Space & Agriculture

These teaching packs are designed for 30-minute (online or offline) sessions that can be included within any lecture or tutorial class. They are designed to be suitable for university students, but could easily be adapted for higher or lower levels. Every month, we will publish at least one exercise that you can use to engage your students with current events. The main aims of these exercises are to give students practice in relating economic ideas to the real world and their own lived experiences.

Newspaper articles or videos are used as the entry point to an economic topic, which is then expanded upon by the instructor before the students are broken into small groups to engage in an activity. This will help students to develop the skills required to work as economists in the real world, and all the materials you need are provided for you. These teaching packs are published as creative commons (CC BY) and can be freely used and adopted.

In this teaching pack, we take a look at satellite crop monitoring and how it is used for both real and financial economic activities. By looking at commodity futures, we give students a sense of what financialization can mean. In the active exercise students learn to discuss these matters and reflect upon them.

The central aim of this lesson is get students to understand and reflect upon a case of financialization. For this, students need to have a rough idea of what satellite crop monitoring and commodity futures are, but do not need to be able to perfectly reproduce all the details.