This guest post is part of a series linked to the publication of G. Pleschova & A. Simon (eds.) Learning to teach in central Europe: Reflections from early career researchers. This post comes from Niina Meriläinen.
Many states of Europe are now experiencing growing social and political passivity of some youths, which may lead to their lifelong marginalization and radicalization. To revert this trend, many university teachers feel committed to encourage and empower their students to become active in their communities, and to play a more active role in the democratic development of societies and in supporting the principles of human rights and rule of law.
In his chapter , Martin Karas, from the University of Economics in Bratislava, reports on various aspects of how to engage non-political science undergraduates. Karas introduced three active learning exercises – a debate, a group analysis of a primary sources, and cut-up cards – to help students to distinguish between various political science concepts, to achieve higher levels of student engagement, to improve knowledge retention, and to create understanding of political actors, issues and practices. While researching the effects of these exercises on student learning, he combined qualitative and quantitative methods.
Whereas active learning methods led to higher levels of student engagement in Karas’ class, they did not significantly affect knowledge retention and understanding. Karas’ research results correlate with the literature findings, which reports the connection between active learning and student engagement, but no robust evidence for the existence of a link between active learning and knowledge retention and understanding.
Karas’ findings are similar with those of Meriläinen, Pietilä, & Varsaluoma (2018) and Meriläinen’s forthcoming research (2019). The later research focuses on the engagement of non-subject students in vocational schools to contribute to social change processes, including law drafting. Naturally, we need to understand that there are various forms of youth engagement and participation to social and political change processes, some that gatekeepers such as officials give credibility, and some that are overlooked and viewed as non-credible by the gatekeepers.
Karas’ research illustrates that the engagement of non-subject students can increase the quantitative participation but may not result in long-term qualitative understanding of the issues, actors and events in the political sphere. This implies that more effective learning methods (and more multidisciplinary research) are needed to achieve lasting and profound awareness, engagement and participation of non-subject students to societal and political change processes.
If we wish to achieve desired change towards equal, human rights based, inclusive and sustainable societies, active citizenship and participation of youths is an essential requirement. Karas’ chapter is an exciting example from this research field. While designing learning methods for non-subject students, various actors working together, such as researchers, teachers, youth workers and volunteers, should take into account several key issues.
This includes making the courses “accessible” for various groups of students including individuals with disabilities, language competences, asylum seekers, and migrants in general, paying attention to power-relations among youths and dissimilar interests and skills of various youths. As they are not a homogenous group that engages with one voice, “one size fits all” teaching and learning method cannot effectively reach all of them. Because youths from various backgrounds should become agenda setters in the democratic development of societies, teaching and learning methods must be designed to address their different needs.