Political Pedagogies

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically disrupted instruction across higher education. What have International Relations scholars learned from the experience of teaching through this situation? Contributors to this volume consider three themes: how they have adapted to new modes of instruction, what constitutes appropriate care for our students amid crisis, and how we as an epistemic community should prepare for future disruptions.

This book features valuable conversations about how COVID-19 has changed how we teach and even who we are as instructors in political science. This project devotes special attention to how our pedagogy in political science has evolved from ‘triage’ to transformation over the course of the pandemic. This book, part of the Palgrave Macmillan Political Pedagogies series, presents a variety of innovations in political science teaching (from “ungrading” to the flipped classroom) and offers systematic reflections on how our approaches to teaching and learning have been forever changed.

This volume asks how we, as International Relations scholars, support our students, and indeed each other, to create classroom spaces that foster the critical curiosity and engagement required to understand and live in a world that feels dangerously disrupted?  In an era of globalization, disruption, and pandemic, International Relations educators need to reflect upon how teaching helps constitute the discipline and position our students to contribute to the advancement of International Relations as a discipline and practice. Through exploring innovative approaches to teaching and learning, this volume ensures that International Relations keeps up with the contemporary needs of students and student learning, and takes advantage of the opportunity to advance as a discipline now and in the future. As we move through ‘pivots’ online and ‘transitions’ to remote learning in the midst of a pandemic, the need for attention to student learning is only made more prescient and urgent.

This Handbook addresses why political science programs teach the research process and how instructors come to teach these courses and develop their pedagogy. Contributors offer diverse perspectives on pedagogy, student audience, and the role of research in their curricula. Across four sections—information literacy, research design, research methods, and research writing—authors share personal reflections that showcase the evolution of their pedagogy. Each chapter offers best practices that can serve the wider community of teachers. Ultimately, this text focuses less on the technical substance of the research process and more on the experiences that have guided instructors’ philosophies and practices related to teaching it.

This book provides a resource for political science faculty wanting to increase their research productivity and/or teaching effectiveness in a time and resource efficient way. Faculty from various subfields and institution types offer examples of how they align their research and teaching activities to “get more bang for their buck.” While some contributors discuss projects within the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) research tradition, others go beyond this approach and integrate their teaching and research in other ways. As a result, this volume offers diverse, innovative, and practical ways faculty can leverage the teaching/scholarship connection to both improve scholarly productivity and ground political science instruction in pedagogical literature.

This book comes at a crucial time as the USA and countries around the world wrestle with an ongoing period of democratic backsliding that shows little sign of abating. Alarmingly, study after study shows that younger people are not convinced that democracy will endure – and that a sizable number are no longer convinced that it should. Especially as changing educational and political landscapes make efforts to educate for democracy both more necessary and more fraught, contributors to this book offer innovative pedagogies and praxis grounded in political and civic theories aimed at strengthening democratic norms, practices and institutions.

This book applies the existing literature in the scholarship of teaching and learning to political science, advising discipline-specific tips, approaches, and strategies to put immediately into practice. Keeping in mind the pace of an academic career, it also challenges the widely held misconception that being a good teacher requires a huge time investment. This book is meant for three core audiences: graduate students taking a course on teaching political science or about to embark on their first teaching experience; newly minted PhDs facing their first academic post and trying to figure out how to balance all of their new responsibilities; and veteran instructors looking to prepare a new course or revise an existing one.

In doctoral programs, graduate students are often encouraged to prioritize their research over teaching. This leads many early career scholars to identify primarily with the role of researcher. This edited collection introduces the term “early career instructor” (ECI) as a novel concept in understanding the experience of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, early tenure-track, contingent faculty, and other scholars early in their teaching careers. Including a diverse array of authors, this volume brings together essays on ECI experiences in different institutional and national contexts as well as reflections on current practices for ECI support and mentorship. At a higher level, this volume is also a call-to-action to recognize the importance of teaching in the early career stage.

The Palgrave Handbook on the Pedagogy of International Relations Theory is a collection that explores how best to teach the systems of thought that organize the study of international relations and global politics. All chapters document and advance intradisciplinary conversations about the challenge of helping students understand the nuances of IR theory. Authors document strategies they have successfully applied to that challenge in a variety of contexts and encourage readers to creatively adapt to the challenges of their own pedagogical contexts. The handbook is organized around four themes – teaching theory for particular audiences and classroom contexts, tips for teaching specific theories, an exploration of pedagogical approaches to teaching theory, and pedagogical considerations specific to courses in geographic regions.

This is an open access book that invites exploration into learning journeys as they unfold in, through and beyond the thinking space of a critically oriented postgraduate International Relations theory course. Drawing on the transformational potential of writing and creative research practice both in the classroom and the reflexive writing of this book, the project considers how we sense and make sense while navigating the lived experiences of academic study and world politics as asymmetrically positioned co-travellers. It narrates and theorizes three transformational writing processes that work with our relationships to self, other and world, inspiring care, curiosity, and other ways of knowing and being-together. The book provides conceptual and practice-based resources for rethinking and creatively engaging with the politics and transformational possibilities of pedagogy as acts of curation in the field, contemporary higher education, and everyday life.