David
W. Schodt, Director of the Center for Innovation in the Liberal
Arts and Professor of Economics.
David Schodt received a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, an MA in Public Administration/Policy Analysisand the Ph.D. degree in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has taught at St. Olaf College since 1977. His primary teaching responsibilities include microeconomics, economic development, and various courses on Latin America.
His research interests focus on political and economic change in Ecuador, where he served as a Peace Corps volunteer, and later returned as a Fulbright Research Fellow. He is author of Ecuador: An Andean Enigma (Westview Press, 1987), and co-author of The Administration of Justice in Ecuador (Centro para la Administración de Justicia, 1993), as well as numerous articles on Ecuadorian political economy. He edits the Ecuador: Economy section of the Handbook of Latin American Studies for the Library of Congress. He has served as a consultant to the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development. His current work examines poverty and structural adjustment policy in Ecuador.
He has a strong interest in innovative approaches to teaching undergraduate economics. His work with case method teaching began formally in 1991, when he was awarded a Pew Faculty Fellowship in International Affairs from the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, for a year's study of case-based instruction. His work evaluating the results of case-based teaching for student learning in economics appears in "Beyond the Lecture: Case Teaching and the Learning of Economic Theory" (Journal of Economic Education, Winter 1995), co-authored with a colleague at Purdue University. He has led workshops on case teaching for the World Bank, and for faculty at liberal arts colleges. He has written a number of cases for courses in economic development. He is currently working on issues involving technology and teaching undergraduate economics. In 2000, he was appointed the first director of the Center for Innovation in the Liberal Arts at St. Olaf College
Susan Carlson, Program Coordinator for the Center for Innovation in the Liberal Arts.
