Guest post – Active Learning in Political Science ©

September 2, 2026September 1, 2026

Introducing AI Policy to Students

Today we have a guest post from Dr. Devon Cantwell-Chavez, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Copenhagen and current Chair of the Education and Learning Section of the International Studies Association. Devon shared her take on how to talk with students about AI use and policy on LinkedIN, and generously agreed to repost here on ALPS. You can find her at https://www.linkedin.com/in/devoncantwell/ and @devoncantwell.bsky.social.

Here’s what introducing my AI policy in the first day of class looked like today:

For context, I don’t ban AI in my classrooms because (1) my institution does not allow for this (2) any ban is unenforceable and (3) I’m uninterested in the surveillance necessary to implement a ban. I do tell students I strongly discourage AI and unpack why this is.

Before the class, they were assigned three readings:

– Tressie McMillan Cottom’s op-ed in the NYT on the midness of AI
– the new MIT report on AI and pedagogy
– Kate Crawford’s introduction chapter to Atlas of AI

We start off with basic definition of generative AI that emphasizes the large data corpus, probability outputs, and perceived confidence of those outputs. Then, we look at how governments are applying AI in public sector work around security issues (this is a security studies course). Many of my students will go on to the public sector (or are from the public sector) so I want them to start by thinking about the implications of these tools being in the public sector. These examples include discussing how the UK home office has used these algorithmic mechanisms to impute data for files and to make recommendations for decisions; how the US has used ML based translation software which has led to the rejection of refugee asylum claims due to inconsistencies generated through inaccurate translation; the impact on the public service labor market; and the vagueness surrounding most government guidance on the use of LLMs in work places. Find the slides here.

Then, we talk about AI use in this course. The university requires AI disclosures for all exams and assignments. Those that used AI in this last time I taught the course scored on average about a grade lower (we have weird scoring) than those who did not use AI. We unpacked some of the reasons why this might be.

What did students share and take away from this?
– they are noticing how LLM use atrophies their thinking and can even make them second guess their understanding of an issue or content they are working through
– they notice that the writing suggestions made by AI often make their points and analysis more convulted
– despite observing these things, they worry about “building AI skills” and have heard anecdotes about employers not hiring folks because they disclosed that they do not use AI
– there is a direct relationship between student confidence and LLM use- when they are less confident, they use AI more
– the pressure on students time is a driver for increased AI use
– students said they have not received any instruction on ethics related to AI
– students found the MIT report VERY compelling

We will be revisiting this topic a lot throughout the course due to how AI has become intertwined with contemporary security issues. I’m not sure I will necessarily change student’s AI behaviors but I am hoping through a sustained intervention with this topic throughout the course that students will be more critically aware of AI in future practitioner roles.

September 1, 2026August 30, 2026

Revalidation, the sequel

Happy start to the new academic year to those who celebrate! To mark the coming of September, we’ve asked Stephen Thornton, Reader in Politics at Cardiff University, to return to his 2023 blog about what an ‘ideal’ Politics/IR degree looks like to reflect on the outcome of his revalidation process. Thank you as ever to Stephen for the guest post!

So, nearly three years ago – having been tasked with leading the upgrade of undergraduate degree programmes in my department – I wrote a blog about my hopes and (mostly) fears regarding this revalidation process, as it was called. The blog led a few weeks later to an online event put on by UCL’s excellent Centre of the Pedagogy of Politics at which various learned and experienced folk, and me, discussed aspects of this process under the banner ‘What does a good Politics/IR degree look like?’ I still don’t know the answer to that, but, since then, I have played a role in transforming Cardiff University’s Politics and International Relations undergraduate curriculum. The number of modules we offer has been significantly reduced, degree pathways have been made more distinct, and a variety of new capstone projects have been added to the mix. I’ve also learned a few things about the revalidation process along the way, some of which might be worth sharing.

August 17, 2026August 19, 2026

Inoculation and epistemic competence: training students to handle misinformation

We’re grateful for today’s guest post from Eloise Harding from University of Southampton, based on her recent presentation at the joint UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics and Aspire conference at UCL. Eloise is a Senior Teaching Fellow in Politics and Director of Programmes in the Politics And IR department at University of Southampton

Today’s Politics classroom is on the frontline of a battle against misinformation, disinformation, clickbait and bullshit, and we need to develop a pedagogy that can respond robustly to these challenges. I’m not claiming to have the perfect solution, but have spent the past three years developing some starting points.

July 14, 2026July 15, 2026

Bringing Gender Into the IR Classroom: A Semester-Long, Multicultural Project

Today’s guest post is by Dr. Susana de Sousa Ferreira, Lecturer in International Relations at Complutense University of Madrid and Academic Secretary of the Department of International Relations and Global History. Feel free to contact her at https://www.ucm.es/relhis/susana-ferreira

Teaching human rights and gender in International Relations can be an uphill battle. These topics are often treated as marginal to the discipline, and depending on the composition of your classroom, you may run into resistance from students who see gender as a “soft” or secondary issue compared to security or interstate politics. Last year, I decided to tackle this head-on in my optional course “International Human Rights and Gender Relations Regime” in the IR degree program at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, with the added twist that 70% of my 33 students were international Erasmus students from different cultural and geographic backgrounds.

Alongside the regular lecture syllabus, I built in a project-based learning (PBL) component that ran for the whole semester: lectures introduced the theoretical framework, and the project gave students a hands-on way to put that theory into practice. Each student group adopted one human rights article (equality, prohibition of slavery, prohibition of torture, freedom of expression, right to work, right to education) as their “beat” for the entire term. This let groups build depth instead of skimming through unrelated topics and gave them ownership over their material.

The project unfolded in three stages. First, groups mapped the global state of “their” right through a gender lens, using a SWOT framework to identify Strengths (progressive policies, advocacy networks), Weaknesses (implementation gaps, cultural resistance), Opportunities (new norms, international cooperation), and Threats (political backlash, armed conflict, economic crisis) — always asking how gender and other axes of vulnerability shape who actually gets to exercise that right. Second, groups moved to the UN system, selecting at least two real complaints filed with bodies like CEDAW or the Committee against Torture, and analyzing the context, the specific violation, the gender dimension, and the international response. Third, they repeated the exercise for a regional system (the Inter-American Court, the European Court of Human Rights) to compare how protection plays out across jurisdictions.

July 13, 2026July 10, 2026

Mentorship as Feminist Praxis: Reimagining Student Success Through Care, Access and Partnership

Today’s guest post is by Poppy Soilleux and Emily Gee of the University of Leeds!

Poppy Soilleux is an undergraduate student of International History and Politics. Her academic interests focus on international law, human rights law, and international relations, with a particular emphasis on accountability, global governance, and the protection of human rights. Alongside her legal interests, she has contributed to research on feminist mentorship and knowledge production in higher education. Poppy hopes to pursue a career in law, aiming to specialise in international human rights and public international law while continuing her interdisciplinary research.

Emily Gee is a final-year PhD student whose research focuses on gender, race, and security within the field of Politics and International Studies. Her doctoral research critically examines peacekeeper-perpetrated sexual exploitation and abuse in peacekeeping operations, drawing on decolonial feminist theory to challenge gendered and raced harms present in the UN’s prevention of SEA strategy. Alongside her research, Emily has been a Seminar Leader at the University of Leeds since 2023, delivering modules in International Politics, Terrorism, Comparative Politics, Global Security Challenges, Power and Conflict, and a first-year skills-based module.

Higher education (HE) increasingly emphasises widening participation, student belonging, and inclusive teaching. Yet many students continue to encounter barriers that extend far beyond the classroom. First-generation students, working-class students, neurodivergent learners, carers, and those from underrepresented backgrounds often arrive at university without access to the networks, institutional knowledge, and social capital that HE frequently assumes. This project explores how feminist mentorship can function as an active, living pedagogical practice to help students navigate these barriers while transforming the educational experience for both students and educators.

Drawing on collaborative reflections between an undergraduate student and a seminar leader at the University of Leeds, the project examines mentorship not as a formal programme or professional development tool, but as a relational practice grounded in care, access, and acknowledgment. Inspired by feminist pedagogical traditions, particularly the work of bell hooks, we argue that mentorship offers a practical framework for creating more inclusive, empowering, and participatory learning environments.

Rather than positioning knowledge as something transmitted from expert to novice, feminist mentorship treats learning as a collaborative process. Students are recognised not simply as recipients of knowledge but as contributors to its production. This shift has important implications for active learning. When students feel that their experiences, perspectives, and questions are valued, they are more likely to participate, take intellectual risks, and develop confidence in their own analytical abilities.

The project identifies three principles that can be embedded into everyday teaching practice:

June 19, 2026June 19, 2026

Why We Learned More When We Planned Less

This guest post is brought to us from William Arnold (PhD student), Kaitlyn DaVisio (PhD Student) and Professor Cynthia Miller-Idriss, all of the School of Public Affairs, American University

The pressures of academia can be intense. For graduate students, there are concerns about income, grades, and a ‘hidden curriculum’. For faculty, there are administrative pressures on narrow performance metrics, and an ever-shrinking pool of tenured positions. Despite these stressors, both students and teachers would do well to remember why we chose to engage in this profession. Most often, one’s interest stems from a joy for learning, the feeling of discovering something new, and the opportunity to share research with other like-minded individuals. In a world where pressures are intense, we must invest in ways to ensure academia remains an enjoyable pursuit. We should not lose our curiosity, nor our passion for discovering something new. One way to foster continued interest in the academic enterprise is through a loosely structured and flexible independent study, which we term a ‘trunk and branches’ approach.

May 19, 2026May 19, 2026

Midwest Model EU 2026: A student’s perspective

As the semester winds down, I want to share a professional highlight from this past spring: I advised and accompanied Indiana State University’s first Model EU team to the Midwestern Model EU simulation at IU Bloomington, Indiana. I pitched it the team as part of my interview over a year ago, and I am appreciative of the administration, the department, and – most importantly – my students who supported and joined this adventure. All students were “recruited” from a concurrent Politics of the EU class I taught in Spring 2026, and I believe – biased as I am – that they did a fantastic job in terms of preparation and professional conduct at the event. Model EU is definitely a high-impact practice that requires students to think on their feet and immerse themselves in an environment that is largely unfamiliar to them (especially those who do it for the first time). In terms of experiential learning, this was certainly one of the most intense experiences I have administered for a student group so far. In true pedagogical fashion, I debriefed with the team in the aftermath (with apple pie), and I am excited to improve and build a new team for next year’s iteration.

Image: Indiana State University’s first model EU team, representing Slovakia, at MMEU 2026 (Credit: JO)

Below I am sharing something perhaps different for ALPS: One of my students, Princes Habal (sophomore, Political Science) reflected on her experience, being part of her team. She shares in the post below challenges and success she experienced in participating.

May 14, 2026May 13, 2026

The Situation Room Game

This guest post is by Dr. Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer, who is an associate professor of Political Science at The University of Toledo. Jeff also authored A Field Experiment in Campaigns and Elections for ALPS last year.

The Situation Room is an immersive role-playing game that I created for my U.S. Presidency class. The goal is to apply what students learn about presidential decision-making in a fun learning environment.

Students simulate the Situation Room, a small but secure location in the West Wing of the White House where the president (POTUS) is briefed in real-time during foreign policy crises. Students take on roles like POTUS, vice president, national security advisor, secretary of state, and chief of staff, along with cabinet members and other White House officials.

The object of the game is for POTUS to draw on advisors to make decisions that achieve the best outcome from a tough situation. In both semesters I ran the simulation, we played a hypothetical crisis in the Taiwan Strait, with it unclear whether China was invading Taiwan.

Set up

Materials that I prepare in advance are: (1) dossiers for each player (available here); (2) a slide deck with accompanying visuals (maps, satellite images, and newspaper headlines); and (3) a customized ChatGPT (available here).

Each player’s dossier contains an official job description, an outline of the character’s objectives and perspective, a brief opening script, a list of policy options to offer, and additional lines to say or actions to choose. Every player except POTUS has at least one classified-style briefing to draw from, tailored to specific roles.

May 11, 2026May 11, 2026

Serious Play: Board Games as Pedagogical Tools (4) – People Power

In this new blog series Drs. Michael Toomey, Andrew Judge, and Jenny Morrison (all University of Glasgow) explore how board games can be used as effective pedagogical tools to bring abstract concepts to life in the classroom. Each entry focuses on a specific game, outlining its mechanics, practical classroom applications, and any possible adaptions or limitations to its use within a standard seminar set up. In examining individual games, they aim to provide a support resource for educators seeking to experiment with games as part of their classroom activities, as well as engage critically with when and why we might use games within teaching. This month we continue with guest contributor Patrick Shea’s People Power, a game about political economy and conflict.

When I ask my students in the first class session in my Political Economy of Conflict course why conflicts happen, the answers tend to centre on power and territory. These answers are understandable, but they limit our ability to assess the motivations, strategies, and consequences for those involved in conflict. People Power: Insurgency in the Philippines, 1981-1986 is a board game that helps highlight the different political economy elements of conflict.

How does it work?

Designed by Ken Tee, People Power is part of GMT Games’ COIN (Counterinsurgency) series — a family of wargames that share gameplay mechanics across a range of historical conflicts. In this game, each player controls one of three factions: the Marcos Government, the insurgent New People’s Army (NPA), and the nonviolent Reformers. Each faction pursues asymmetric goals — the Government seeks territorial control and patronage, the NPA builds resistance through guerrilla operations, and the Reformers shift popular opinion through activism. Each turn, a card is drawn from an event deck that determines both the order in which factions may act and a historical event that players can choose to trigger. Factions that act on one card must pass on the next, forcing difficult decisions about when to act and when to wait. The game is organised into two Campaigns that culminate in Election Rounds, where victory is checked, resources are redistributed, and popular support can shift.

May 5, 2026May 1, 2026

Do you want to develop your scholarship profile and the impact of your work? Introducing the DARSHE* – an easy-to-use scholarship development tool.

This guest post is brought to us by Rose Gann, Professor of Politics Education, and Julie Hulme, Professor of Psychology Education, both of Nottingham Trent University.

Are you interested in teaching and learning in Politics and International Relations and in using this work to develop your scholarship/academic profile? If yes, then the DARSHE framework might be of interest. My colleague (Prof Julie Hulme) and I recently undertook a project to map the ways in which academic staff within a large school of social sciences understand and practice scholarship (Gann & Hulme 2023). Through undertaking this project we realised; a) our colleagues often struggle to recognise their work as scholarship and b) they find debate around meaning and definitions of scholarship overly complex and unhelpful. Our solution was to come up with a tool – the DARSHE – Description of Activities Related to Scholarship in Higher Education (Gann & Hulme 2025) – that not only provides a simple visual guide to assist colleagues with identifying their work as scholarship but is broad enough to include diverse approaches, (and thus circumvent extensive debates about definitions of scholarship), as well as being able to help colleagues identify next steps to develop the reach and impact of their work. You can find the full text introducing the DARSHE here. Below is a quick introduction to the main ideas.