CTaLE Associate Christa Hansen shares her perspective on the recent EconTEAching session that launched CTaLE’s Communities of Practice.

I provide here a retrospective review of the October 17, 2023 EconTEAching seminar, opening the Communities of Practice Initiative, marking the 30^th EconTEAching seminar in total.

As described on the CTaLE Communities of Practice webpage, ‘Better Together’ has always been a core value of CTaLE’s work. I myself am a recent new Associate member of this group, and was introduced to CTaLE in a manner just as described, through a jointly hosted community engagement initiative, co-hosted by the Royal Economics Society, Imperial College London (my home), UCL and LSE.

The Communities of Practice Seminar, which may be viewed here, provided a fascinating panel post-pandemic post-mortem. Following the economic, social, health and welfare (need I name more?) shock that was COVID-19, the economic teaching community shifted. There was the obvious significant focus of a move to online teaching and assessment. Additionally, how to update best practices, and maintain quality assurance. Today, where do we go from here? As Parama Chaudhury, CTaLE Director (UCL) stated: “…we’ve gotten a lot of feedback…on areas that people are working on and who want to connect with others. We felt like we couldn’t not do anything on this front so this is…setting that up and I’m excited to see what happens next.”

The seminar was excellently chaired by Cloda Jenkins, CTaLE Associate Director. There was a discussion of a somewhat disparate global Economics Education community; a discipline in my personal opinion, which is traditionally focussed on research. The irony of this, Economics is an area of  research requiring a strong yearly output of students with a solid, undeniable grasp of the fundamentals backing this research as well as ones with an interest in pursuing this discipline at a higher level. Naturally, resolving this critical disconnect between educators is crucial, and was one of the key reasons CTaLE, among others, was formed. There was some discussion in the seminar about additional virtual economics educators groups, including X (formally Twitter) and LinkedIn. Post-pandemic, and with artificial intelligence already in the classroom, whether in-person or virtual, economic educators are wanting to connect, and build communities of practice.

There was an interesting spread across the panel about communities of practice, and collaboration. From his very well-structured basement workspace, which is always a pleasure to see, Douglas McKee (Cornell University), provided very clear points. He highlighted in his experience, how his research collaborations fed into his teaching community, and likewise in reverse. Although, he observed it may be difficult to find a physical community in your department focussed on teaching. Additionally, he elaborated that many educators find it difficult to make those collaborations or find time for research, and suggested The Economic Education Network for Experiments (EENE.org) as a forum for educators to work together with others to run synchronised studies in their classrooms. Lastly, Doug suggested something that resonated quite highly with me personally. He suggested another way to collaborate is to go outside of your discipline, as in cross-discipline based education-based research reading groups, where often overlapping issues and interests arise. Let me provide a bit of context as to why I found this of interest.  

I have a PhD in Economics, with a focus in Health. I write research for Imperial College Business School, advise at our School of Public Health, and am a Teaching Fellow on the Faculty of Medicine at the Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI), teaching Health Economics and Digital Health Leadership to a largely NHS clinician postgraduate base. Sound messy? It is. However, in less than a year of joining my cross-disciplinary teaching post, I connected with another economist, joined his writing group, and our first book chapter came out last week in print. This is the same reason why being a part of such a diverse group such as CTaLE is so helpful.

The seminar also covered other very useful practical topics such expanding existing in-person communities of practice. Kripa Freitas (University of Toronto) stated their department instituted this concept beginning in 2016 through a summer seminar series covering 6-8 weeks. She indicated it is a very open and vulnerable forum with people being willing to share ‘Here is what we tried’ and ‘Here is what didn’t work’. Ultimately, as the group grew, they transitioned to more external speakers, and now have a solid group of approximately 70 colleagues, with 30-40 attending regularly every week. Parama Chaudhury discussed the flexibility of CTaLE, with scheduled virtual activities such as these seminars, as well as impromptu in-person meetups driven by schedules if someone is in town and wants to connect. Stefania Paredes Fuentes (University of Southampton) commented on how connecting outside your own university allows individuals to expand their impact, expanding on Douglas McKee’s research comments on sample size – we know we would like more!

Have a wonderful holiday season. Please do join us for the next EconTEAching seminar in the new year, on Wednesday January 10, 3-4 GMT: Working with Student data: What to Consider (link: Working with Student data: What to Consider (ctale.org)). If you’re lucky you might even see Doug McKee’s fantastic workspace again.

Thank you for reading,

Dr Christa Hansen
Imperial College London

Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI)
Centre for Health Economics & Policy Innovation (CHEPI)
Centre for Teaching and Learning Economics (CTaLE), UCL

Image credit: UX Indonesia