Learning by Doing: Formulating Macroeconomic Policy under Various Forms of Capitalism

The purpose of this paper is to describe two different pedagogical experiments employed in a course on global capitalism. First, the course incorporated interdisciplinary team teaching (an economist and a political scientist). Second, the course created a team project, which allowed the students to actively address the varieties of capitalism in a policy setting. Specifically, students experienced the political and economic role played by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on the world stage by participating in a simulated IMF Executive Board meeting. The course was unique in the sense that it had dual (student and faculty) teams. We found that team teaching offered us the opportunity to go beyond our specific disciplines and present to students a world that is more complex than any one discipline can capture. Students told us that this active learning experience gave them an engaging opportunity to think about the perspective of others.