The editorial work - FAQ
We are happy to have you on board as an editor!
This document is designed to help you make the most of our activities here! Please browse through the FAQ, and do not hesitate in contacting us should you have any questions.
Please also find a detailed explanation of your tasks as an Exploring Economics Editor below.
General Questions
1. What is expected of me as a workshop facilitator? What is my role?
Our idea is that the workshop facilitator conceptualizes contents and methods of a workshop stream (three sessions of 90 minutes on five consecutive days). We would like you to prepare a workshop curriculum and a syllabus that provides information on required readings, pre-work for the sessions and options for a group project. You are welcome to plan the workshop as you see appropriate for the topic as well as the learning outcomes and objectives for the students. You may conduct the workshop alone, with a co-facilitator or with guest speakers. We are happy to discuss any ideas or thoughts with you while you are preparing the workshop curriculum. You will find detailed information on the workshops down below in the FAQ.
2. What is the lecturer compensation?
The compensation will be dependent on how the facilitator chooses to structure the workshop series. The overall remuneration is 750€ per workshop stream. If you choose to facilitate the entire workshop series without a co-facilitator, you would be eligible to receive the full amount. If you share the responsibility with a co-facilitator or invite guest speakers, they would be entitled to receive a portion of the remuneration. It is up to you how to split the amount amongst you. The remuneration for an evening lecture is 500€ to be shared by all speakers (if there is more than one).
3. What is the background of the students?
We expect most students to be in their Bachelor or Master studies with a few Doctorate students from universities located in Europe, North and South America, South East Asia, the African nations, and India.
4. Is there any limit for the number of participants for each workshop?
In general, we aim for each workshop to have around 10 +/-2 participants.
Preparations
5. What do I need to provide prior to the Summer Academy?
- April 22nd: A short workshop description, learning objectives and lecturer biography & picture. Klick on the links to find examples from last year.
- June 15th: A workshop syllabus laying out the topic(s) to be covered on each day of the workshop, including a reading list (list of materials, recordings, papers and the like). Please also fill in the module description provided (Word document attached to the email), editing all highlighted parts of the document and leaving the rest unchanged.
- July 15th: After the Google Classroom has been set up for your workshop, you should send a welcome message to your students and communicate with them prior to the workshop start.
Workshops
6. What exactly do you mean by “workshop”?
When talking about a “workshop” during the Summer Academy, this is a stream of 15 sessions (5 days with three sessions of 90 mins each) stretching over Jul 30-Aug 3. Think of it as a block seminar (a university seminar usually running over one semester is here taught as a crash course within one week). Eleven workshop streams will be held in parallel with about 10 students each.
7. What does a day of sessions look like? What should we consider when preparing the workshop? (General guidelines for the format)
When preparing the workshop, you are relatively free to decide how to use the three workshop sessions per day. We recommend using one workshop session for individual work by the participants to either read the day’s required readings, watch pre-recorded lectures, or complete any other type of individual work needed to prepare for the other workshop sessions. Another workshop session could then be used to either give a live lecture to students and allow them to ask questions or to have a class discussion building on the readings or pre-recorded lecture. Finally, one session per day should allow workshop participants to work on the common output and their presentation for the project festival. The facilitator will not need to be present for all of these group work sessions, but should be available to drop in, answer students’ questions and give guidance for their common output.
8. When will the workshop sessions run?
The workshop sessions are planned for the five days from Sat July 30 through Wed Aug 3, 2022. On each day, three slots are scheduled for 10:30am-12pm, 1pm-2:30pm, 3pm-4:30pm (UTC+1).
We recommend using the second slot each day for the live components of the workshop, such as live lectures or class discussions, as this slot will be during daylight hours for most participants living in different time zones. You should take into account that the first slot will be during the night for students from the Americas and that the third slot could be too late in the evening for Asia-based students. Depending on your own timezone as well as those of the participants, the first and third slot could be used for individual work (such as reading the required readings or watching pre-recorded lectures) or group work (such as working on the common workshop output). You are not required to attend all sessions live, but you should be available for the students’ questions that arise during individual or group work. So your time commitment may be one to two sessions per day, depending on how you design your workshop’s curriculum.
9. Is there any ideological inclination or particular school/s of thought that is to be followed while giving lectures by the facilitators?
The Summer Academy aims to give a platform to pluralist and heterodox schools of economic thought that differ from the mainstream, orthodox and neoclassical economic thought predominantly taught in Western universities. Therefore, your workshop/lecture should incorporate concepts and analytical tools from heterodox economic school of thoughts, such as feminist, post-Keynesian, ecological, Marxian, anarchist, economics and more. Additionally, the Summer Academy is committed to decolonising the study of economics, which is why we ask facilitators to approach their topic(s) not (only) from a Eurocentric or Western perspective, but also give plenty of room for perspectives from the Global South.
Group Output
10. What is the group project/common output about?
The group project gives students from each workshop the opportunity to apply the newly acquired knowledge from their workshop, to network with their fellow workshop students while working on a common output, and to prepare for a group presentation at the end of the Summer Academy. The common output could be a policy brief or an essay, a collection of literature on a certain issue (dossier), an explanatory video, a podcast, a presentation, an interactive website or online tool, or a course syllabus. This common output should be worked on primarily during the summer academy week with some guidance from the workshop facilitator, but participants will have until the end of August to submit the final output to the summer academy organizers.
On Aug 4, a project festival is planned at which all workshop groups will have a slot to talk about what they learned in their respective workshop and present the first draft of their common output they have completed so far. During the project festival, they will also be able to attend two or three other workshop groups’ presentations. Facilitators are welcome to attend their own and other workshop groups’ presentations during the project festival.
11. Do the participants need to finish the output before the Summer Academy ends?
No, the participants should finish a first draft of their common output before the project festival to be able to present and discuss what they have worked on so far. However, they have until the end of August to submit the final version of their common output to the Summer Academy organizers.
12. Will I have to grade the participants’ output?
As the summer academy is an academic endeavor, we want to give our participants the opportunity to receive academic credits for their active participation in it. Awarding ECTS credits for participation in the Summer Academy is made possible through the Certificate Project for Pluralism in Economics, which was launched in March 2019 from a group of people in the German Netzwerk Plurale Ökonomik e.V. (Network for Pluralist Economics).
All participants who actively participate in the Summer Academy and the group presentation in the end will receive a Summer Academy certificate and a written confirmation for 2 ECTS. Neither the presentation nor the common output will have to be graded by the workshop facilitators; the students’ participation in those group projects is enough to receive the 2 ECTS.
Additionally, we also want to offer our participants the (voluntary) option to write an essay to gain more credit points (5 ECTS). This examination will be put together and graded by the network.