econ Stories, a site responsible for a couple of stellar videos on classical economic theory. Here’s one:
When I saw this, my first thought was a joyous “Hey, someone’s doing it right!”
Then I started to think about what made it right. Here’s what I came up with:
1) It’s unabashedly entertaining, well-made, and distributed on a platform accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
2) It directly addresses the question of why NORMAL people should care about what could look like abstract and inaccessible history/theory.
3) It doesn’t parrot a partisan interpretation, or a simple-minded notion of right or wrong. It allows for reasonable points on both sides (key to critical thinking).
4) It doesn’t simply present the information to be memorized, it asks the watcher to participate by making a choice (critical thinking again).
5) Finally, you can just tell everyone involved is madly in love with the subject matter.
And this is why amateurs make better teachers. It didn’t surprise me to find out that one half of the duo behind Econ Stories is not a professional economist. It doesn’t hurt that he works for an interactive agency, which explains the great production values.
But there’s also a professor involved, one who writes econ-based NOVELS — talk about effective forms of communication — as well as the Mercatus Center at George Mason University (stated goal: “connect academic learning and real-world practice”). (If you want more, this is all from the Backstory Page.)
Ideally, I think all disciplines should get on board with with these goal-oriented creative partnerships. I’ve noticed that social “science” BAs (econ, poly sci, sociology etc.) tend to get into lucrative media fields. But this is what I meant when I said the humanities needed to support itself — precisely by refusing to isolate itself from the real world; by getting its graduates into places where they won’t just use the lessons they’ve learned (that’s cliché by now) but where they can publicize those lessons.
If you really love Wittgenstein (or whatever) you should want as many people as possible to know about him. And that means thinking about the best platform for telling others about him. So where’s the interactive game for Socrates? Not happening. In fact, I have an admin friend who’s trying desperately to get faculty on board with these kinds of interactive learning projects. Some of them won’t budge; they’re too busy living in the past, on multiple fronts. I have more hope for the students, if we can just convince them not to go to law school…
Econ Stories is aptly named — stories are what people care about. Not treatises. Not articles that will get you tenure. Stories. And if you don’t have a story to tell about your subject? Maybe it’s time to rethink your career.
And the Mercatus Center is brought to you by… Charles Koch, of the Koch Bros, aka “the Tea Party’s and Scott Walker’s wallet.”
The one point that you’re missing is that this is also largely about how the very well-funded right is better at winning media wars and -ahem- at simplifying very complicated theories and entrenched historical political/economic/social battles down to stories and feelings.
“We” need to be better at getting our stories out, true. But we should also have a discussion about what forms of affect (feeling making) and simplification are we willing to manipulate?
No, we should not have a discussion and simplification is (simply) the only way to speak to a general audience. People who understand this have more money and power than people who don’t — hence the well-funded right. So perhaps the goal should be to get the money. At that point you’re welcome saturate the airwaves with whatever discussions you’d like to cram down people’s throats. I’ll be watching Family Guy.
I haven’t seen video no. 2, but video no. 1 (“Fear the Boom and Bust”) fails spectacularly on point no. 3, with its portrayal of Keynsian stimulus as a decadent night on the town, followed by the mother of all hangovers, with Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner as the enabling bartenders.
Wonder how you’d treat a student who didn’t address the text at hand?
Re: your point on stories. I’ll always remember the moment I first decided to be a mathematician. We were learning how to prove whether a sequence was bounded/monotone/convergent using mathematical induction, and my professor said something like, “Really, when you think about it, all mathematics is, is telling stories. Proofs are just precise, consistent stories.” And that’s what it has always been to me — which is why, I think, I’ve always enjoyed and been successful at communicating the joy of mathematics to people who have admitted an abject hatred of the subject. Too often mathematicians (and academics in general) lose the ability to communicate passionately and tell stories about their subject.
I also love the EconStories videos. I once tutored principles of economics, and quite frankly that video contains more information than [I'd wager] a goodly number of my students retained. And it’s way more fun than watching me draw endless models and diagrams on a blackboard.
Wow, I’ve never heard anyone talk about math stories before, but it’s a cool idea — I wonder, though, if precise and consistent are compatible with the element of suspense you’d find in traditional stories, though? If you find some funding, maybe you could make some Math Stories videos!!
Although I have never thought about it before, hearing these things described as “mathematical stories” really struck a chord in me.
I became a mathematician because I read Jurassic Park, which lead me to discover Chaos Theory. I’ll have to hunt down the exact quote someday, but what pushed me over the edge was something to the effect “Mathematicians probably don’t care if their work is being applied to something; they do it because they enjoy doing it.” Although I dislike teaching math, and I regret the debt I got in pursuing the PhD, I CANNOT regret having learned the math!
I have put my infant children to sleep describing quaternions, by going back to basic integers. (An infant doesn’t know what even an integer is–we have to start somewhere
I have tried to find time to write this out, a little more expanded, and in such a way that non-mathematicians could read it, but those who *want* to be mathematicians can work on perfecting their skills–but it’s difficult to find the time!
And I also need to build up a library of mathematical “story” texts–texts that describe mathematics, without having much “mathematical” in them. (I’ll recommend instantly the latest such book I read: “Here’s Looking at Euclid”.)
You’ve got me thinking about a great number of issues here…I hope you’re not too jaded to believe that academics can read your blog and get something valuable from it for our teaching and research careers. Your point in this post, for example, lends great weight to the notion that we ought not teach classes so much as facilitate them, by which I mean that I usually have as much to learn from my students as they from me, even if the kinds of teaching and learning we exchange are vastly heterogeneous. In any case, I think what you’re doing is important and I always look forward to reading more.
I’m only surprised by my academic following because so many people I met while still teaching had their heads in the clouds, and couldn’t even begin to face the reality of what was going on. And to be frank, I’ve never been a huge fan of the “learning from the students”/facilitating model because it allows people (mostly non-teachers, I guess) to cling to their fantasies of students bringing something — anything, really — to class. In my experience, they didn’t want to be there in the first place, they didn’t want to work, and even if by some miracle they did they were incapable of sustained focus. So teaching mostly felt like selling them a product, hoping they’d get maybe a simple, vague takeaway. I wouldn’t call that learning in any real sense, but it’s something, and this video does it remarkably well. It tries, anyway.