The 16th Conference of the European Society for Ecological Economics will be held at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of Ghent University, Belgium. The title of the conference is “Looking for (the) Just Judges – Promoting Sustainable and Inclusive Well-Being in Turbulent Times” referencing to the missing panel in the alterpiece of the Saint Bavo cathedral in Ghent.
The conference brings together ecological economists from across Europe, and is organized in collaboration with the city of Ghent and several local NGOs. It will host a series of keynote lectures, parallel sessions and poster sessions. Participants also had the opportunity to submit Open Special Subtracks (OSS) and Closed Special Sessions (CSS) to complement the conference programme.
The subtrack on “Teaching and Learning Ecological Economics” will explore theoretical, empirical and practical knowledge on how economics education can be developed to align with ecological economics principles.
It is old news that the vast majority of the large numbers of economists now working in central banks, governmental institutions and powerful international organisations and consultancies have studied the same mainstream textbooks in economics. Pluralist and heterodox economists and students of economics have long recognised the importance of this aspect of the neoclassical hegemony and argued that we need to rethink and reform economics education (e.g. Earle et al 2016). These calls align with the longstanding ambition of ecological economists to challenge the dominance of ideas from mainstream economics in all domains of society, and imply an economics education with fundamentally new content and new ways of teaching.
However, research on teaching and learning alternatives to mainstream economics remains scarce. As for research on ecological economics education, it is virtually nonexistent. Moreover, the little research that exists has mainly focused on higher education. There is virtually no research about teaching and learning economics below the university level, even though many core principles of mainstream economics become established in students' understanding of "economic issues" long before that, often in upper secondary education or possibly even earlier.