Kokomo’s CEE continues to make inroads into delivery of economic education

		September 19, 2003

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Parkinson

Sorgman

Thanks to an $11,900 operations grant from the Indiana Council for Economic Education (ICCE), IU Kokomo’s Center for Economic Education (CEE) will be able to offer 20 scholarships to area teachers wanting to sharpen their economics curricula. The ICCE is a state-supported umbrella organization for the 13 Indiana economic education centers. While some of the grant money will cover Kokomo CEE’s operating expenses, the majority will become tuition stipends for a graduate-level economics course next spring. Taught on Saturdays, the class is open to K–12 instructors. It will offer them ideas on incorporating lessons in basic economics into existing classroom activities. Parkison, who teaches economics, and Margo Sorgman, an education professor, have offered similar classes through the Kokomo CEE since 1997. The upcoming class will be especially important in light of changing state teaching standards, Parkison said.

Passed in 1999, school accountability legislation titled Public Law 221 requires, among other standards, that students in grades K–8 of Indiana public schools learn basic economic principle. This fall, Indiana begins pilot ISTEP+ tests of students’ social studies knowledge, including economics. By 2004, social studies questions will be included in ISTEP+ statewide.

Ty Spangler, who teaches seventh-grade social studies at Western Middle School, attended such a class last winter. “I came up with classroom activities that I would never have come up with on my own.” His students “ate up” a lesson in international trading, in which candy represented consumable trade goods. Spangler had fun using a bullhorn to teach about the workings of a “command economy,” in which a central authority makes major economic decisions.

Even very young children can grasp economic concepts when the ideas are taught at the child’s level, Sorgman said. In one class, she noted, students were asked to draw pictures of “goods” and “services.” Before receiving economic instruction, some drew angels for “goods” and churches for “services.” Angels still appeared in some students’ drawings after lessons in economic terms, according to Bev Brewer ICEE director. In that case, a child drew a winged blacksmith turning out halos as a “producer.” A cartoon Elvis Presley portrayed a “consumer,” receiving a halo while uttering “Thank-you-very-much.”

Sorgman and Parkison are invited speakers this month at a research symposium sponsored by the National Council for Economic Education (NCEE). At the symposium, the NCEE will introduce and make available to economic education researchers the extensive datasets on economic education collected by NCEE, the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Education and other governmental and non-governmental organizations.

Sorgman and Parkison also are involved in a study of the attitudes of Eastern European teachers toward economic education. Their interest began in 2001, when both took part in a curriculum writing workshop in the Czech Republic. Last fall, Parkison spent a week in Armenia, teaching economics basics to government ministers and teachers from several former Soviet republics.

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