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“No to E! News red carpet events in the classroom!”

I struggle with technology in the classroom. And not in the “should I allow my students to use laptops or not” way. I am firmly in the camp that allows the use of laptops and tablets in my lectures. There is plenty of debate on this issue: some encourage it; others discourage it. There is no right answer, and ultimately how we handle this “problem” is up to each of us. My choice for laptops is largely based on my feeling like a hypocrite if I insist on pen and paper. I use my laptop/smartphone in my teaching, research, and just general existence. The last time I wrote by hand thank you cards, my hand started aching.

My struggle comes from the “appropriate” use of technology in the classroom. Or better: my students’ changing understanding of what is “appropriate”. Or better-better: What is my role in educating young adults on what is appropriate in the classroom regarding technology? Can I expect certain things? Or are we starting at zero?

I am fully aware that on their lists of priorities, attending my class with 100% devotion ranks relatively low: behind the lunch menu, their friends, weekend plans, and whether somebody texts them back. And yet, in the recent past I have encountered a myriad of strange situations in the classroom that required my intervention because students either forgot where they were or thought they could get lost in the anonymity of the crowd. I had to call out a student who was watching four (!) basketball games at the same time on a split-screen, another one for watching an E! News red carpet event during a group assignment, and another who was so furiously typing while we were watching something as a group that I had to inquire whether they were transcribing the clip (they immediately stopped when I said something). At a guest lecture I gave this week in hybrid form, the inviting professor muted me for a second to admonish two students for playing chess and watching soccer respectively on their screens: they hadn’t noticed that the angle of the zoom cameras in the lecture hall meant that their shenanigans were being projected to the big screen.

A newer contender in the distracting technology game is the rise of Air Pods and other small Bluetooth headphones. They disappear under a student’s hoodie or their hair. A colleague and I recently exchanged thoughts on that, and we both agreed that it is strange to tell students to take out their headphones…in class. And yet, we do it. Has the bar been lowered from “pay attention” to “don’t obstruct your only tool to hear”?

As a teacher I can prepare well for class, make sure the activities are pedagogically sound, and I can set clear boundaries of what the purpose of our classroom is. I do that at the beginning of the semester with the syllabus and my laptop guidelines, which I reiterate in person. I encourage responsible and positive use, and I also highlight – hopefully in a not intimidating way – that in our learning community I can see what they do, just like they see what I do.

What I don’t want to do is play whack amole with Air Pods and E! News. This frustration that I harbor over the misuse of technology and the disregard for our shared learning space stands in odds with my aims of creating an open, inclusive, and comfortable learning environment. And I am not even certain if my frustration is appropriate as an educator. Even as I am writing this, I keep going back and forth on whether it is okay to be frustrated, whether I should be more understanding, whether my students need even more guidance on appropriate classroom behavior, whether I am too harsh or not harsh enough, and whether I should retrain my hand to write with a pen and demand the same of my students.

Maybe someone here will know how to fix all my problems. Perhaps cut off the Wi-Fi?

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Politics in Worlds that Never Were, Part 1

This semester, I’m teaching a literature course with a mouthful name: Thinking for a Thriving Planet – Environmental Politics in Worlds that Never Were. It’s part of a Department of English Teagle Grant in which ten faculty from different liberal arts departments teach fiction/non-fiction literature courses grounded in their respective disciplines. It was a tremendously fun and insightful course, and I’d been chomping at the bit to teach it again.

I taught a variant of this course at the US Air Force Academy in 2018. In that version, cadets analyzed science fiction and fantasy literature using international relations theory (I also included a block on board games and roleplaying games). For their midterm, the cadets had an open book/open note short essay exam analyzing an excerpt from the Dungeons & Dragons Forgotten Realms campaign setting, which questions such as, how would realism interpret a 20th-level character freely adventuring across sovereign boundaries? And, how does magic in this setting influence the balance of power in this setting? The course culminated in a world analysis paper, requiring students to analyze at least three books in a series. I was also able to get post-Herbert Dune author Kevin J. Anderson and roleplaying game designer Sean Patrick Fannon as guest speakers, and authors Jeanne DuPrau (The Book of Ember) and John Scalzi (Old Man’s War) to comment on cadet papers written on their respective books.

Image by 8385 from Pixabay

For my current class, I was required to focus on environmental politics per the Teagle Grant. One minor problem: I don’t specifically study environmental politics. Too easy–I’ll learn alongside my students! Soliciting the help of my department’s environmental politics scholars–shout out to Bob Duffy, Ryan Scott, Dimitris Stevis, and Marcela Velasco–I assembled a collection of seminal environmental politics paired with six speculative fiction books, plus a book chapter appetizer. Listed below in order of course appearance:

I’d already settled on Bacigalupi, DuPrau, Herbert, Miller, but folks on the Political Scientists Facebook page suggested Stewart and Valenti (and UNLV’s Chris Jensen suggested opening with the Tolkien chapter to ease students into analysis). They also have a similar midterm, analyzing an excerpt from the roleplaying game Shadowrun, and a world analysis paper grounded (pun unintended) in environmental politics. I’m also including a games lesson and two lessons on films.

Another challenge is that, unlike my 400-level USAFA course, this version is 100-level. Whereas my USAFA students already had introductory major’s courses under their belts, my current students were hit with a firehose right out of high school (hence, why Chris Jensen’s Tolkien chapter suggestion was a great idea). I’ve mitigated that by reminding my students that this is a discussion-based course with no right or wrong answers, just poorly organized ones. I also taught them strategies for approaching the material using Adler and Van Doren’s How to Read a Book as a foundation. I think they understand that the thinking is high, but the risks are low now, as they exploded out of their shells yesterday to discuss Dune–I barely had to say or do anything beyond selecting raised hands!

So far, so good, but the midterm will be their next big challenge.

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New Contributors (and request for readers’ advice)

Hello, I’m Cathy Elliott and I am joining the ALPS blog as a regular contributor along with my friends and co-conspirators – JP, Kalina and John – from the UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics. I’ve written for ALPS once before, which led to some really interesting conversations, so I’m very excited to be blogging more regularly about my favourite subject: active learning (or, as I prefer to call it, ‘learning’, since I very much doubt that passive learning is actually a thing.)

Student in Chelsea Physic Garden for my class last year

Despite that first post on simulations – which was very on-brand for ALPS – I don’t do so much with games and simulations in my teaching at the moment, though there is a always the chance that I might come back to them. However, with the start of the UK autumn term fast approaching, I have lots of exciting plans for my Politics of Nature module this term, which I hope to write about every week or two. In this class, we do outdoor learning, object-based learning, portfolio-based assessment with a strong focus on optionality and choice, and we make lots of use of technology including flipped classrooms, eportfolios and social annotation. So, there will be lots to say!

I’m also a Vice Dean Education at the moment, so it’s quite possible that I will stray into questions of policy and strategy every now and again. However, my heart will always be in the classrom and with my undergraduate students. I’m very happy to hear your thoughts if there’s anything you’d particularly like to read about.

Meanwhile, I have a new and hitherto unexpected problem. I am of an age where I have just acquired my first ever pair of glasses! This is all good news as it’s a miraculous treat to realise that I can see again! However, they are only for reading and everything from the middle distance outwards is hopelessly blurred when I wear them. So, how do I teach now? Luckily, I avoid lecturing as much as possible, but I have to do it sometimes. How will I look at my notes and my slides and the students’ faces? And in the seminar room or other settings, how will I switch from my notes to look at the students? Seasoned spectacle wearers, give me your best tips!

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“How to spark curiosity”

Hi everyone, my name is Jennifer Ostojski. I am a Visiting Assistant Professor in International Relations at Colgate University. In August 2022, I defended my dissertation on European identity. I recently joined the ALPS team, handling some of the day-to-day stuff, contributing weekly (on Fridays) my thoughts on teaching, and also soliciting guest posts to present new and exciting teaching tools. Looking forward to our time together!

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What is it that we do in Political Science? That’s a question a faculty member prompted us to think about in a department meeting I recently attended. The Geology department “produces” geologists”. The Physics department “produces” physicists. But what do we mean by “producing” political scientists? I could give you the old spiel of pre-law tracks and policy-oriented folks. They have clearer expectations of what happens in the great beyond when they leave their undergraduate institutions. But what about my students, who focus on International Relations or Comparative Politics, who have internships in consulting firms, architectural firms, or even on the stock market? I don’t know about you, but I am not producing consulters, architects, and stock market experts in class.

Reflecting on this question, I realized that the “what I do” in class is to try just genuinely spark curiosity and excitement for everything that politics is (see Chad’s three-part series on the Death of Curiosity here, here, and here). I find that when students come to class, their perception of politics is much more limited to distant actors, processes, and things they think they have no power over. Missing from their radar is the consciousness that ultimately everything they do, engage with, and consume is and can be tied to politics. And more importantly, they are not passive observants but actors in the political world. This realization does not happen organically, but when achieved it can create a curious mind about the world around them – maybe not in perpetuity but at least for the length of the semester.

Over time this transformation and realization can take place when prompted by the instructor (you and me!). Over the last couple semesters, I have put more emphasis on creating activities and classroom designs to elicit this realization in my students and involve them and their ideas more strongly in our classroom environment. Below, I outline some of examples that I am currently doing in my two courses.

1. Participation now makes up 20% of my students’ grade. It is a lot – I think – compared to other courses, but ultimately I decided that I need to motivate my students to speak up in any capacity, share their ideas, and allow themselves to play around with concepts without necessarily feeling the need to say the “right” or “correct” thing.

  • Caveat: I have seen an uptick in participation. But the hurdle of “saying the right thing” is ever present. I had a student recently apologize to me after class for not knowing the answer.

Assuring and reminding my students about the opportunity the classroom provides to freely exchange ideas has worked so far only in parts for me. 

2. I begin every class session with a 5-minute news recap session. It wakes up the students (especially those pesky early Monday morning sessions), and it allows students to share news stories that peaked their interests about domestic or international issues.

  • Caveat: If students don’t read, and I come across that a bunch (maybe you too?), it can become an exercise in cricket sounds. I counter that by keeping in my metaphorical back pocket a couple of stories when students are not sharing anything on their own. They can then at least respond to that and communicate their thoughts.
    • The cynic in me is a bit baffled when I encounter folks who just don’t read anything. But that is beside the point here.

3. A core assignment in my class, which I have done now for a couple of semesters, is a short in-person presentation, in which each student picks their own topic in relation to the class theme (this semester it is broadly “International Relations”). For me, it is Important that they are free to choose the topic and put their own mark on our class. Often, they contribute fresh new case studies that enrich our understanding of core concepts. Also, if they choose on their own, they are more likely to genuinely like the topic, which can be felt in the way they approach the presentation research itself. Students in the past have talked about Princess Diana as an international diplomat, the efforts of the NBA to start an African basketball league, the emerging norm of returning stolen artifacts to former colonized states, and the rise and fall of the Adani Group.

  • Caveat: I have found that when first confronted with the assignment, some students “get it”, while other students are a bit overwhelmed. Two reasons stand out: (1) the freedom of choice is almost too much, but providing examples helps quite a lot for students to be able to narrow down; and (2) a lack of interest in seemingly a lot of things, which then transpires into not knowing where to start and how to proceed. In the case of the second option, I have found that it takes a lot of probing and pulling to define half-heartedly some “interesting” topic.

These three are by no means perfect, but they have created a warmer and more engaged back-and-forth that I appreciate and prefer over my monologues. I try and improve upon that regularly. No empirical evidence exists on the effects of my efforts (yet), but I see it as my responsibility of “what I do” to instill – especially in introductory courses – a sense of curiosity and ownership by our students over politics. Maybe in twenty years one of them will reach out about their international political efforts in architectural design.

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What ChatGPT Can Do

Taking the ball — Simon’s post from last week — and running with it: here is an AI version of the “victory of the already-advantaged” college application trauma dump.

You are a high school senior who is applying to college. Your mother is a corporate lawyer and your father is an engineer. You grew up in an affluent neighborhood and attended a private high school. Write a college application essay that discusses how an anxiety disorder negatively affected your childhood and how it represents a challenge that you triumphed over.

Triumph Over Adversity: Overcoming Anxiety to Pursue My Dreams

As I sit down to write my college application essay, I find myself reflecting on the twists and turns of my journey thus far. I grew up in an affluent neighborhood, the child of a corporate lawyer mother and an engineer father. I attended a prestigious private high school where the opportunities seemed endless. However, beneath the facade of privilege and opportunity, there was a silent battle I had been waging throughout my childhood—anxiety.

Anxiety has been a constant companion in my life, a persistent shadow that often threatened to engulf me in darkness. It was not the type of anxiety that stems from external stressors, but rather an internal struggle, a whirlwind of irrational fears and doubts that manifested itself in various ways throughout my formative years.

One of the most significant challenges I faced was social anxiety. The affluent environment I grew up in fostered high expectations for academic and social success. As a teenager, I often found myself paralyzed by the fear of judgment and rejection. I would hesitate to speak up in class, avoid social gatherings, and overthink every interaction. This fear of scrutiny held me back from forming meaningful connections and experiencing the full richness of high school life.

Additionally, my anxiety often manifested as perfectionism. I felt compelled to excel in every aspect of my life to compensate for the internal chaos. It was a relentless pursuit of perfection, a quest that left me feeling drained and inadequate. I would meticulously review every homework assignment, agonize over exams, and second-guess my abilities. The pressure I placed on myself became overwhelming, causing my anxiety to spiral even further out of control.

However, as I reflect on my journey, I am proud to say that I did not let anxiety define me or dictate the course of my life. Instead, I chose to confront my fears head-on and seek help when I needed it. With the support of my family, I began therapy and learned valuable coping strategies to manage my anxiety. I slowly pushed myself outside of my comfort zone, one small step at a time. I joined clubs, participated in public speaking events, and embraced opportunities for leadership.

One of the most significant turning points came when I decided to participate in a debate competition. The prospect of standing before an audience and articulating my thoughts was daunting, but I refused to let anxiety hold me back any longer. Through perseverance and hard work, I not only overcame my fear of public speaking but also discovered a passion for debate. It was a triumph over adversity, a testament to my resilience and determination.

Through these experiences, I have come to understand that triumphing over adversity is not about eradicating all challenges; it is about learning to navigate them with courage and resilience. My journey with anxiety has taught me the importance of self-acceptance and the power of seeking support. It has also instilled in me a deep empathy for others facing their own battles with mental health.

As I embark on this new chapter of my life, I carry with me the lessons I have learned and the strength I have gained from overcoming anxiety. I am excited about the opportunities that lie ahead in college, where I hope to continue my personal growth and make a positive impact on those around me. My experience has shaped me into a compassionate, determined, and resilient individual who is ready to face any challenges that come my way. Anxiety may have been a formidable foe, but it has also been a powerful catalyst for my personal growth and self-discovery. I am now prepared to pursue my dreams with unwavering determination, knowing that I can triumph over adversity and achieve my goals.

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Breaking: There’s a problem with something

Surely redundant when no one ever takes a phone in the toilets anyway, right?

The discussion that prompted my previous piece also gave me opportunity for more reflection on the long journey back home from the conference: another benefit of using surface transport only.

The position that most of us – I think – would take on AI is that it’s here and we have to live with it. It might be causing our colleagues inconveniences or making us change what we do, but the use-case of the technology is so much broader than university assessment (or applications, for that matter) that the thing will keep on rolling forward.

If that’s so for AI, then it’s also so for other technologies. The noughties cry of “don’t use Wikipedia: it’s trash!” is an obvious example. That site has a lot to condemn it, both in breadth and in ever-more instances depth, as its editorial model has proven its value.

Likewise, we all seem to have accepted students with laptops in our classrooms, after all those years of grumbling that they couldn’t be up to any good and weren’t paying attention. Which they might not be, but again, that say more about what’s happening in class than what’s happening on their screen.

But I’d take it one step further.

There are lots of things about the world that aren’t – how to put this? – helpfully aligned with what we want to happen in our classes. Our students are people, and like people everywhere, they have a bunch of other stuff going on.

Moreover, each of them thinks and acts for themselves. Which is great, but also sets up the possibility that the zone of overlap among the class on How We’ll Be gets smaller.

Often, that’s not an issue, because the range of what a student might have to do in class is itself constrained: drawing down and pulling up knowledge and experience with others.

But as we move towards more active environments, the issue becomes more salient, because we are relying more on the students to create for themselves the space for their learning. At that point, there is a need to have a more engaged approach to Everything That’s Not Directly On The Syllabus.

A case in point was the course on negotiation I used to run at my former institution. Classes were all about students practising their negotiation with each other and then debriefing. My role was to facilitate and support.

A frequent theme was that “So-and-so is an arsehole”. Which, often, they were, in that situation. They didn’t play by the rules, or didn’t know how to, and sometimes they just liked to stir. Like I said, students are people.

The import of this theme was typically that I should stop it happening. Which I understand, but which I always pushed back on.

The course was designed to create a relatively safe place to try out negotiating (none of the behaviours displayed would have merited me seeking disciplinary behaviour under our student code, for clarity), so part of that practice was exactly about handling people who aren’t all conveniently on the same page.

You’ve dealt with arseholes and I’ve dealt with arseholes and it’s not fun, but sometimes you don’t get a choice.

For some of my students, this sounded like just throwing my hands up in the air and saying they had to suck up all the bad things in the world. But that was never the intention.

Debriefings were communal and part of that was about trying to get the arseholes to understand why their actions were counterproductive to their objectives (both academic and personal). Often that did result in them trying out different ways of interacting that were less antagonistic.

Just as important was getting everyone else to reflect on how to manage problems like these. Even if you can’t stop some arseholes being arseholes, you can find ways to limit their impact.

I won’t pretend that everyone came out of the class all on top of such things, but it speaks to the wider point already made that as much as we seek to build agency in our students, that agency will eventually find limits. At those points we want our students to have the self-reflection to make sense of that, the adaptability to continue and the resilience to press on.

We might not be able to stop the world being a problem, but we can work to improve our chances of riding those problems out.

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What ChatGPT can never do

It’s a belated summer here in Belfast, where I’m attending the UACES conference. As well as a lot else, we’re running a series of L&T panels, including one on assessment.

The prompt for this was the bruhaha over ChatGPT and Why All Assessment Is Impossible (I paraphrase): while we might understand that the problems lie much more with the assessment design than the scary AI, that’s still not really filtered through to all of our colleagues.

Our discussion was really stimulating, both for its breadth and for its reflection on what we are trying to achieve in our assessment – and, by extension, in our teaching.

A concern that was raised was that if AI can produce more encompassing integration of knowledge than any human, almost instantaneously, does this mean the ‘end of thinking’ for our students? Even if the lurid framing might rile, the idea is not to be dismissed.

For me, this prompted the thought that even in an era of all-knowing technology there is still a clear role for us as teaching, instructors and facilitators: to help emancipate our students by giving them the tools to build their agency in the world.

We frequently talk about building self-reflection and criticality in our students. In an age when the challenge is parsing and navigating through too much information, getting students to make informed choices about what to use and how to use it is essential.

And we do that because it gives them a way of standing more firmly in the world, to achieve what they want to achieve.

We don’t (I think) want to produce reproductions of ourselves, but autonomous individuals who can both define their own purpose in life and find ways to realise that purpose.

In this framing of education-as-emancipation, it becomes irrelevant what AI can do, precisely because it’s AI doing it, not the student. As one colleague noted, almost all our students don’t come to university to cheat, but to learn and to develop themselves.

Put differently, if everyone can just turn to ChatGPT, then what gives you the edge is understanding that that technology can and can’t do and understanding how you can use that to your own purposes.

This points to assessment that valorises reflection and critical engagement with knowledge and with arguments, so that the student is able to apply such tools to other situations. It also suggests that we as instructors have to spend more time on assessment that is grounded in individual experience and that recognises there is as much value in being able to articulate your self-awareness as in nominal achievement of a particular task.

A case in point in our discussion was groupwork. Yes, you can mark how well a group functions together, but we know from our own lives that sometimes we have to work with people who aren’t our optimal partners [cough], so there’s as much value in understanding how to cope with and mitigate that scenario as there is in everything being super-positive.

When we can pick up a device and find out a pretty decent amount about any given subject at the drop of a hat, ‘knowing stuff’ isn’t useful in the way it used to (even if we go to lots of pub quizzes), and we need to recognise that in all of our teaching practice.

Indeed, you might argue this is a great example of being self-aware and self-critical that we should be applying to ourselves, even as we apply it to our students.

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“Keep it Simple, and Plagiarize” (Classroom Games, that is!)

I likely just gave every academic a heart attack!

I’ll assuage your worries. The words are from legendary wargame designer Jim Dunnigan, author of Wargames Handbook. What he meant by those words was that first, use the minimum amount of game mechanics necessary to model your game’s objectives, and second, you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to design games from scratch. I’ll discuss objectives further in a later post and focus on design “plagiarism” here.

Game mechanics are the rules that govern player behavior, such as card game hands, using dice to measure chance in a roleplaying game, or dribbling a basketball. Odds are someone’s already designed game mechanics that comes close to modeling your game’s objective. Even the first roleplaying game, Dungeons & Dragons, was born from tabletop wargaming mechanics. Instead of designing from a blank page, borrow mechanics from those other games. Indeed, since game mechanics can’t be copyrighted, you can often download game rulebooks for free directly from publishers.

What this means for you as an educator is that there’s a world of material out there that you can use, mix, and match for gaming your course learning objectives. For example, For my Fall 2019 Comparative Authoritarianism course, I borrowed mechanics from Risk and Pandemic to build a zombie apocalypse game that measured students’ knowledge of different regime types and their expected regime behaviors (assessing games will be another topic!).

Great, where do you learn game mechanics? The best way is to play games (or watch people play), and the second best way is to read rulebooks. I’m lucky that Fort Collins has two game stores where customers can borrow games in the store for free (and Gryphon Games & Comics also rents out games for a few dollars a day, which is nice when games such as Gloomhaven cost $150).

In the absence of a local game store, BoardGameGeek is a fantastic resource. PAXsims is also great for following the professional, training, and education gaming scene. If you want a handy mechanics reference, I recommend Engelstein and Shalev’s Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design (2022).

The holy grail for political science educators, however, is Gaming Political Science, hosted by the Department of Political Science at Kansas State University. I imagine Dr. John Filter cloistered away like a gaming monk, gathering games published in the Journal of Political Science Education, International Studies Perspectives, Perspectives on Politics, and so on (I’ll do future posts on games in journals, let alone numerous other resources).

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What’s In A Name?

Some of my teaching duties are in an undergraduate interdisciplinary major — Global Studies — that includes a required 100-level course pitched at first-year students called, conveniently, Introduction to Global Studies. The course, taught by a close colleague, is in part intended to attract students to the major. The problem? Few first-year students take it; those that do intended to major in Global Studies before arriving on campus. Junior and senior non-majors looking to pick up what they think will be an easy three credits needed for graduation often comprise a large portion of the class. To make matters worse, the number of students majoring in Global Studies is dwindling.

Giving the course a sexier title might increase first-year enrollment, so I thought I’d try crowd-sourcing ideas. Any suggestions? The first thing that popped into my head: Mocha, Marriage, and Markets. However, this title might not be suitable, given that the instructor is not a mail order bride.

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The Geometry of Active Learning

A brief post on the physical spaces we work in:

Steelcase Inc. conducted this study before the pandemic on classroom configurations. Students and instructors reported that classrooms outfitted with more casual, mobile furniture were more conducive to learning than those with traditional, row-by-column desk and table arrangements. While we all know, or should know, that self-reports about learning are generally bogus, I thought the study was interesting, given that faculty and students rarely get any say in how classrooms are designed.