This semester I am once against tasked by my institution to introduce a new crop of students to the magical world of international relations theories. Yet, as many of us, who do that regularly, know, teaching theories in international relations can be a difficult feat, as many of our students (most of the time freshmen and sophomores) engage with abstract ideas/frameworks for the first time. In particular, keeping together the purpose of theories, why we have different ones, and what their core assumptions are in how they approach the world can be daunting – for both the student and the teacher tasked with that role. As a visual learner myself, I have adopted two measures in my classes to convey visually the meaning of theories and why we have them. Below, I briefly discuss them.
Theories as Sunglasses:
Every time I begin a session about a new theory, I project an image of a pair of new sunglasses alongside with my slides. Each pair has differently tainted glasses and a different color of frames. I do that to remind my students that each week we encounter a new way of seeing the world, and that different shading of the world means that we view it in a new light (aka new assumptions). When introducing new theories and reflecting upon the catalogue we have, I emphasize that we don’t wear multiple pairs of glasses at once, because that would look “goofy” and we wouldn’t be able to see clearly. My hope is this that this heuristic device prevents the usual 101 response of “What if we brought all theories together to explain event X?”.
A Visual Cheat Sheet:
The idea came to me last semester – not in a dream – but as I was preparing a mid-term review session on the theories. At that time, I roll-called all theories and critical approaches my students encountered in the first half of the semester and diluted it down to key components that these theories think differently/similarly about: human nature, anarchy, actors, and interests. Lastly, again as a visual learner, I also included a tangible example (i.e., Why did the Soviet Union fall?), which allowed the application of the different components to a real world event.
Last semester, I only used it as a one off in the review session, providing students a grid to apply their knowledge to, but I decided this fall semester to include it as an accompanying document throughout our entire class time – especially in the beginning with the build of of the different theories. I handed it out in the first class, explaining its purpose. Since then, I have been using it in class as a visual reminder, referencing back to it, emphasizing its utility, and also using it as way to illustrate, for instance, how theories “talk” and “respond” to each other. I find that when all theories and their attributes are visible at the same time, their co-existence becomes clearer to an audience that is experiencing them for the first time.
Below, you can see my basic version of it. I am sure others have experimented with this sort of knowledge framing, and I would encourage others to share their ways to dealing with new IR audiences.
