Bringing the classroom to the real world: Field trips to marginalized neighborhoods

Abstract

The authors incorporate experiential learning into three courses: Urban Economics, Labor Economics, and the Economics of Inequality. Students visit neighborhoods that, while geographically proximate, remain outside most students’ day-to-day experiences, such as a legal red-light district that is also home to low-wage immigrant workers and a public rental housing estate whose residents were recently relocated. These location-oriented field trips raise a confluence of themes, such as poverty and crime, that relate to and beyond the authors’ courses. Students’ written reflections provide evidence that they are able to: (i) identify economic concepts within the lived realities of communities; (ii) recognize the assumptions and validity of economic models; and (iii) contextualize and reevaluate the costs and benefits to the economic agents whom they model in the classroom.