Welcome to the early careers workshop for economics organized by the Economics Network.
Over the course of two very engaging days, a group of experienced economics educators
will engage in insightful dialogues on teaching economics at University level. This Workshop is
carefully designed to empower junior colleagues starting their journey as lecturers, as assistant
professors or teaching fellows in economics who have responsibility on designing and delivering
lectures. In the workshop we go beyond generic training provided at institutional level to
explore teaching issues that are specific to economics. Annika, do you want to tell us something
about the benefits of joining the early careers workshop for economics? Yeah so I think even
if you're an experienced teacher there's often this big jump you go through in the early
careers phase. Like I know in my case I went from running lots of quantitative methods
seminars and then suddenly was in charge of a big theory-based unit that involved interacting
with large teaching teams. I think for me the workshop's really helpful for helping me meet
other people at similar early career stages in economics but also helping me understand
how what I'm doing with my unit connects to the whole world of UK higher education quality
assurance and frameworks and standards and things like that but also just for understanding how I
can use examples of really great practice in economics education from all around the world
to make my own course better. You know I think what we do as economics educators is
really difficult, right? We don't just use maths; we don't just use text; we use both of them all
the time alongside diagrams and graphs and coding and pictures and all of those things might be in
one session. So understanding how to do that efficiently for me and really effectively for
the students is something it's really useful to you know reflect on for the couple of
days of this Workshop so that I can do things better going forwards. That's certainly what I
took away from it anyway. Thank you very much Annika, I completely agree. Teaching economics is
quite complex but this is not just about teaching economics: we believe the workshop can benefit all
aspects of our academic career. Chris, do you want to tell us more about it? Yeah you don't have to
look very hard to realize that teaching is becoming more important in UK universities
and so for many of us learning how to teach better, more effectively, is just a no-brainer.
However it's much wider than that too. Even if you're just purely research minded - if you're
just after that top five publication - you still need to learn how to teach efficiently.
If anyone's ever gone through writing a bad assessment and having hundreds of emails
of students trying to clarify things or having a student complaint and having all the stress
and heartache of that they're learning, these quick tips is just going to be so, so valuable.
More generally, I think learning to teach also has some benefits in helping you to communicate
and present your research. So I really think there's benefits for all academics no matter
what your role exactly is. Thank you very much. I do think this workshop is carefully structured
to foster interactivity and to provide a lot of opportunities for you to get guidance to share
insights and to receive personalized feedback on your teaching and assessment materials. In fact
before the workshop we encourage you to complete pre-workshop activities to help us tailor the
sessions to your specific needs and aspirations. So join us and thank you; I'll see you soon.