|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Center for Economic Education scholarships get boost from grant
July 24, 2003 | ||||||
|
KOKOMO, Ind.—Thanks to an $11,900 operations grant, 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 Indiana Council for Economic Education (ICEE) approved the full grant amount requested by the IU Kokomo Center, said Center coordinator and Associate Professor of Economics Kathy Parkison, Ph.D. 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, planned in spring 2004. 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. (For more information, call (765) 455-9462 or e-mail kparkiso@iuk.edu.) Parkison and Professor of Education Margo Sorgman, Ed.D., 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 will begin pilot ISTEP+ tests of students’ social studies knowledge, including economics. By 2004, social studies questions will be included in ISTEP+ statewide. “A lot of teachers who’ve never had economics (as a curriculum component) would benefit from the Center for Economic Education classes,” Parkison said. She and Sorgman passed on that message to area educators, financiers and civic leaders at a lunch hosted by IU Kokomo June 12. Those in attendance included State Senator Luke Kenley of Noblesville; Don Smith, president of Central National Bank; Harold Redlin, field agent for Indiana Business Modernization and Technology Corporation; Jean Neel and Francis Petro, representing Kokomo manufacturer Haynes International, Inc.; and school superintendents Thomas Little of Kokomo-Center Township Schools and Thomas Fletcher of Tipton Community School Corporation. Western Middle School teacher Ty Spangler told lunch attendees that the CEE class he attended last winter convinced him that “economics infiltrates all classes and all class levels and ages.” “Margo and Kathy have the resources to help you think outside of the box,” he said, “I came up with classroom activities that I would never have come up with on my own.” His seventh grade social studies 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 told the lunch audience. 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 Indiana Council for Economic Education Director Bev Brewer. 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.” Parkison said that several persons attending the lunch volunteered to serve on the Center’s first advisory board, to be named and working by this fall.
Return to Current News Releases Return to Archived News Releases |
|
|||||
