Every assignment that I’ve created on Perusall now includes these two questions:
What most interested you in Reading X?
What most confused you in Reading X?
I’m hoping that this will help students who consistently answer “nothing” to (1) and “everything” to (2) will help them realize that they’re in the course for the wrong reasons.
I’m also devoting eight class sessions throughout the term to wicked problem exercises, but I’m going to hold students accountable for participating. For each exercise, every student will get a worksheet consisting of the following:
What is my solution to the problem?
What are the main points of the other team’s presentation?
What is one strength and one weakness of the presentation?
What is a question for the presenter?
I’ll collect these worksheets and mark them as satisfactory (full marks) or not (zero). Each worksheet is worth only 2 percent of the course grade, but students will need to pay attention to what’s happening around them to earn credit, which requires a minimal amount of cognitive effort. It should be plain to students that a worksheet grade of zero indicates that they weren’t willing to exert this effort.
Finally, I’m instituting a device-free classroom policy. Laptops, tablets, and phones will need to be out of sight and out of reach when students are in the room.* If students prefer staring at the wall to engaging with what’s happening around them, that’s their choice. They will see the effects of that choice in their grades.
I’ll be at the UACES conference in Prague. Dr. Susherwood, international man of mystery, will be leading a panel discussion — “I’m Sorry, Dave, I Can’t Do That”: How To Address The Use Of AI In The Classroom — on the morning of 9 September. Hope to see you there.
*Yes, I will make exceptions for students with documented disability accommodations, but I expect this to be a rare occurrence.
As the readers of this blog know, but many of our students don’t, learning requires effort. People who want to learn how to play the guitar, bake croissants, or speak Tibetan are willing to expend considerable effort to learn these skills. Those who don’t aren’t.
Teaching in the age of AI?
At this stage of my career, I expect students to have the minimal level of motivation needed to learn something about the subject of the course I’m teaching. If they prefer outsourcing all cognitive effort to AI because they have no curiosity about, say, how the election of populist authoritarians has led to higher energy prices, they should go somewhere else. My enthusiasm in the classroom won’t by itself magically convert them to my religion.
For my autumn term courses, I will be introducing some exercises that should make the connection between motivation, effort, and learning more apparent to students. One such exercise is a graded* self-evaluation with the following questions:
On a 1-5 scale, with 1 being lowest and 5 being highest, how much of a priority is this course compared to my other courses, work, personal life, etc.?
Given my answer to Question 1, how much effort did I exert last week to learn in this course?
What have I learned in this course?
What specific actions did I take last week to learn more effectively in this course?
How does my answer to Question 4 reflect advice from the “How to Maximize Learning” page in the course’s “Start Here” Canvas module?
How have I connected my experience in this course to one of my interests?
I’ve scheduled this self-evaluation to occur four times across the term. I’m hoping that it will help students realize that learning is like taking one’s mind to the gym. They can either lift the mental weights themselves, or they can waste their time watching other people — or machines — do it. I’m happy to coach them on how to do the former. The latter isn’t my problem.
*Automatic full marks for completing the survey’s questions, courtesy of the LMS/VLE.
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.
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.
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:
As we (or some of us, at least) move into a slower period of the academic year, I wanted to offer some reflections on this year’s events.
I must begin with a confession: for each of this year’s panels, I had a hidden agenda. I refer not to the printed running order (/script/emergency questions) that I kept handily out of view of my laptop camera when chairing. I mean to admit that the themes and participants for this year’s panels were selected with two goals in mind: first, the noble goal of discussing the latest ideas from some of the most influential and innovative researcher-practitioners in HE pedagogy; second, the – let’s say ‘prudent’ – goal of helping me advance my thinking on some embryonic SoTL research ideas.
With that in mind, my reflective posts (yes, that’s right – I just turned this into a series) will offer a summary of one of our panel events, followed by a brief account of how it has influenced a piece of SoTL research that I am in the process of developing. I would welcome feedback on either aspect.
Relational Pedagogies Inside and Outside the Classroom
Our first presenter at this event was Karen Gravett (Associate Professor and Associate Head (Research) at the Surrey Institute of Education, University of Surrey). Karen is among the leading researcher-practitioners of relational pedagogy in HE. She has written widely on relational pedagogies, including a recent monograph. Her presentation centred on the novel post-humanist strand of her conception of relational pedagogy and its potential benefits for addressing pressing questions around the role of digital tools in HE. In brief, she highlighted how much work on relational pedagogy is humanist in its focus and assumptions, e.g., focusing on staff-student relationships and student-student relationships. But a relational pedagogy can also be socio-material by taking into view our relations with environment and objects. This opens the way for a post-humanist strand of relational pedagogy that decentres the human subject and considers how we are constituted through our technologies and environments.
Karen highlighted two key benefits of her post-humanist conception of relational pedagogy. First, it can ground many familiar relational pedagogical practices, such as staff-student partnerships, co-creation, authentic assessments, and reflective writing. Second, it also provides us with theoretical tools to consider how to organize digital education to promote good pedagogical relations, rather than necessarily viewing the digital as a threat to the relational.
Next up were Kate Schick (Associate Professor of International Relations at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington) and Claire Timperley (Senior Lecturer in Political Science at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington) co-presenting a selection of ideas from their recently published work on relational pedagogy.
To my mind, Kate and Claire are at the forefront of implementing innovative relational practices in PIR pedagogy. Their talk began with theory and moved on to practice, with each element corresponding to a recent, or upcoming, publication.
First, they explained their notion of ‘slow pedagogy’ understood as a relational form of subversive pedagogy. It is subversive in challenging the dominant ‘knowledge-transmission’ model of education, which emphasises efficiency and speed. It aims instead to create spaces for slowness, relationality, and care. This part of their talk built on their contribution to the 2024 Journal of International Political Theory special issue on ‘subversive pedagogies’ that they edited.
Next, they moved on to practical implications. First, they focused on classroom practices that invite students into slower spaces, offering three examples: micro-communities of learning, relational scaffolding for research projects, and creative writing. Here they drew on their 2025 article in Politics on ‘spacious learning’. As attentive ALPS readers will be aware, Kate and Claire previously published their own ALPS post on this work, so I will not do them the disservice of aiming to summarise it again here.
Finally, they focused on assessments, arguing that the goals of relational pedagogy are best served by a revised interpretation of ‘authentic assessment’ that reorients students to a different conception of learning through creative assessment practices. Here, they drew on ideas from their 2025 Teaching in Higher Education article on ‘assessment as pedagogy’.
UK-based readers will be pleased to hear that Kate and Claire are visiting in October with several events planned to discuss the conceptual foundations of their current book project. Keep an eye out for further details closer to the time.
The event then moved into the Q&A. Such was the richness of the discussion that I could not possibly aim to do it justice by way of providing a comprehensive summary. Also, it was a long time ago, and – cards on the table – I can’t read all of my notes. So, I shall instead highlight three questions that stuck in my mind as being especially incisive:
(1) Much research in this area is based on classroom experiences – can and should we aim to go beyond this to more general empirical research?
(2) Relational pedagogy can focus on micro-level practices, but do we also need greater attention to how universities can support these practices via macro-level systems?
(3) Many of the practical recommendations made by relational pedagogues are appealing, but do we need to sign up to the ‘theory’ to endorse them?
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 Andrew Judge’s Daybreak, a game about climate change and international cooperation.
In this 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 the series continues with Jenny Morrison’s review of Class Struggle, a boardgame on the capitalist system.
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 begin with Michael Toomey’s review of Tammany Hall, a political boardgame about power, patronage, and competition.
How does it work:
Tammany Hall is based on the eponymous political machine of late-18th and 19th century New York City (for 3 – 5 players) . Players compete with one another to accumulate political support (and more importantly, political favors) among four contemporary immigrant communities (Irish, English, Germans, and Italians) in Manhattan, aiming to gain and to maintain control over the city’s mayoralty. In essence, Tammany Hall gamifies the process of securing power in an imperfect democracy and utilizing that power to reward allies and punish adversaries.
The Serious Play Review Board: Michael Toomey, Andrew Judge, and Jenny Morrison
It is a surprisingly rich and dynamic game. Early on, the Irish immigrant population is dominant, encouraging players in the early stages to focus their efforts on appealing to this constituency. However, as the game progresses, the Italian population becomes increasingly important, replicating the demographic shift that happened in the city throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, and forcing players to respond to this influx. The game mechanics are relatively straightforward and easy to get into, but with enough flexibility that it can be re-engineered to connect to other concepts or issues from Politics and International Relations.
Applications for teaching:
Tammany Hall is directly adaptable to teaching several political concepts and issues. This is not particularly surprising, as it was designed specifically by its developers to connect and relate to contemporary politics. At its most basic level, it can be used to teach the dynamics of political contestation amidst an electoral campaign. Going deeper, it is readily usable for classes teaching the concepts of corruption, patronage, and clientelism. In the game, players are rewarded with political favour from particular immigrant communities for providing them housing and support. This favour can then be leveraged during elections to control power- a clientelist dynamic which is replicated in many polities throughout the world. Alternatively, the in-game practice of dominating an electoral constituency through the use of “ward bosses” to exercise influence on your behalf (and those of your supporters) directly replicates political practices in countries and contexts as different as modern Ireland and pre-2022 Russia (to name just two).
The game can also be used to teach classes on the politics of immigration. On one hand, it can be used as part of a lesson on how politicians might appeal to immigrant communities for votes. Perhaps even more useful and interesting would be its usefulness for understanding how rivalries and hostility might subsequently emerge between these groups, and how political actors oftentimes play different ethnic demographics off against one another. More abstract concepts can also be illustrated with it- it would not be too difficult to connect the game to a lesson on the politics of grievance, for example, or even to illustrate theories such as Selectorate Theory. In all these instances, the teaching benefits are most sharply accentuated when followed up with a debriefing session, where the lecturer can highlight the specific points, they wish to draw out, and/or where students can reflect on the real-life relevance of the game.
Adaptations and setup:
The game takes between 60-90 minutes to play the whole way through (both according to the developer’s estimates, and to the reviewer’s own personal experiences playing the game). As such, it is likely that a game would need to be truncated to include an effective debrief session. This is not too complicated: the game is divided into four distinct phases (each replicating a single electoral cycle), so there are natural points at which the game can be stopped. This does hinder the possibility of fully simulating the demographic shift that occurs later in the game, potentially curtailing one of the more interesting features of the game, but this can perhaps be compensated for by starting the game at a later phase with a pre-set distribution of communities across the board.
The basic game mechanics, centred around building support among a given community of actors within a set period or cycle of time and then leveraging this to attain and wield political power, can be re-imagined illustrating various Politics/IR concepts or issues without much adaptation. However, the game board might need to be re-designed somewhat if being used to illustrate more abstract or conceptual dynamics. A single copy of the game can easily accommodate groups of between 3-15 students (organised into teams of up to three players). Larger teams might also be possible but can become unwieldy and/or may lead to some students being marginalised.
Conclusions:
Many boardgames are most useful as framing devices or as icebreakers to provoke broader discussion in a classroom but are less useful for simulating specific behaviours or more complex concepts. Ironically, Tammany Hall probably functions best for the latter but is less suitable as a framing device or as an icebreaker. It is most useful for helping students apply and analyse what they have learned about cronyism, patronage, and clientelism (or whatever behaviours or practices the instructor is teaching) in a gamified setting, but is maybe less useful for achieving lower order steps on Bloom’s Taxonomy. All in all, though, Tammany Hall is a highly useful and adaptable boardgame with plenty of application in a variety of Politics and IR classrooms.
In mid-September we started a new series, “Office Hours: Year One”, where four first-year tenure-track professors from different institutions reflect on their experiences throughout the first year. See Part 1 here. We are back with Part 3, and the first semester is officially done done for our cohort. Hopefully, they and our dear readers used the winter break to recuperate and rest (ha!). In this post, we are checking in to see how things went in wrapping up the end of the fall semester, and what sort of priorities are guiding the group’s thinking as we look ahead to the spring semester.
Thank you again to Dr. Brooklyn Walker (University of Tennessee-Knoxville), Dr. Charmaine Willis (Old Dominion University), and Dr. Jennifer Ostojski (Indiana State University) for contributing and letting us get a glimpse at the first-year life.
