Promoting Critical Thinking in Economics Education

Some economist educators are lecturing less, and making use of teaching techniques that engage students more actively. Here we discuss a number of pedagogical strategies that do just that, with the aim of encouraging critical thinking on controversial economic issues. The three specific examples discussed in the paper are 1) a simulation to model the different social locations of various economic agents in the Bolivian debt crisis, 2) service learning to confront stereotyping of the poor, and 3) an active learning exercise incorporating several alternative teaching tools, to examine hypotheses and statistical data on the changing structure of the American family.