A few thoughts on my comparative politics course this year, now that the semester has ended:
Although I think my revised writing prompts made the intent of assignments more transparent, I forgot to preface each prompt with an overview of how readings related to the topic at hand. Also, for some assignments, it was obvious that students still weren’t reading items that I regarded as essential. If I don’t specifically refer to an author in the prompt, students often don’t read that author’s work. Since the relationship between the author and the question I posed was obscurely implied rather than explicit, I don’t have much justification for reducing students’ marks.
My Gerkhania simulation worked much better, in terms of student engagement, in a class of fourteen than it did in last year’s class of ten. Yet in each parliamentary session, students rapidly disclosed the roles they had randomly acquired to sort out how to construct coalitions that allowed the greatest number of them to “win.” I’m thinking of introducing two changes to the simulation next year that might reduce students’ tendency to default to rational actor behavior. First, keep students’ roles the same throughout the simulation, instead of randomly changing them for each session. This might cause students to develop a greater attachment to their fictional identities. Second, have students draft their own legislation instead of providing them with a a list of pre-determined bills.
Re-arranging course topics and pushing the qualitative comparative analysis deeper into the semester seemed beneficial, but many students still struggled with the assignment. They don’t, for example, understand concepts like “land productivity” and how measures like these can be used as independent variables. I need to continue separating the QCA into smaller components. Baby steps.