Here's the third of the `teaching' papers series I've been writing recently. First, I was interested in exploring problem based learning in advanced monetary economics, then I fiddled about with software to get large classes to interact. In this paper, written for the workshop `Pluralism in economics: rethinking the teaching of economics', October 18, 2008, City University, London, I spend some time thinking about the relation between differing approaches to teaching macroeconomics. 

Here's the abstract of the paper:

Pedagogical pluralism is difficult to implement in practice, but when overlaps between competing approaches are considered, the benefits for the students exceed the costs. An example is given contrasting two approaches to the modeling of money in macroeconomics: the stock-flow consistent macroeconomic modeling associated with Godley and Lavoie [1] and Barro’s [2] more mainstream neoclassical dynamic general equilibrium modeling. I argue students can only contrast and compare approaches effectively when thematic overlaps are significantly large to make these comparisons obvious. Only then should a pluralist approach be considered desirable.

The paper is below.