Today we have a guest post from Susan Allen, associate professor of political science at the University of Mississippi. She can be contacted at shallen [at] olemiss [dot] edu.
This semester I am teaching a course on gender and international politics for the first time. The first half of the course examines gender and representation, while the second half explores gender in international politics. I aimed to bridge these two sections with a simulation that I created on child marriage—something currently on the agenda of the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights and a likely topic at the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) this summer.
Students have been working in groups by regions of the world to expand their knowledge base beyond their own experiences. For the simulation, they became spokespersons for their designated regions. As additional preparation, students read about CEDAW and an excerpt from Women, Politics, and Power by Paxton and Hughes. I did not inform them beforehand of the particular issue that would be discussed as part of the simulation, other than to say that the activity would resemble a communication from CEDAW.
During the simulation’s first class session, students met in their regional groups to research child marriage, making use of GirlsNotBrides.org. Each group formulated a regional proposal for what it would like the full class to discuss in the next two sessions. During these classes, a graduate student and I questioned students about their proposals to ensure they remained faithful to their roles. The ultimate objective was to collectively produce a single proposal to be presented at the upcoming CEDAW.
Based on post-simulation debriefing papers, students had mixed feelings about how little official private information was they received prior to negotiations and how much they had to rely on their own research to formulate a regional proposal. Perhaps as a result, discussion on the first day was a little slow to develop and their proposals were not as well fleshed out as I expected. On the second day, the majority of the students participated enthusiastically (and perhaps chaotically).
One of the most interesting things about this experience for the students was that they failed to come to an agreement in the time allotted. Many of them were concerned that they had “failed” the activity. When we debriefed the following week in class after they had written their papers, many of the students offered interesting insights about the difficulty of creating a proposal on something that they as American college students thought was an “easy” issue. The experience highlighted some of the practical challenges of creating laws that codify gender equality.
Next time, I might provide students with slightly more structured guidelines, but I don’t think I’ll do anything to make it easier for the students to create a unified proposal. I think the challenge and failure were essential parts of the value of the activity.