UC Santa Cruz - Center for Teaching Excellence

John Isbister – Teaching Statement 2005-06
Professor, Economics

I teach courses that are quite diverse, both in subject matter and in size. In terms of subject, they range from basic economics to moral philosophy, and in terms of size, from small seminars to large lecture courses with up to 400 students. What is common to them all is my core belief that it is the job of a teacher to help students to think. I want my students to be able to think profoundly and systematically. They all have opinions, of course, but most of those opinions are one-liners. I want them to learn how to construct a real argument, how to ground those arguments on first principles, how to be persuasive, how to marshal evidence in a way that is logical and coherent. I want them not just to respond to the events in their lives, but to learn how to shape their lives. In the economics courses, I want them to see economic theory and principles not just as formulas to be memorized but as ways of arranging and interpreting reality so as to make sense of it and to improve upon it. In the ethics courses, I want them to be able to explain in ways that are powerful and convincing why some things are right and others wrong. I have my own strong opinions about all the issues we discuss, and I express them, but I try not to impose them. The students have academic freedom, just as I have, and if they end up disagreeing with me totally, that’s fine. But I want them to come to their views through analysis and hard work.

I teach courses for both the Economics Department and Merrill College. For Economics, I teach large lecture courses in introductory micro and macro economics, and several upper-division courses. Lately I have mostly been teaching an upper-division course that I created six years ago, entitled Economic Justice, and I have also taught courses on economic development in low-income countries and immigration. At Merrill, I put together a freshman honors program when I was provost. Basing our decisions mostly on an application essay, we selected 20 students out of an incoming class of about 300, and offered them a year-long program: a section of the core course led by the provost in the fall, a writing course in the winter, and a course on “modern moral problems” that I taught in the spring. Since stepping down as provost, I have continued to teach the honors course in ethics each spring.

I think I do a good job with the large introductory economics courses, but I find them tough. The students have varying levels of motivation. Particularly these days, the great majority of economics students want to be majors in Business Management Economics. They want to learn how to be successful in business, but many of them are not fundamentally interested in economics. Or, perhaps to be fair, I should say that some of them are not fundamentally interested in my approach to economics, since I treat the subject as a social science, and not as a part of a business-school curriculum. So those courses are a challenge for me. My basic strategy is to be enthusiastic about the material, to treat it as if it were incredibly important (as in fact it is), and to do everything I can to entice the students into taking it seriously. I succeed with some of the students, not with others. Every quarter I tell my TAs (and at the same time that I am saying it to them, I am saying it to myself), that they must approach their teaching as if it mattered enormously. I tell them that if they convey the impression that economics is fascinating, there is a fighting chance that their students will be infected with their enthusiasm and throw themselves into the subject. But if they convey the impression that this is humdrum stuff, their students won’t stand a chance. Between my TAs and myself, I think we get through to quite a few of the students.

I have always taken an interdisciplinary approach to economics. Many economists do interdisciplinary work, but what they usually mean by this is that they apply economic methodology (that is, utility-maximizing principles) to areas normally thought to be non-economic, such as military and political strategy and family structure. I do the opposite. I immerse myself in the methodology of other disciplines and try to see how those methodologies can illuminate fairly traditional economic issues. In the past, I have often used approaches from political science, sociology and history. For several years now, I have been mostly interested in the methodology of moral philosophy, particularly a branch of that subject known as “applied ethics.” My course on economic justice uses philosophical constructs from such writers as Mill, Rawls, Singer and Nozick (as well as economic philosophers Friedman and Sen) to examine such economic issues as income distribution, tax policy and foreign aid. In my Merrill course on ethics I leave economics altogether, and take a philosophical approach to such pressing current issues as affirmative action, abortion, free speech, capital punishment and animal rights. Always the emphasis is on analysis and argument.

As a way of helping students succeed, I give them writing assignments in every course. In economics courses, instructors typically assign problem sets rather than essays. I assign a lot of problem sets too (lately, through quite innovative web-based programs), but I always include at least one essay and sometimes more. I am convinced that students think best by writing. In the courses on ethics, the students do a lot of writing, including quite a few short five-page papers and longer term papers. When I teach a seminar on ethics, I read all the papers, but when the course is large (the Economic Justice course this coming spring is going to have between 180 and 300 students), I have to devote a lot of attention to helping graduate students and readers learn how to respond effectively to student writing, writing which varies widely in terms of competence.

I have taught for a long time (it is 38 years since I first joined this faculty), but I still get nervous before almost every class. Who am I, I find myself asking, to present myself as an authority on this subject? Surely this time the students will pierce the veneer and see the fraud. But then I tell myself: no, I’m still a student, much like them. This is not so much a master-apprentice relationship as it is a mutual journey on which we are all embarked. It will have lots of false turns and errors before we finish. But what matters is the inquiry.