Contributors to Teaching Economics in Troubled Times, listed alphabetically:
J.R. Clark earned the Ph.D. in Economics from Virginia Polytechnic Institute under the Nobel Laureate James Buchanan. He holds the Probasco Chair at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and is the author of six books and numerous academic articles published in the United States, Austria, Japan, Italy, Canada, France, India and Russia. Prior to coming to UTC, Professor Clark was with the Joint Council on Economic Education in New York, chaired a large University economics department in New Jersey, held the Hendrix Chair at UT Martin, and was a research fellow at Princeton University. In 1996, he was inducted into the Mont Pelerin Society and elected to its board of directors in 2006. Currently, he serves as Secretary/Treasurer for the Association of Private Enterprise Education and the Southern Economic Association, as well as a board member of Kenco Corp.
Lucien Ellington is UC Foundation Professor of Education and Co-director of the Asia Program at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Professor Ellington is also a Senior Fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute and is the founding and current editor of the Association for Asian Studies teaching journal, Education About Asia. His publications include books, journal articles, and book chapters on Japan, economic education, economic and world history, and educational reform. Professor Ellington has also served as editor for two book series on Asia.
Barbara Flowers recently joined the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis as a senior economic education specialist. Prior to joining the Fed, she served as director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Economic Education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis where she taught economics and developed curriculum in economics and personal finance. While at the center, she also developed the American Dream Youthpreneurship Program for high school students. She is the co-author of Financial Fitness for Life, Grades 6-8; Economics at Work, and elementary curriculum units, Focus on Economics: K-2 and 3-5, among others.
Selena Garrison is State Training Coordinator and Head Trainer of the Florida Master Money Mentor Program through the Department of Family, Youth and Community Sciences, in the Institute for Food and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Florida. She holds Bachelor of Science degrees in both Psychology and Family, Youth and Community and Sciences from the University of Florida. She also holds a Master of Science in Family, Youth and Community Sciences from the University of Florida with a specialization in Family Financial Management. Her research interests focus on the impacts of financial socialization in relation to financial knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. Her Master’s thesis focused on gender differences in financial socialization and willingness to take financial risks.
Michael Gutter is an Assistant Professor and Financial Management State Specialist for the Department of Family, Youth, and Community Sciences, in the Institute for Food and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Florida. His Ph.D. is in Family Resource Management from The Ohio State University with a specialization in Finance. The common theme that connects Gutter’s Research, Teaching and Outreach is helping households achieve financial security. His outreach projects include Managing in Tough Times, Florida Saves, Florida Master Money Mentor, and Get Checking. Professor Gutter is the current Vice President of the Florida Jumpstart Coalition and serves on the editorial boards for the Journal of Consumer Affairs, Journal of Consumer Education, and the Journal of Financial Counseling and Planning. His research and outreach has funding from Great Lakes Higher Education Guaranty Corporation, Bank of America, National Endowment for Financial Education, and the FINRA Investor Education Foundation.
James D. Gwartney holds the Gus A. Stavros Eminent Scholar Chair at Florida State University, where he directs the Stavros Center for the Advancement of Free Enterprise and Economic Education. He is the coauthor of Economics: Private and Public Choice, (Cengage South-Western Press, 2010), a widely used principles of economics text that is now in its 13th edition. He is also the co-author of the annual report, Economic Freedom of the World, which provides information on the consistency of institutions and policies with economic freedom for 141 countries. His publications have appeared in scholarly journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Southern Economic Journal, Kyklos , and Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics. During 1999-2000, he served as Chief Economist of the Joint Economic Committee of the U. S. Congress. He is a past President of the Southern Economic Association and the Association of Private Enterprise Education. His Ph.D. in economics is from the University of Washington.
Jane S. Lopus is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Economic Education at California State University, East Bay. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Davis and an undergraduate degree in political science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Professor Lopus teaches a wide variety of economics courses at Cal State East Bay and was named the University’s Outstanding Professor in 2006. She is an active researcher in economic education and has won both research and leadership awards from the National Association of Economic Educators. As a former high school economics teacher, she has written many materials for teaching economics at the high school level. She is actively involved in the international programs of the Council on Economic Education.
Dwight R. Lee received his Ph.D from the University of California, San Diego in 1972. Since that time he has had full time tenured faculty appointments at the University of Colorado, Virginia Tech University, George Mason University, and the University of Georgia where he was the Ramsey Professor of Economics and Private Enterprise from 1985-2008. He is currently the William J. O’Neil Professor of Global Markets and Freedom at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Professor Lee’s research has covered a variety of areas including the Economics of the Environment and Natural Resources, the Economics of Political Decision Making, Public Finance, Law and Economics, and Labor Economics. He was president of the Association of Private Enterprise Education for 1994-95 and president of the Southern Economic Association from 1997-98. John S. Morton is the senior program officer for the Arizona Council on Economic Education. Previously, he was an economics teacher at Homewood-Flossmoor High School (Illinois), founder and director of the Governors State University Center for Economic Education (Illinois), founder and president of the Arizona Council on Economic Education, and vice president for program development at the National Council on Economic Education. He chaired the advisory board of The Wall Street Journal Classroom Edition and has written 40 publications and books of instructional activities for the high school economics course, including four widely used textbooks.
Mark C. Schug is Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Professor Schug taught for 36 years at the middle school, high school, and university levels. He currently is a fulltime consultant on economic and financial education and education policy. A widely recognized scholar, he has written and edited over 200 articles, books, and national curriculum materials. He served for three years as Senior Fellow with the National Council on Economic Education. He serves on the boards of the Association of Private Enterprise, Business and Economics Academy of Milwaukee, Economics Wisconsin, University School of Milwaukee, the Governor’s Council on Financial Literacy and School Choice Wisconsin.
Angela M. Smith is an Assistant Professor of Economics at James Madison University. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Virginia with concentrations in public economics and industrial organization and a B.A. in economics from the College of William and Mary. Her primary research field is experimental economics and she has written multiple refereed articles in this area that examine various phenomena including exclusive contracts, security investments, individual probability updating, and firm product ordering behavior. She also uses experiments in the classroom to guide students to realize and understand economic concepts through experience.
Phillip J. VanFossen is the James F. Ackerman Professor of Social Studies Education, Director of the Ackerman Center for Democratic Citizenship and Associate Director of the Purdue University Center for Economic Education at Purdue University. Professor holds a courtesy appointment in the Krannert School of Management at Purdue where he teaches introductory economics courses. He is the program author for a recently released high school economics textbook Econ Alive!: The Power to Choose (Teacher’s Curriculum Institute, 2009). In addition to economic education, his research interests include the use of digital technology in social studies classrooms. He has authored 3 books, numerous chapters and more than 25 refereed articles on these topics.
William Walstad is John T. and Mable M. Hay Professor of Economics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Editor of the Journal of Economic Education. He is an expert on testing and assessment in economics. He served on the test committee for the 2006 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in economics and now serves on the test committee for 2012 administration of NAEP economics. He helped construct the National Financial Capability Challenge test for the U.S. Department of the Treasury. He has directed projects to prepare many pre-college tests, including the Test of Economic Literacy (high school), Test of Economic Knowledge (middle school), Basic Economics Test (elementary) and three Financial Fitness for Life tests (elementary, middle, and high school).
Michael Watts is a Professor of Economics and the director of the Center for Economic Education at Purdue University. He has served as president of the National Association of Economic Educators and the Society of Economics Educators, as Vice President of the Midwest Economic Association, and as a member and Chair of the American Economic Association’s Committee on Economic Education. His main teaching interests include microeconomics, labor economics, and the history of economic thought. His major publications include The Literary Book of Economics; “Teachers’ Undergraduate Coursework in Economics in the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study” (with W. Bosshardt) and “Instructor Effects and Their Determinants in Pre-College Economic Education” (with W. Bosshardt). He was a member of the writing team for the first edition of the voluntary national standards in economics. He has served as a consultant for such organizations as the Council on Economic Education, Agency for Instructional Technology, The College Board, the IMF, the U.S. Information Agency, and Microsoft.
William C. Wood is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Economic Education at James Madison University. An accomplished teacher and writer, Wood was the recipient of teaching awards at the University of Virginia and at James Madison University, where he was the 2001-2002 Distinguished Teacher in the College of Business. Wood was named in 2002 as an inaugural winner of the Southern Economic Association’s Kenneth G. Elzinga Distinguished Teaching Award. Wood is also a past recipient of the Alpha Kappa Psi-Clifford D. Spangler award for research in risk and insurance and Best Paper award for the Journal of Private Enterprise. He is the author of three books, more than 30 scholarly articles, and national economic education materials for school and adult audiences.
