Teaching about Microfinance

You might know that I practice economics without a license. I've gotten by on just a bachelor's degree. This fall I have also been teaching without a license---teaching a half-course, Introduction to Microfinance for Development, at Georgetown's Public Policy Institute. Actually, many "unindoctorates" in Washington teach courses. This is my first time at the blackboard in 20 years, the last being as an undergraduate teaching assistant for Henry Leitner, who can tell you a great story about Bill Gates at the dawn of the microcomputer. CGD's John Osterman has just posted the syllabus, which you'll see echoes my book outline. My strongest memory of the course will probably be the prompt arrival at 12:10 each Monday of the succeeding professor in the classroom, E.J. Dionne, who would plow through the clutter of chairs and slowly departing students like a happy, talkative, important speedboat, dispersing us in his wake.Overall, I'm glad I tried my hand. While I don't think I will teach again soon---probably because of my strong pre-existing pedogagic bent, I did not learn much about microfinance from teaching it---I did enjoy exploring pedagogy.Under the tutelage of my colleague and veteran Georgetown professor Vijaya Ramachandran, I ran the first three sessions as a true seminar, assigning 2--3 students each time to present specific works on the reading list in order to seed discussion. For the first class, I assigned readings and watchings with clashing views on microfinance: Muhammad Yunus's autobiography and David Hulme's "note on the dark side of microfinance"; an Opportunity International video about Vivian in Ghana, who started a school, and the FRANCE 24 program (in English) on the "crushing burden of microcredit" in Bangladesh. I used the juxtapositions to suggest that the truth is elusive, and asked the students how they and the global "we" could pursue it.The second session revolved around my chapter 2 draft and Portfolios of the Poor. As in the draft, I had the students list the financial services they use and the purposes they put them to. In class, we aggregated these lists on the board and talked about how financial services help us build assets, manage consumption, invest for the future, prepare for emergencies, etc. This led to ideas about commonality and difference across the North-South divide: the poor need financial services for the same reasons we do, but their need is more urgent and they have different options.The third session was about history. It felt, I'm sure my students agree, like two hours with our carriage wheels stuck in the mud. Discourse was not spontaneous. After, in despair, I returned to my guru Vij, who told me I would need to lecture after all. This I did for the next two sessions, on microfinance as business and the impacts literature. For me at least, that brought the energy back.For session 6, last week, I took a tip from my retired-professor dad and broke the 10 students present into 3 groups, each to work on a problem. Which was: evaluate MFTransparency.org from the point of view of potential borrowers, investors, and funders of microcredit. My dad predicted that having students voice their thoughts with peers would make them more confident about speaking to the full group. That worked well. The students' reflections on transparency about matched my own, and led me into an unplanned mini-lecture featuring this post.For the last class, yesterday, students took turns talking about the draft papers they had handed me a few days before. (I borrowed a trick from a college writing teacher, who had students hand in first, then final, drafts of each paper, offering feedback in between.) Here too I was encouraged by the interactions; they had plenty of questions for each other.I had reviewed those drafts over the weekend, often while sitting in the theater basement, under the stage, between numbers, clad as a comedia dell'arte sword-wielding Turk. Doing so, I realized that in a sense, I am not really trying to teach my students about microfinance. That is a vast tapestry, always in flux, which no amount of analysis can fully chart. And I recalled Einstein's words: "Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school." What I am really looking for, and hoping to convey, is an effective style of critical thought in the social sciences. That is why I introduced yesterday's class with a bit of Socratic method, on the questions "what is science?" and "what is social science?". I hope that years (or weeks) from now, when the students have forgotten everything they learned about microfinance, some of those bigger ideas will remain.