William M. Abbott

History and Economics—Can Students (and Professors) Learn Together?

in spite of much rhetoric and many ad aptations of core curricula, one of the old problems still plagues us: students compartmentalize knowledge and fail to make lasting connections between sub jects. We have developed a course integra tion that overcomes this and other prob lems and that includes two unusual features. Our project integrated two courses that, to our knowledge, had never been paired: Introduction to Macroeco nomics, from the social sciences and Em pire to Commonwealth, 1815-1992, from the humanities. And in an attempt at genu ine integration, each professor partici pated as a student in every class of the oth ers course.

The uses of economics in an integrated cluster

IF YOU TEACH A HISTORY COURSE required of business or other non-history majors you may be confronted with student complaints that the subject is boring and of no use to them in the pursuit of their professional objectives. Because they do not know how to deal with history course material and are used to much smaller, denser reading assignments, such students may also complain that they do not know how or what to study for tests, and that there is too much reading in the course. Unlike a hard science or math-oriented social science course, in which most of the reading deals with problem solving methods that build on previous skills, history course reading often appears to these students as a mountain of disparate facts. Whereas, for example, an economics test might cover thirty pages of difficult but solvable problems, a history test might cover three hundred pages of loosly organized information, which students find impossible to memorize for the exam. You may as a result be confronted by frustration and resentment rather than by a willingness to learn.