Decipher Financial Puzzles in Media and Pop Culture: A Digitally Engaged Teaching Case Study
The session addresses the theme in the following ways:
(1) The presentation will serve as a digitally engaged teaching case study where a new course was designed and implemented to weave creative and artistic practices into financial education. The course design started before the pandemic hit North America and once the lockdown started, all the course presentations had to be shifted online. As a result, some of the course activities had to be redesigned and made location-agnostic. The goal is to be able to offer this course both in-person and online as a response to the fluidity of the situation.
(2) Course-content wise, the new seminar course which is at the center of this presentation addresses the uncertainty around financial system, especially in the wake of the financial crisis.
(3) As a professor in a STEM field, and an amateur/emerging playwright, I have been championing theatre-as-pedagogy and narrative mathematics since 2016. The larger goal of integrating arts and science education is at the center of the course design.
(1) The presentation will serve as a digitally engaged teaching case study where a new course was designed and implemented to weave creative and artistic practices into financial education. The course design started before the pandemic hit North America and once the lockdown started, all the course presentations had to be shifted online. As a result, some of the course activities had to be redesigned and made location-agnostic. The goal is to be able to offer this course both in-person and online as a response to the fluidity of the situation.
(2) Course-content wise, the new seminar course which is at the center of this presentation addresses the uncertainty around financial system, especially in the wake of the financial crisis.
(3) As a professor in a STEM field, and an amateur/emerging playwright, I have been championing theatre-as-pedagogy and narrative mathematics since 2016. The larger goal of integrating arts and science education is at the center of the course design.
Have you ever watched a pundit’s passionate rant over financial crisis on TV and wondered whether he was right or wrong? Did you get the full story after watching movies like Margin Call or The Big Short? What was the efficiency market versus behavioral finance debate all about? Did you wonder why everyone in the financial press seem to be calling for a lower debt/equity ratio on banks in the post-crisis era? Those are the questions I wish to explore with my first-year students in a seminar course designed to improve financial literacy and embed financial ethics in a fun, relatable and creative fashion. The course design started before the pandemic hit North America and once the lockdown started, all the course presentations had to be shifted online. In this session, I will present my experiences throughout the course design and implementation process, focusing on weaving creative practices into quantitative subjects as well as location-agnostic teaching.
As a professor in a STEM field, and an amateur/emerging playwright, I have been championing theatre-as-pedagogy and narrative mathematics since 2016, and have created various mini-theatre projects to improve teaching and learning at my university. In this new first-year seminar course, I deepened this practice by actively immersing my students in the financial media and cultural references of finance throughout their learning experience. Students in this course are diverse in their academic background (the course is open to all students in the Faculty of Arts and Science), and therefore this pedagogical approach serves two immediate purposes: (1) for students from the humanities, such a pedagogy breaks down the complex financial concepts into less intimidating, relatable human stories that can be further explored; (2) for students from quantitative fields, it allows them to see the human side of the equation and makes it possible to open the door for financial ethics discussions. In this ten-session course, every seminar opened with a “puzzle” from a media source (e.g. film, TV talk show, stage play). We then spent the rest of the seminar exploring both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the puzzle. Students engaged in formal debates, informal breakout-room-based discussions, team-based presentations, as well as modified op-ed article writing where they were asked to present the case in both a “believing” and “doubting” mode. The course culminated in a close reading of Ayad Akhar’s play “Junk” where students were cast as different characters in the play to understand this leveraged buyout story and to explore bigger themes such as the financialization of economy, all through an intimate, immersive experience.
In this session, I will present details of this digitally engaged course, the efficacy and lessons learned from the “embedded ethics” pedagogy. I will discuss the location agnostic course design and how it can be offered in both online and in-person setting. I will also encourage session participants to share similar experiences and brainstorm novel ways for cross-pollination between arts and science education.
As a professor in a STEM field, and an amateur/emerging playwright, I have been championing theatre-as-pedagogy and narrative mathematics since 2016, and have created various mini-theatre projects to improve teaching and learning at my university. In this new first-year seminar course, I deepened this practice by actively immersing my students in the financial media and cultural references of finance throughout their learning experience. Students in this course are diverse in their academic background (the course is open to all students in the Faculty of Arts and Science), and therefore this pedagogical approach serves two immediate purposes: (1) for students from the humanities, such a pedagogy breaks down the complex financial concepts into less intimidating, relatable human stories that can be further explored; (2) for students from quantitative fields, it allows them to see the human side of the equation and makes it possible to open the door for financial ethics discussions. In this ten-session course, every seminar opened with a “puzzle” from a media source (e.g. film, TV talk show, stage play). We then spent the rest of the seminar exploring both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the puzzle. Students engaged in formal debates, informal breakout-room-based discussions, team-based presentations, as well as modified op-ed article writing where they were asked to present the case in both a “believing” and “doubting” mode. The course culminated in a close reading of Ayad Akhar’s play “Junk” where students were cast as different characters in the play to understand this leveraged buyout story and to explore bigger themes such as the financialization of economy, all through an intimate, immersive experience.
In this session, I will present details of this digitally engaged course, the efficacy and lessons learned from the “embedded ethics” pedagogy. I will discuss the location agnostic course design and how it can be offered in both online and in-person setting. I will also encourage session participants to share similar experiences and brainstorm novel ways for cross-pollination between arts and science education.