On November 20, 2017, Dr. Abdullah Al-Bahrani was selected to be the next Center Representative for the National Association of Economic Educators (NAEE). He will join the NAEE’s Executive Committee in 2018 and help uphold its mission of advancing economic and financial literacy by serving educators.
Dr. Al-Bahrani is the Director of the Center for Economic Education and an Assistant Professor of Economics at NKU. His focus on economic education has earned him the Award for Excellence in Teaching and Instruction and the Dean’s Citation for Outstanding Teaching. “A lot of things that I do in the classroom force the students to see the economics,” Dr. Al-Bahrani says. Students today are in a constant state of multi-tasking and often have several things competing for their attention at once. To address this issue, Dr. Al-Bahrani incorporates social media, TV, movies, and music into his lectures to encourage student engagement in the classroom. This style of communication has led to groundbreaking programs such as “Econ-Selfies” and “Econ-Beats”.
“Dr. Al-Bahrani communicates with students through media and with the language they know and understand,” says Dr. Rebecca Porterfield, Dean of NKU’s Haile/US Bank College of Business. “When students are tasked with putting economics to music and video, all the technology inputs they are familiar with come together in an innovative and creative way—a way that allows for application that leads to real knowledge.”
