In all of my courses I’ve been migrating away from the standard textbooks put out by academic publishing houses. They are expensive, have a brief shelf-life, and are usually collections of easily-forgettable facts rather than memorable narratives. Chuck the textbooks and you’re left with the exciting (at least for me) but time consuming process of identifying replacements. It’s a challenge to find just the right journalistic accounts, memoirs, and fiction to apply to the broad themes of whatever course I’m teaching.
While seeking out such books for a comparative politics course, a question popped into my head: “is it really necessary for all students in a course to read the same books?” This then led to another question: “is it necessary that all students in a class study the same topics and learn the same things?” To a certain extent, people choose what universities to attend, what to major in, and what courses to take. Yet once in a class, all students march in lockstep through whatever content the instructor has selected. No more choice. I’ll make an educated guess that that lack of choice at the end of the educational pipeline produces a lack of intellectual and emotional investment among students — there’s not as much buy-in as there could be.
So I’m contemplating an experiment: putting together a modular architecture for my comparative politics course. Modular architecture is a term coined by author and business guru Clayton Christensen in The Innovator’s Dilemma and other books. It refers to designing components (in this case particular topics and the assignments that relate to them) independently so that they can be swapped in and out of a system as needed. The “module” format is a well-known method of organizing a course — the whole class studies certain topics in a sequence. But this is different — students choose topics from a larger list and study them throughout the semester, independently of what other students in the class have chosen. I can see how such an approach might facilitate grouping students into project teams according to topic, but beyond that I’m still trying to figure out how to make this idea work.
I’m trying a similar strategy in my comparative courses. What I have found works well is to have students select different country cases to apply readings to. The first third focuses on general issues of regime type, colonial past, political economy; the second third focuses on more specific issues and students compare the data they continue to compile within global regions (and then look at the regional data compiled by other groups; finally, students focus on a specific topic we’ve covered and write an essay relating to their case and then work with students who focused on that topic to make comparisons across regional/regime/development/cultural/etc. differences and similarities.