Upper Peninsula Teaching & Learning Conference - 2026

In my Intermediate Macroeconomic Theory course at Michigan Technological University, I have experimented with a series of applied, historically grounded projects designed to help students contextualize the development of macroeconomic models. This initiative began after I discovered that a majority of students could not identify the decade of the Great Depression, revealing a significant gap in historical-economic literacy that limited their ability to fully grasp the evolution of macroeconomic thought.
In response, I first implemented a half-semester project in which students created a detailed persona of an individual living during the Great Depression. While this immersive assignment significantly deepened students’ understanding of that period and increased engagement beyond expectations, it also narrowed their focus to a single event.
The following year, I redesigned the assignment into a group-based virtual timeline project spanning major economic events from 1900 to the present. This broadened students’ historical awareness but reduced the depth of contextual understanding necessary to fully appreciate the intellectual environment in which foundational macroeconomic models were developed.
This presentation will explore the design process behind these projects, assess the tradeoffs between breadth and depth in applied historical learning, and introduce a new hybrid model currently under development.