Since 2013, Professor of Economics Rajiv Sethi has worked with the UK-based group CORE (Curriculum Open-Access Resources for Economics) to develop high-quality, open-access instructional content, distributed worldwide under a Creative Commons license. A $290,000 award from the Teagle Foundation will allow Prof. Sethi—along with department colleagues Prof. Homa Zarghamee and Prof. Belinda Archibong—to establish the first branch of CORE in the United States. This chapter will work to expand the vision that economics should be an inquiry into the fundamental problems facing humanity today and to ensure that the resources necessary to implement this vision continue to be freely available online.
Prof. Sethi is the grant’s principal investigator, with Prof. Archibong and Prof. Zarghamee as co-investigators; all three will serve as project directors. Under their direction, and in collaboration with CORE, they will build a coalition of faculty members and graduate students who are engaged with this approach to teaching economics. At Barnard, the initiative will take shape in a workshop series for faculty and graduate students who will be selected through a competitive application process and provided with stipends and partial reimbursement of travel costs.
"The workshop will involve faculty at all levels and Ph.D. students approaching the start of their careers, but the materials they will work on will be suitable for use in undergraduate courses,” Prof. Sethi said. “So Homa, Belinda, and I will each teach a section of Introduction to Economic Reasoning (BC 1003) using CORE during the 2017-18 academic year, like many of the other workshop participants.”
Short-term goals include creating a cohort of new Ph.D. graduates who are confident, networked, and excited about teaching economics. Graduate students who complete a workshop will be certified as CORE-Teagle Fellows, a distinction Prof. Sethi hopes will help to illustrate their level of commitment to education.
The first workshop will take place at Barnard, August 17-19, 2017.
