‘Your Teaching Style Does Matter’

Danil Feodorovykh, a teacher in HSE’s Subdepartment of Microeconomic Analysis, has been elected by the students as one of the best seminar teachers of 2012 at HSE. He spoke to Andrei Scherbakov of the HSE news portal about teaching style and microeconomics.

AS: Teaching is a bit like acting, isn’t it — you have to perform for your audience —

DF: Yes, it is. And I’m convinced that style is a very important part of the job. As soon as I started teaching at Vyshka’s Department of Economic Theory, I was lecturing to large audiences and you can’t relax even for a second otherwise the students get bored and contact is broken.

AS: What is important in teaching?

DF: You need to keep contact with your students, not just during lessons but outside the lecture hall too. The university provides many ways to do that but I love talking about microeconomics so if my students want to see me outside of hours, I’ll try to work in a meeting. It’s also an important part of the teaching process. I try to introduce a broader, not just abstract, approach to microeconomic analysis. With my students, we looked at how microeconomic models can show that, contrary to expectation, the introduction of stricter fines for not wearing a seat belt can cause an increase in road deaths.

AS: Which books do you think are essential for learning about Microeconomics?

DF: There are some good books that we use on our courses – Hal Varian’s “Intermediate Microeconomics” for example and the less well known but also very good textbook “Price Theory and Applications” by Steven Landsburg.

AS: You also teach school kids, can you tell us something about that?

I set tasks for school Olympiads and am one of the authors of the site on economics for school kids - http://iloveeconomics.ru/. I like explaining to non-economists why microeconomics is so interesting. It’s key to show the connections between the theories and models and real life. There are quite a few very good popular science books that explain these connections, like Steven Levitt’s “Freakonomics” and Steven Landsburg’s “The Armchair Economist” which has come out in Russian recently.

AS: You are doing post graduate studies yourself and working on a dissertation. What is your research about?

DF: It’s about investigating corruption. My supervisor who is the head of our department, Mark Levin is a well-known specialist in the field. Together, we’re trying to research the structure of corrupt cooperation. Our work will be mainly theoretical; researching corruption is difficult – you can’t just go up to people and ask them if they have given bribes or taken them. In general, there are problems in gathering empirical material about corruption, but I hope that we manage to achieve something that will deepen our understanding of how the shadow economy works.