A Pedagogy of Economics

For any university-level language program striving to attain standards-based goals, a variety of factors, including time, audience, goals and environment, is brought to bear on curriculum design and pedagogical practices. Occasionally, however, extenuating circumstances create the need to innovate and reimagine the classroom experience and learning outcomes of courses. Such was the case for virtually all educational programs nationally at the post-secondary level, including foreign languages, following the global economic crisis of 2008. The sweeping reductions in funding available to sustain secondary and post-secondary educational programs in the US prompted many administrators to target language programs among others whose costs did not seem to be justified by their outcomes (Berman, 2011; Hu, 2009; Koebler, 2012). And yet, as Malone et al. (2005: 1) pointed out, prior to the downturn in the economy, ‘The need for individuals who can speak and understand languages other than English is acute in many sectors in the United States, from business and social services to national security and diplomacy’. Thus, precisely at the time of growing national need for specialists with professional competence (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages [ACTFL] Superior/Interagency Language Roundtable [ILR] 3; Appendix A) in a number of critical languages, economic circumstances were forcing a reduction in the numbers of programs and resources needed to train such students (Beale, 2010; Jaschik, 2010; Zehr, 2011).

At the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), after considering and rejecting a number of cost-saving proposals, including the elimination of the requirement of two years of language study before graduation, the College of Liberal Arts turned to its Language Policy Advisory Committee (LPAC) for recommendations on further action. The LPAC, comprising faculty from each language department in the college, turned to the report of the Modern Language Association (MLA) on the restructuring of language programs for a globalized environment (MLA, 2007).