The “I” in Capitalism: Radical Pedagogy and the Stories That Our Students Tell About Capitalism and Inequality

This article provides a description and assessment of a series of short, ungraded essays that I have assigned in my classes over the past four years. My hope, initially, was that these assignments would allow me to connect with my students during a moment of disconnection (the early days of the pandemic). It worked. And, it turns out, these assignments have done much more than this. They have helped my students and me to create more vital spaces of critical conversation about capitalism, inequality, and economics. For many of my students, these assignments have enriched their critical understanding of capitalism, its associated inequalities, and the stories economists tell about capitalism. These assignments have helped many of my students to recognize that they—through their lived experiences of capitalism—have important, rich, and powerful insights to bring to a critical conversation about capitalism and economics. I sent out emails to 123 students I have taught in six classes over the past four semesters asking them to tell me about their experience of these ungraded assignments. I received forty-nine responses. These students—overwhelmingly and often at length—have told me that these assignments enriched their experience of the class, helped them to understand the course material more deeply, and in many cases, helped them to see that they have something important to say about capitalism. One student writes: “These ungraded assignments were important in illuminating precisely what it feels like to be a subject under capitalism.” Another writes: “These papers taught me to question my surroundings and consider the inequalities that are all around us.” A third writes: “I devoted as much attention to them as I did to the graded ones.” And these ungraded essays provoked rich conversations about “incentives.” JEL Classification : A20, B50