High School Economics Field Trips

Charity-Joy Acchiardo is Associate Professor of Instruction in the Department of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the faculty lead for UT’s OnRamps microeconomics course for high school students and is director of the Economic Education and Financial Literacy program, both joint projects of the Civitas Institute and UT's Department of Economics. She is a past Executive Director of the Journal of Economics Teaching. Her websites econkahoots.com and econshark.com are dedicated to making the economics classroom more engaging. Professor Acchiardo’s passion is sharing her joy about economics with others, and she is a frequent speaker, both domestically and internationally, at workshops for educators and students. She completed her Ph.D. in Economics at George Mason University.

Ninos P. Malek is a Professor of Economics at De Anza College (Cupertino, California) and an Economics Lecturer at San Jose State University. He also taught Economics and Advanced Placement Economics at Valley Christian High School in San Jose, California for fourteen years.

He earned his B.A. and M.A. in Economics from San Jose State University and a Ph.D. in Economics from George Mason University. Dr. Malek has been recognized for his teaching excellence at both the high school and college level. He placed second in the 2008 international Economics Communicators Contest in Las Vegas, Nevada sponsored by the Association of Private Enterprise Education. He was a 2018 finalist for Outstanding Lecturer at San Jose State University and he is the 2018-2019 recipient of the Teaching Excellence Award given by the College of Social Sciences at San Jose State University.

Dr. Malek has led several teacher and student workshops for various organizations including the Fraser Institute, Foundation for Teaching Economics, California Council on Economic Education/Bay Area Financial Education Foundation, California Association of School Economics Teachers, The Gus A. Stavros Centers for Economic Education at Florida State University and The University of South Florida, The Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University, and the Office of Economic Education at the University of Arizona.

Dr. Malek has been published in peer-reviewed economics education journals, Newsweek and The Mercury News.

Dirk Mateer is a Professor of Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Economics in the Movies, Essentials of Economics, and Principles of Economics. Dirk has been featured in the "Great Teachers in Economics" series and he was also the inaugural winner of the Economic Communicator Contest. While he was at Penn State, he received the George W. Atherton Award, the university’s highest teaching award, and was voted the best overall teacher in the Smeal College of Business. While at the University of Arizona, he received the best large class lecture award in the Eller College of Management and the University’s Koffler Teaching Prize, a quadrennial award for his contributions in economic education. He received the Kenneth Elzinga Distinguished Teaching Award from the Southern Economic Association in 2021.