Shirley Gedeon's teaching is driven by a primary objective: to translate the complexities of the language of Economics into something that students can easily understand and call their own.
Shirley discovered Economics as an undergraduate studying Political Science and History. Because everything seemed to point to Economics, she reports, she was drawn to it. She was also drawn to teaching--as a graduate student she knew from the first day as a TA that "...it was immediately clear that this is what I loved--it was love at first sight."
For the next 15 years of Shirley's teaching, what drove her was an ongoing attempt to translate complex clinical Economics terms into language that her undergraduate students could appropriate and call their own. She describes herself as "...pacing the halls trying to figure out how an 18 year old could understand and want to learn the law of diminishing returns..." For 15 years she tried to make this happen, and often succeeded. She worked to figure out how to best state clearly what it was the textbooks were presenting very clinically. "They really needed to be able to put it in their own words--to really own it--I was helping students move from abstract conceptualization to concrete experience, in Kolb's words." She seemed to have figured out the strategies to make students really develop an understanding of these complex ideas--"I had a great time and the students loved what I was doing."
Still, there was much room for growth and transformation in Shirley's teaching. She wasn't aware of this until a couple of events in the last six years--events that Shirley describes as "major factors" in her re-thinking her sage on the stage approach and transforming her teaching. The first was when Shirley was given the opportunity to team teach an interdisciplinary course. She was teaching with a professor of English whose expertise was rhetoric and the teaching of writing. She enjoyed teaching the interdisciplinary course, feeling that it really helped students express their thoughts through writing--part of their "owning" the language of Economics. It wasn't the course that inspired Shirley, though, so much as the other teacher. "The writing teacher really did a lesson plan and developed learning objectives--they planned assignments ahead of time. I always thought 'what example am I going to use today' as I walked from the office to the classroom, knowing that I would be lecturing on a topic and the only thing to plan was the example." Working with this other teacher, Shirley discovered that there are there are differences in teaching styles and communication, and that there are differences in learning styles. As a lecturer of Economics, Shirley felt she hadn't really done her job in thinking through these styles and finding ways to weave them into her teaching.
Soon after this experience, Shirley had the opportunity to teach her course online. Shirley was intrigued by the opportunity because she had felt that technology was passing her by--she saw others using it, knew that her students were comfortable with it, but hadn't tried to learn anything about it herself. By the end of the three months, Shirley reports, she was engaged in what she called "the pedagogical shift of going from the classroom to online..." Suddenly, Shirley felt she had a tool set in front of her that would allow her to put in place what she'd learned from her colleague in the interdisciplinary course--she felt that she could really help students find their own voice. Through her discovery of the technological tools, Shirley felt she could "...give my students the same joy I'd discovered in the early part of my teaching career. I could really help them see that it's a blast to translate these complex ideas into terms your kid brother or sister could understand."
Not satisfied with theory alone, Shirley has always been interested in focusing on the intersection of ideas and real-world experiences. Her dissertation research was on the practicalities of the idea of worker self-management. She traveled to a Socialist country to explore this, and examined up close whether the theory of worker self-management could work. "That kind of practical, concrete experience became the hallmark of the way I've thought, taught, done research. Does practice hold up the theory, can it inform the theory?"
No wonder Shirley is so bent on helping students find their own voice in the world of Economic ideas. If they don't, Economics won't be much more than theory to them and they'll have little sense of how these ideas play out in the real world. And given Shirley's passion for teaching, it's no wonder she's adopted technology even though just a few short years ago she didn't even use an overhead projector.
top
