Bringing the Classroom to the Real World: Field Trips to Marginalized Neighborhoods

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Y

14

Foreign Countries; Undergraduate Students; Neighborhoods; Field Trips; Disadvantaged Environment; Power Structure; Poverty Areas; Experiential Learning; Educational Strategies

10.1080/00220485.2023.2200409

0022-0485
2152-4068

The authors incorporate experiential learning into three courses: Urban Economics, Labor Economics, and the Economics of Inequality. Students visit neighborhoods that, while geographically proximate, remain outside most students' day-to-day experiences, such as a legal red-light district that is also home to low-wage immigrant workers and a public rental housing estate whose residents were recently relocated. These location-oriented field trips raise a confluence of themes, such as poverty and crime, that relate to and beyond the authors' courses. Students' written reflections provide evidence that they are able to: (i) identify economic concepts within the lived realities of communities; (ii) recognize the assumptions and validity of economic models; and (iii) contextualize and reevaluate the costs and benefits to the economic agents whom they model in the classroom.

As Provided

2023

EJ1393169