Events – Active Learning in Political Science ©

June 16, 2026June 15, 2026

Teaching Day at ISA 2027: Call for Proposals

Consider submitting your proposal to present at Teaching Day at International Studies Association (ISA) 2027, which will be offered in both virtual and in-person formats this year (Tuesday, March 2, virtual, and Saturday, March 20th, for in-person in Atlanta). This third Teaching Day will be a great opportunity to share your teaching practice and exchange ideas with colleagues at all career stages on this fundamental part of our jobs. You can propose to lead a session on a core teaching and learning topic or skill (such as grading and giving feedback, course design, assignment design, active learning, or creating community and trust) or on the teaching innovation of your choice, as part of the Faculty Showcase. I encourage anyone who considers themselves to be a scholarly educator to submit–this is going to be a lower cost, add-on event to ISA that will provide a space for educators of all levels, regions, and perspectives to share ideas on teaching and learning, and fill in the gaps in training that many early career instructors experience. We hope to get a really varied set of presenters to ensure a wide range of perspectives are represented.

Submissions are due July 1, and also mark your calendars so you can plan for your attendance at this signature event planned by the ISA Pedagogy Committee. Read the call for proposals at https://isanet.org/Portals/0/Media/Conferences/Atlanta2027/Teaching%20Day%202027%20CFP-Final.pdf.

May 20, 2026May 20, 2026

Call for papers: Postgraduate Teaching Conference

If you’re reading this and getting deja vu, it is for good reason – this post was originally shared on Monday. However, due to a wordpress plugin-driven techno-mystery, the post was lost. So, round 2! (or as close an approximation as I can manage, it’s Sod’s law that this is one of the rare times I wrote directly on the site rather than first drafting on google docs…). Anyway, on with the post:

On Friday, I posted on ALPS about the upcoming CPP x ASPIRE conference, happening at UCL on 12th June – for which registration is now open. Well, it must be SoTL season here in the UK because I’m back already with news of another upcoming SoTL event, this time a postgraduate teaching conference, taking place at the University of York on the 17th July 2026: Teaching in the in-between: Postgraduate Perspectives on SoTL.

May 15, 2026May 15, 2026

Registration open: CPP x ASPIRE Conference

If you’re around in London (or willing to travel) on the 12th June and you fancy hearing some cutting-edge Politics SoTL then I have some very, very good news for you!

Registration is now open to all for the Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics and ASPIRE‘s conference.

There is a packed schedule of brilliant papers – you can register here (as well as read more about all the excitement that the day promises).

Hope you see you there!

April 14, 2026April 14, 2026

Call for abstracts: TPTN workshop on “Designing Political Theory Curricula”

ALPS readers who teach political theory might be interested in a one-day workshop taking place at the University of York on Monday 1st June on the topic of ‘Designing Political Theory Curricula’. It is being organised by the Teaching Political Theory Network (TPTN).

Workshop details: An important part of teaching political theory and philosophy involves the designing of curricula, programmes and modules. However, in doing so, political theorists may face any number of challenges and obstacles. We often teach broad cohorts of students, including students who may have little interest in political theory. How can we ensure our teaching is engaging them? We may need to design assessment to fit the module content, but what are the best ways to assess the skills political theorists seek to impart? How can we ensure that our teaching speaks to and engages students from different backgrounds, or provides them with the skills they need to succeed beyond academia? This workshop creates a space to share research and experience regarding the design and delivery of political theory teaching.

Questions that might be addressed include:

– How to design modules for different cohorts of students?

– How to design assessments for political theory modules?

– How to design inclusive and diverse curricula?

– How to balance competing demands from students, institutions, employers and/or society when designing curricula?

How to take part: If you’re interested in presenting something at this workshop, please email a short (300 word) abstract to adam.fusco@york.ac.uk and john.wilesmith@ucl.ac.uk by 27 April 2026 (extended from the original deadline of 13 April).

Please also drop us an email if you wish to attend but not present, or if you wish to be added to the TPTN mailing list for updates about this and future events.

April 8, 2026April 8, 2026

Call for abstracts! CPP x ASPIRE Conference

This year, UCL’s Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics and ASPIRE are co-hosting a one-day conference at UCL Bloomsbury Campus on 12th June. The call for abstracts is copied below, we’d love to see you there:

It has been 20 years since Ishiyama, Breunig, and Lopez published ‘A Century of Continuity and (Little) Change in the Undergraduate Political Science Curriculum’ in the APSR, in which they discussed the ebbs and flows of academic attention to teaching and learning in our discipline. Since the publication of the piece, we have seen an inexorable rise in attention to, and innovations, within Politics and International Relations curricula; it is fair to say we are clearly in a state of some sustained ‘flow’.

Today, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in our field is a well-established subdiscipline, shaping how we conceptualise, innovate, deliver, and evaluate education. Moreover, curricula are markedly changed from those of two decades ago, with active learning and advances in assessment just some of the defining features of the contemporary Politics and International Relations classroom. Running alongside this transformation has been the growth of the education track: whilst this initially came about as a result of changing institutional financial and workload pressures, the education track has matured such that these posts are often held by colleagues deeply committed to advancing pedagogical practice and embedding educational innovation within the discipline.

In June, UCL’s Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics is teaming up with the ASPIRE network to host an event taking place at a pivotal moment in the ongoing transformation and development of education in our discipline. We invite papers, and / or panel proposals, around these themes:

How can we keep flowing and avoid the possibilities of ‘ebb’ that Ishiyama, Breunig, and Lopez warn of?
What are the unique perspectives and forms of expertise that education track colleagues can contribute to our discipline?
Does Politics and International Relations, with its attention to power and social change, imbue education track colleagues with a set of special skills for analysing (potential) changes to teaching and learning practices?
What are the existing areas in pedagogical scholarship on Politics and IR in need of further development? How can we address these areas and insufficiencies to facilitate the disciplinary flow ‘onwards and upwards’?

Please send submissions – in the form of abstracts of up to 300 words – to JP Salter (john-paul.salter@ucl.ac.uk) and Jeremy Moulton (jeremy.moulton@york.ac.uk) by 17th April 2026. Please also drop us an email if you wish to attend but not present (the more the merrier!).

March 10, 2026March 9, 2026

2nd Annual Teaching Day at ISA

If you are attending the International Studies Association’s Annual Meeting in Columbus later this month, I encourage you to consider attending the 2nd Annual Teaching Day at ISA, a free conference-within-a-conference on Sunday, March 22nd. While the rest of ISA features a number of great panels and roundtables on the scholarship of teaching and learning, the Teaching Day consists of workshops, simulations, and demonstrations of teaching techniques and approaches. Participation was competitive and we have a great program for you.

Check out the Teaching Day at ISA Program!

February 13, 2026February 12, 2026

Online panel event: Relational Pedagogies Inside and Outside the Classroom (5 March, 4.00 – 5.00pm)

We at the UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics (CPP) are excited to share with you the details of our second online panel event of the year on the theme of ‘Relational Pedagogies Inside and Outside the Classroom’.

It will include contributions from the following panellists alongside time for audience Q&A:

Kate Schick, Associate Professor of International Relations, Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Claire Timperley, Senior Lecturer in Political Science, Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Karen Gravett, Associate Professor in Higher Education at the University of Surrey, UK

Regular readers will be aware of the work that Kate and Claire have recently published in this area, as summarised in their their September 2025 ALPS post on Spacious Learning in Political Science.

The event will run as a Teams webinar on Thursday 5th March, 4.00-5.00pm (GMT). If you would like to attend, please register beforehand on the following event page, whereupon you will receive access details: UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics webinar: ‘Relational Pedagogies Inside and Outside the Classroom’.

We hope for a wide-ranging discussion on issues such as the benefits and challenges of relational pedagogy; different forms of relational pedagogies; discipline-specific considerations for relational pedagogy (especially the disciplines of political science/IR); relational pedagogy beyond the classroom, e.g., the role and importance of pastoral activities; institutional and cultural pre-requisites for effective relational pedagogy.

We look forward to seeing you there!

February 6, 2026February 9, 2026

ASPIRE SoTL Circle Episode 3

This guest post is brought to us by Dr. Jillian Terry. Jillian is an Associate Professor (Education) at the LSE, where she is Co-Director of the LSE100, LSE’s flagship interdisciplinary course. In this post, Jillian is reflecting on the ASPIRE Network’s latest SoTL Circle – a frequent event series where academics get together to discuss one piece of SoTL. If you would like to participate in an ASPIRE SoTL Circle, join the network and you will be invited to all future events.

This month, ASPIRE Network hosted our third SoTL Circle event, and I was happy to facilitate our discussion following the great examples set by my ASPIRE colleagues Jeremy Moulton and Madeleine Le Bourdon in our first two circles. For this iteration, we branched out from the confines of Political Science and International Relations, as I chose Aaron Stoller’s article “A Case for Critical Interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinarity as Democratic Education”, published in 2020 in Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies. The article makes some bold contentions about the value of interdisciplinary thinking for engaging students in education for deep democracy, and I hoped it would spark some interesting discussion amongst our community of teaching-focused Politics and IR scholars as we think about interdisciplinarity in our own teaching practice and the purpose of democratic education.

December 19, 2025December 18, 2025

Disability, Technology, and Inclusive Education

This academic year, the UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics (CPP) is hosting a series of online panel events. Our first event on 4 December was on the theme of ‘Disability, Technology, and Inclusive Education‘. In this guest post, one of the panellists at that event, Martin Compton (College Lead for AI and Innovation in Education, King’s College London), offers further reflections on how best to use technology to facilitate the inclusion of disabled and neurodivergent students, the extent to which changes required in the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic improved inclusion for disabled students, and whether those improvements have been maintained.

I was delighted to be invited to speak at the UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics’ recent panel on Disability, Technology, and Inclusive Education. My current role at King’s College London (AI and innovation in education lead) can sometimes mask my wider faculty development and student engagement passions related to inclusive education but this was a perfect opportunity to connect these aspects of my work. The invite prompted me to reflect again on my own position, shaped by both professional and personal experience. I spoke alongside two people whose work I admire greatly. Dr Miranda Melcher’s coherent thinking, scholarship and advocacy of high impact interventions were passionately shared. And my former colleague, Ben Watson’s, leadership in digital accessibility at UCL has had cross-sector impacts. It was a great opportunity to be reminded of the clarity of their arguments, their commitment to practical change and their willingness to challenge the limits of established thinking.

My own starting point in this space is relatively simple. Digital tools, and now generative AI, have already changed what is possible for many learners, especially those who have been historically marginalised. A significant complicating factor is that these same tools can widen divides at the same time. I understand the many good reasons to resist certain developments in educational technology. I understand the arguments that warn of harm and the potentials for exacerbating marginalisation. So to that end, I am neither a technological determinist nor a tech evangelist. I do, however, feel concerned by the strength of anti-technology narratives that often drown out successful inclusive applications and hard-won gains. Too often accessibility is an afterthought as opposed to embedded practice. In a 2023 paper, (co-authored with Ben and Dr Alex Standen, now at LSE), I argued that there was a risk (already apparent in fact) that progress made during the Covid lockdown period, and recently expanded through responsible uses of AI, would be undone wherever opportunity to ‘return to normal’ presented itself. But, wilfully ignoring or winding back on approaches that can narrow engagement and attainment gaps should never be on the table. We need to hold on to what worked for those whose needs and voices are so often the least heard in policy discussions.

December 8, 2025December 8, 2025

ASPIRE SoTL Circle Episode 2

This guest post is brought to us by the brilliant Dr. Madeleine Le Bourdon, Associate Professor at the University of Leeds. In this post, Madeleine is reflecting on the ASPIRE Network’s second-ever SoTL Circle – a frequent event series where academics get together to discuss one piece of SoTL. If you would like to participate in an ASPIRE SoTL Circle, join the network and you will be invited to all future events.

ASPIRE’s second SoTL circle dived into his year’s Jacqui Briggs Prize for best teaching and learning article published in Politics – Siobhan O’Neill’s ‘Decolonising Politics Curricula: Exploring the Experiences and Views of Racially Minoritised Students’. The article brings to the forefront racially minoritised students’ perspectives on the Politics curricula, through innovative and thoughtful methodologies. You can read Siobhan’s ALPS post here where she reflects on the article.

Personally, as a scholar of Political Pedagogy it was a pure joy to lead the event, following in the shoes of the great Jeremy Moulton who led our last circle. Amid end of semester chaos on gloomy December afternoon, taking an hour to gather and discuss an article may feel indulgent. But it was quickly clear that like me, the poignancy of the piece had had a real impact on the group that joined. In reading O’Neill’s I had many questions and points I wanted to discuss with colleagues and so I attempted to squeeze as many of these ideas into three core questions.