Economics With Heterogeneous Interacting Agents... Access

What is it?

TPRS® is a specific instructional strategy involves the co-creation of a narrative through story asking, using high frequency vocabulary, and providing lots of input in the target language with small amounts of translation for clarity. Story asking is the process where the teacher asks the the students questions to determine the details of a story. Skills involved in this process are circling, pausing & pointing, using gestures, comprehension checks, pop-up grammar, and so forth. Literacy is a huge component as the created narrative becomes a text for extension activities, follow up stories, and so forth.

Economics With Heterogeneous Interacting Agents... Access

Tell me more!

TPRS® was invented in 1990 by a Spanish teacher named Blaine Ray. Blaine was inspired by the works of Stephen Krashen as well as James Asher, who stressed the importance of gestures and movement to help in the language acquisition process. TPRS® has grown and evolved quite a bit over the past three decades. Formerly known as Total Physical Response Storytelling, TPRS has evolved thanks to the thousands of teachers who have contributed, expanded, and refined the strategy. There is also a huge body of research on the topic. For some of those resources and to see it in action, see the resources below.

TPRS in Action

Featured video: Watch Aya Shehata as she gives a TPRS demo in Japanese, including background about the strategy and how she incorporates it into her class.

Economics With Heterogeneous Interacting Agents... Access

In standard macroeconomics, we often look for a single "equilibrium" where supply equals demand. EHIA suggests that the economy is rarely in a state of rest. Because agents (consumers, firms, or banks) are constantly adapting to the actions of others, the system is in a state of perpetual flux. This approach draws heavily from and biology , treating market fluctuations not as external "shocks," but as emergent phenomena born from internal social interactions. Key Pillars of the Framework

Economics with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents (EHIA) represents a paradigm shift from traditional "representative agent" models to a framework that views the economy as a . Instead of assuming all people are identical and perfectly rational, this field acknowledges that the economy is made up of diverse individuals—each with unique goals, limited information, and differing behaviors—who constantly influence one another. The Shift from Equilibrium to Evolution

By using , researchers can simulate millions of interactions on a computer to test policy ideas. For example, EHIA can show how a specific tax change might affect different income groups differently, or how "fake news" might spread through a market and cause a flash crash. It provides a "laboratory" for economics, moving the field away from abstract equations and closer to the messy, interconnected reality of human society.