"How to be a Con Artist" - A Wake Forest Course About The Character Behind Fraud

Описание: Dr. Rebecca Gill, an entrepreneurship and communications professor at Wake Forest University, taught a course entitled “How To Be a Con Artist: Stories of Fraud, Entrepreneurship, and the Social Imagination” (COM 370/ENT 302) to help students explore the men and women behind well-known fraud cases, and to think critically about what led people to do what they did. In the course, students explored the role of celebrity and social media, but also examined the virtue of honesty and the entrepreneurial ethos of “fake it ‘till you make it.”

Gill says her participation in the Program’s 2022 Course Development and Redesign Workshop gave her tools and the terminology to examine and discuss the character behind the cons. “[That] workshop really helped me to kind of understand what virtues and vices I might talk about,” she says. During the semester, she focused on perseverance, courage, transparency and secrecy. The course also focused on learning what not to do. “I really drew on counter-exemplars—the people who tend to give in more to their vices than to their virtues,” Gill says. “At a very basic level, we can learn how people who may have seemingly good intentions may fall into a path of making poor decisions, have unethical behavior, and show some of the tensions that our students might face in the workplace themselves.”

Read more about our Program's Course Development and Redesign Workshop for Wake Forest University faculty: https://leadershipandcharacter.wfu.ed...

Learn more about the Program for Leadership and Character: https://leadershipandcharacter.wfu.edu/