Made possible in part by Soomo Learning
I’ve handed off the research methods course that I had taught since 2015 to a colleague, but since I’ll be visiting the homeland of my people’s former imperial overlords in a few weeks, I thought I would share this brilliant example of data analysis:
https://www.nationaltrustscones.com/2023/04/which-uk-counties-serve-best-scones.html
For many, now is the time for the annual departmental away-day(s). There’s no teaching to do done, just a pile of marking, so someone senior feels the best thing would be to get everyone into a room to do something.
I used to consider that it wasn’t an away-day if you could still see your campus from the window, but times/finances have changed.
Last week, I spent two days approximately 20 metres from my departmental building for our away-day, but since a) I’m very rarely on-site and b) I’d never been to this particular building, I didn’t feel aggrieved about it.
Plus if left enough money for the accommodation and for nice lunches.
Perhaps precisely we don’t see much of each other, a good amount of reflection and debate went into making the days worthwhile.
That meant avoiding reporting anything and giving much time to discussion and advancing projects.
Reporting is a killer: lots of description of things that have happened, which if it were important to you then you would know about already. It’s largely a relic of the Good Old Days, when committees where actually the beating heart of academic governance: now it just makes sense to keep such things confined to written notes or access to dashboards.
By contrast, discussion is something that is increasingly rare, especially as remote working destroys the notion of water-cooler moments.
For us, just being able to spend time chatting about anything with a colleague in person is much valued, and if we can tie that towards something specific and valuable then even better.
This year, we tried making the research-focused elements build up to generating more internal collaborations. That meant making space for sharing interests and ideas, and nudging everyone to think about linkages, without imposing anything too heavy.
For teaching, we worked on sharing best practice tips and trouble-shooting, as well as revisiting the long-term planning ideas we created at last year’s event.
Stick in a nice meal at the pub in the middle and it was a recipe for constructive and purposeful community-building, rather than a chore. We didn’t even need to resort to a team-building exercise.
If your away-day isn’t giving you that, then maybe you want to offer organising next year’s event, to everyone’s enjoyment.
From the prompt “Complain to my husband about not washing dishes thoroughly in the style of Jane Austen”:
My dearest husband,
I hope this letter finds you well. It is with some vexation that I write to you regarding a matter that has been weighing heavily on my mind: the washing of the dishes.
As you are no doubt aware, this is a task that we both undertake in turn, and one which is essential to the smooth running of our household. And yet, I cannot help but notice that your efforts in this regard have been somewhat lacking of late.
I have observed with no small amount of dismay that you have not been washing the dishes thoroughly, leaving behind a residue of food that is most unappetizing. This, I must confess, has caused me no small amount of discomfort and concern, as it is not only unhygienic, but also highly unpleasant.
I trust that you will take this matter seriously, and make a concerted effort to improve the quality of your dishwashing in the future. I am sure that with a little more attention to detail, you will soon become as proficient in this task as I am.
With the utmost respect and affection,
[Your Name]
The sight of a piece whose authors include an erstwhile ALPS colleague on the use of music in teaching politics neatly coincides with the past week’s European extravaganza of music/politics: Eurovision.
I’ll assume that a good number of you know about this, but for the culturally-void here’s a quick run-down.
Each member of the European Broadcast Union gets to submit a song for a competition, where everyone gets to vote, but not for their country. Someone wins.
Obviously, there’s more to it than that.
‘Each member’ obviously doesn’t mean each member does submit, or is allowed to submit. And Australia (very much neither an EBU member nor in (or near) Europe) get to submit for, well, reasons.
And the whole voting thing is quite involved. and occasionally corrupt. Pardon, ‘irregular‘.
Throw in a revolution-triggering song, landmarks on clipboards and opening of borders and you see why it’s catnip to the passing academic.
A quick squizz on Google Scholar throws up thousands of results, from imagery to regional voting blocks, LGBT+ identities to governance. This year you’ve also had a Zelensky dimension too.
Someone’s even made a lovely dataset of voting for you to play with. To help with things like analysis of the popular v. jury voting.
Throw in the wildly varying conceptions of what might constitute a popular song and if you struggle to make a class out of some aspect of this, then you are really not trying.
And since you didn’t ask, here’s my personal favourite of recent years:
So there’s been a coronation here.
You might have missed it: I sadly found that I had other, unavoidable, commitments all weekend.
Given that many of our readers might be working in states that have made the (not actually that difficult) leap to becoming republics, this is maybe a good point to suggest some resources for class discussion about constitutional monarchies, and whether they are morally defensible.
I raise this partly because of the arrival of someone new on the throne of the United Kingdom, but partly because it’s also a good way into some basic questions about constitutional design and the relationship between governors and governed.
Moreover, as much as you saw a bunch of Brits all dressed up in union jack-print clothing and cheering the pagent of it all, there were plenty of others from whom it wasn’t a thing at all.
To get a sense of the ambivalence around the coronation and the installation of Charles III, visit the BBC website to see the kinds of stories being created: not quite the effusive or fawning position you might have expected (even if the BBC isn’t a government-funded news channel, Elon).
The Guardian offers a more critical take, on the back of recent investigations into the Royal Family’s extensive assets, but also some archive content to further point up How Times Have Changed.
You might also explore the semiotics of more pro-Royal outlets like The Sun or the Daily Mail. The framing of the Royals as celebrities here is perhaps my main takeaway; any notion of leadership feels distinctly in second place.
Which begs a question of why we put up with it all?
There’s plenty of polling on this (here and here, for example) which highlights the benign neglect of most people: it’s fine, but also not that important.
The question of what you’d replace the Crown with is also a not unimportant point: even Republic, a key protest group, are clearer about problems than solutions.
And for a more scholarly overview, there’s this from my colleagues at UK in a Changing Europe.
Finally, if that’s not enough to stimulate class discussion, try a taste comparison of the official dishes of the past two coronations: Coronation Chicken (Elizabeth II), and, um, Coronation Quiche (Charles III).
Today we have a guest post from Rebecca A. Glazier at the School of Public Affairs at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (rebecca [dot] glazier [at] gmail [dot] com) and Matthew Pietryka at Florida State University’s political science department (mpietryka [at] fsu [dot] edu).
Many professors are struggling to engage their students, who are often disengaged and burned out. To address these issues and improve student retention, universities are increasingly turning to edtech solutions or big data—everything from predictive analytics to chatbots in discussion boards. These remedies tend to be far removed from students’ daily lives. In contrast, as professors, we are with students in the classroom every day. And this experience often prepares us to know best how to engage our students.
In a new, open-access article we just published in Education Sciences, “Learning through Collaborative Data Projects: Engaging Students and Building Rapport,” we illustrate how faculty can engage students through collaborative data projects. Rather than relying on top-down university solutions, faculty can use the content of their own courses to involve students in collaborative projects that build rapport and make them feel included and engaged in the course. We see these collaborative data projects as another kind of active learning—getting students thinking outside of the textbook and involved in contributing to a project that is bigger than themselves.
We used data from more than 120 students over two semesters and our results suggest that most students find these collaborative data projects more enjoyable than typical college assignments. And students report the projects make them feel the professor is invested in their learning.
The article we wrote detailing these projects is open access. It provides advice on implementing these projects as well as the R code used to create individualized reports for students participating in the collaborative data projects. The individualized reports help develop rapport between the professor and each student. And this programmatic approach allows professors to scale up these reports to accommodate classes with hundreds of students. Building rapport and doing active learning is something considered possible only in smaller classes, but our approach demonstrates how it can be done in large classes as well—with significantly positive results.
At a time when many faculty members are struggling to engage students, we can take matters into our own hands by designing projects for our classes that draw students in and build rapport with them. It doesn’t take expensive edtech solutions or top-down directives. Mostly, it takes thoughtful pedagogy and prioritizing student connection.
Open Access article link: https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/12/12/897.
Recent episode on the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast on this research: https://teachinginhighered.com/podcast/engaging-students-through-collaborative-research-projects/.
It’s May 2023 here in the UK, which means we are having so many public holidays that it feels like Belgium.
As a distraction from celebrating the arrival of someone else that we didn’t select into the position of Head of State, academics have been more focused on the latest stage of strike action by the main union, the UCU.
Right now, that means a Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB). This means not returning marks/grades to the university, which in turn means there are gaps in calculating degree classifications for completing students.
Rather than get into the mechanics of all this, I’ll instead focus on the new approach that employers have taken to this.
In the past, there would be a relatively small deduction of pay for participating in a MAB: 10-20% was the typical range, reflecting the amount of time that might be involved, plus a bit for the disruption it caused.
This time around, employers seem to be going for a rather different model:
Continue reading “The odd situation of assessment”
I’m in the unusual position of getting some feedback from students on some teaching that will be happening at the end of this year.
Our distance-learning model means we build our resources a long way in advance, so we have the opportunity to get some road-testing of new elements beforehand, through a scheme run by the university.
In this case, that meant inviting a bunch of undergrads to try out the asynchronous negotiation exercise I’ve been working on for the past couple of years for our new Masters in IR.
Sadly, only a handful of those invites turned into feedback. While all positive, it does still make me wonder whether it’ll work in practice when our students get to it shortly before Christmas.
And it raises the more general question of how we can do this for people in more regular settings: typically, we only find out if our class is going to work when we deliver it.
With that in mind, there are several things we might do to improve the chances of that happening.
Firstly, we can follow good design principles. That means using our generic knowledge about course design to create something new. Having clear learning objectives and ensuring alignment between these, the activity and any assessment is the obvious go-to, but we might also consider what we know about how students behave and about the impact of the various constraints we operate under.
Oddly, this can be harder to remember to do when we have a ‘standard’ session than when we try for something more original or innovative. A lecture might not break any new ground in its delivery, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make something that sucks: you have to work on being clear about your purpose and how you’re using your time to achieve that.
If we follow the insights that basic pedagogy teaches us, then we are already much more likely to hit our goals.
Second up, we can talk it through. Teaching isn’t a heroic struggle, where one woman/man does it all on their own, but a collective endeavour: we help each other to help students learn.
In all the major simulation activities I have built, I have also sought the advice and input of colleagues, both within my institution and beyond it. Their ideas and comments have been a major asset and opened up a lot of ideas that I wouldn’t have had on my own, certainly not before trying things out with my students.
There’s really no downside in sharing your teaching practice: you get useful input, they get a warm glow of being helpful (plus someone they can ask for advice in return), you all get a stronger community of practice. So if you don’t do it already, try it.
Finally, we can wargame it. This is really only necessary for major projects, where the costs of failure are relatively high.
Basically, you become the most pessimistic person you can think to be and ask for each step of your activity ‘what’s the worst that can happen?’, and then think about ways to avoid, minimise and address those things.
You used to do this when you started out teaching and asked yourself ‘what if they ask a question?’: like that, but with the confidence in your abilities that has developed through practice. [Which possibly leads you to ask ‘what if they don’t ask any questions?’, but hey].
Sitting down and working through all the worst-case scenarios is helpful for the same reason as the previous idea: it takes things out of you and places you in someone else’s shoes. Here, you’re actively empathising with the student.
If you want a single take home on this, then it’s that the more you think about how things might (not) work, the more likely it is that they will work when needed. Failure to prepare leads to preparing for failure, and all that.
Today we have a guest post, or more accurately, a guest video, from Joel Moore of Monash University, on an innovative use of the ChatGPT AI in a simulation:
I know we’ve been around this one before, this is an increasingly common question.
This week, it’s been brought back to the front of my mind by a couple of things. First, there is the impending departure by my significant other across the seas to a conference about which a degree of ambivalence is being expressed. Second, there was this thoughtful post from Jenny Thatcher which I heartily recommend:
The crappy response to Jenny’s critique would be ‘pfft, sociologists’, but it would also be to deny seeing pretty much all of this at politics/IR conferences over the years (like Jenny, it’s not finger-pointing at particular things, just more the general vibe).
Academic conferences were built for a different time, like a lot of other bits of academic life: before we had the internet, physical co-location was the only viable way to have discussions about research at any speed. Sure, you could write a letter, but it’s not the same.
Add in a big dose of commercialisation for all involved and the tightening of the labour market and the mix that Jenny describes can be found across the sector: systemic inequalities, predatory behaviour of all too many kinds, stasis.
If the piece resonates, then it’s also because I chair an research association that holds its annual conference as a key part of what it does. While it’s not as central or as exclusive an activity for our overall profile as it is for other associations I know of, it still is A Thing.
So what to do?
Continue reading “What’s the point of conferences?”