Kathryn Dominguez, Norman Bishara (MPP '04) use world financial crisis as teaching tool

January 20, 2010

Kathryn Dominguez and Norman Bishara, an assistant professor in the business school and MPP alum, spoke to the Michigan Daily about the affect of the recent world economic crisis on the content of the courses they teach.

Dominguez currently teaches three courses that directly relate to the worldwide financial situation. Dominguez told the Michigan Daily that, in one course specifically, she plans to change the way her class discusses the U.S. monetary policy in relation to other countries. "In most cases when I've taught this course [a macroeconomics class] in the past, we've looked at developing countries as our example because the U.S. has been kind of boring in terms of policy," she told the Daily. "We don't tend to have very large changes in macro-policy, or we haven't in the last decade or so, but now the U.S. will be a very interesting example to look at."

While Bishara, who also serves on the Ford School's Alumni Board, hasn't altered his courses to specifically include the current state of the economy, he told the Michigan Daily that he has used the crisis as "a teaching tool . . . to talk about how problems could have been avoided and how some of them are related to simple business ethics problems."