Category: In the Classroom

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Project Citizen: Building Citizenship Skills in an Introductory American Government Course

Today’s guest post comes from Dr. Brooklyn Walker at Hutchinson Community College, Kansas!

This semester, on the first day of class, I asked my introductory American Government class to generate a list, in teams, of how they come across American government and politics. They couldn’t think of a single example. I concluded that many of my students haven’t thought about themselves in terms of politics. They lack political efficacy. They are turned off by polarization and negative affect. And they don’t notice the role government and politics play in their everyday lives. 

But years after they graduate, I want my students to be aware of their political environment and equipped to engage it. I wasn’t convinced that exposing students to interesting information or ideas would address the problems I was seeing. Instead, I wanted to help my students learn about themselves as citizens, develop citizenship skills, and see government in action. I developed Project Citizen to advance these three goals, and to create a bridge for my students between the classroom and the ‘real world.  

Project Citizen is the overarching title for a set of five assignments distributed throughout the semester. It comprises approximately a third of the semester’s total points, signaling that that civic engagement is a priority in the class.

Students begin the semester by writing a brief introductory essay (400-500 words). This essay reflects on a class reading making the case for civic engagement, and they describe what an ideal citizen does and knows. Then they detail their own civic engagement and the hurdles they face in becoming the ideal citizen they described. This essay forms the foundation for the remainder of the projects and marks the baseline of each student’s civic engagement.

Students then select three projects from a menu, each of which results in a 500-word essay. Each prompt is linked to a topic we cover in class, and the prompts are intended to advance the three main goals. Giving students choices is a core feature of Project Citizen. Some of the prompts may be triggering for students. For example, a Black male in my class asked if he had to talk to a law enforcement officer, and another student with social anxiety was worried about contacting a local civil rights group. Project Citizen encourages students to choose prompts that take them out of their comfort zone but gives students space to avoid prompts that they feel could be harmful. Finally, choice promotes equity. Many students, especially those with lower socioeconomic statuses, do not have easy access to someone who’s running for office or reliable transportation to civic meeting spaces.

ProblemGoalRelevant Prompts (course topic in parentheses)
“Don’t know who they are as citizens” Learn about self as citizenTake a survey to identify your party identification and ideology (Public Opinion); Make your voting plan (Participation); Develop a media diet plan after comparing news articles (Media)
“No efficacy, intimidated by polarization”Practice political skills, including political  discussionsTalk to a police officer about the role of civil liberties in their work (Civil Liberties);Talk to a local civil rights group about their work (Civil Rights); Interview someone who’s run for office about the role of money in politics (Elections); Complete an action recommended by an interest group (Interest Groups); Contact a member of Congress (Congress)
“Don’t know how government actually pops up in their lives”See politics / government in actionAttend a local meeting (Constitution and Federalism); Identify party linkage strategies via party communications (Political Parties); Analyze presidential communications via inaugural addresses (Presidency); Observe a courtroom (Judiciary);Evaluate bureaucracies after speaking with a recipient of state or federal services (Bureaucracy)

Finally, at the end of the semester, students revisit their initial essay. They annotate that essay with 8 comments, reflecting on what they learned from class readings, lecture, discussion, and their projects. Their comments can introduce new information or examples to support or refute their initial points, reflect on how they have changed through the semester, or describe their next steps for developing their citizenship skills.

While most of the students’ Project Citizen work occurs independently, projects are woven into class periods. I mention project prompts during lectures, pointing out information that may be relevant or questions the project may help them answer. Students learn from each other during a peer review session (for which they also earn Project Citizen points). I print copies of the assignment rubric and students provide feedback on two peers’ essays, using the rubric as a framework. After projects are submitted, we dedicate class time to discussing student experiences and connecting those experiences to course material.  

Some semesters I’ve integrated badges, which are essentially extra credit opportunities, into Project Citizen. Badges encourage students to take more ownership of their learning experience. Some of the badges I’d used include:

  • Jack-of-all-Trades Badge: complete one project for each of the three goals 
  • Design Your Own Adventure Badge: create your own project prompt (in consultation with me)
  • 10,000 Foot View Badge: complete a meta-learning worksheet about a project
  • Second Chances Badge: revise and resubmit a project
  • Collaborator Badge: complete a Project Learning prompt with a co-author

Ultimately, students have reported positive experiences with Project Citizen. One student said that Project Citizen “let me build up my ideas about who I am and about my beliefs. I got to explore what my point of view is and I learned things about myself I never knew.” Another appreciated seeing the government in action. After attending a local meeting, they commented that, “Normally people wouldn’t go out of their way, but Project Citizen gave me exposure to see how my community is run.” 

Project Citizen is constantly evolving, so I look forward to your reflections and comments.  

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Using the “World Climate Simulation” in Class

When teaching International Relations, the issue of climate change is unavoidable. I found myself a couple of semesters ago in a position where I got frustrated about my stale lecture on this issue. Climate change is man-made, the world is one fire, and our students are experiencing it daily. How can I add to this in class without just shouting “look at the data”?

The internet came to the rescue: I found the “World Climate Simulation”, a role-playing game from Climate Interactive (MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative; UMass Lowell Climate Change Initiative). I will forego, explaining the simulation in detail, because the simulation’s website is exhaustive enough, and I would end up simply copying what they already explain. Instead, I will briefly go through some key points and considerations that I have, after conducting the simulation now three times in different learning environments.

C-Roads Interactive Climate Change Simulation Dashboard

  1. The purpose of the simulation is that country and region representatives (i.e., the United States or Other Developing Nations) come to an agreement to lower and slow down the warming of the globe. The simulation illustrates that if all countries around the world won’t change any of their behavior by 2100, the global temperature will increase by 3.3 C, which will have detrimental and irreversible effects on human existence and the global biodiversity. Negotiations and discussions between the global players aim to bring the rate to below 2 C.
    1. The simulation provides character sheets for each country/region. They are adaptable to class size (I use six; but that is not necessary).Students must make decisions on when their country/region will reach peak emission rates, when/if they will reduce emission levels, by how much, and whether they will support afforestation and prevent deforestation (and at what rate).
    1. The simulation also provides great slides that allow you, as the educator, to set the scene.
  2. I pair the simulation with two readings/media:
    1. Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons”An episode of the New York Times Daily Podcast (“Who pays the bill for climate change?”, 2022).
    1. With both of these, students are exposed to both the ideas of free riding, collective action, and inherent conflicts regarding the responsibility to tackle climate change.
      1. Based on these readings, I add two specific incentives for the students throughout the simulation:
        1. If they can change the trajectory of climate warming by 2100 to below 2 C, the entire class gets 1 Extra Credit Point.
        1. The group that commits the least will get an additional Extra Credit Point.
  3. Depending on how long your class sessions are, you can easily adapt and change the simulation to your needs.
    1. My broad structure is:
      1. I email character sheets out prior to meeting, urging them not to share their sheets with others.Class begins with a first initial meeting within the groups to establish who they are, what their country is doing, and what is feasible in terms of their own commitments to slow down climate change.As a group we collect in the interactive dashboard (see picture above) all of our countries/regions initial commitments, assessing by how much/if at all we were able to change the trajectory of climate warming.Then, the student groups briefly strategize, and then they disperse to speak to other groups to move the needle in any direction.
        1. Depending on how much time you have, you can do multiple negotiation rounds.
        After the negotiations, we collect again in the dashboard feasible commitments, and evaluate where we are.
      1. We debrief. This includes asking questions about how they felt getting the initial tasks, how the negotiations went, and discussing why it is difficult to make any global agreements on climate change.
  4. Thoughts on how the simulations have gone so far:
    1. The more time you can dedicate to it the better. I have played around with different structures anywhere between 60 minutes to 2 hours, and obviously, the longer session had better discussions/negotiations.
    1. In most cases, students will find that balancing national interests vs. global commitments is quite difficult. Countries tend to be selfish, and no one wants to make the biggest contributions right away. The debrief is key here, because it allows you to combine the students’ experiences with the readings and illustrate the thinking/obstacles that exist in global politics to overcome transnational problems.
    1. Take the time to walk around while the students are negotiating. They take it seriously, and the things they say to one another are both profound and amusing at times!
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Is it in the assessment criteria?

I zoomed into an excellent QAA event this week on implementing racially inclusive practice in assessment, based on a project at University of Leicester, partnering with Birmingham City University and University of Wolverhampton. I’d very much recommend that you have a good look at their report in detail. The take-home for me was that that whilst an inclusive or decolonised curriculum and role models are incredibly important for engagement and for inspiring students, particularly racially minoritised students, if you want to tackle race awarding gaps, the solution is pedagogical.

Their approach is deceptively simple: they focused on making sure that the hidden curriculum is made visible for all students and the tacit is made explicit, that students understand exactly what they have to do to succeed, with no guessing games involved, with clear documentation of what is required, and that all assessment criteria are clearly and transparently explained with examples of what good or less good work against those criteria would look like. One of the staff who had implemented the intervention very disarmingly said that he felt a bit embarrassed that he and his colleagues hadn’t been doing this already! He also said that although there was some initial resistance because of worries about ‘spoonfeeding’, the improvement in the students’ work that he saw and the way they engaged allayed most of those fears. They found that by doing this, they could reduce awarding gaps significantly, improve student enjoyment and confidence, and also improve staff experience of teaching and assessing!

There is a lot to learn from in the report. Personally, I’ve already thought a lot about assessment criteria over the years, in an attempt to be inclusive, yes, but also because I just wanted to communicate with students what I wanted them to do, so they would learn better and I could read better work when assessing. As a less experienced teacher, I realised that I was marking work down for not doing things that I had never taught or told the students to do – which offended my sense of justice. But I knew I did want the students to do those things (such as make a coherent argument, evaluate evidence, use examples, write for an audience, use appropriate referencing), so it got me to thinking about how I might teach those things in the context of a disciplinary and substantive module. I came to the conclusion that having transparent criteria and spending some time making sure that everyone understands them would help me communicate what skills I wanted to see and how they might develop them. It turns out to be a practice that serves all students – not just those who have been previously disadvantaged, but also the ones who keep doing pretty well, but don’t know why.

As we know that tutors are often looking for different things in their students’ work, it usually doesn’t work in a discipline like ours to have generic or departmental criteria. It is an incredibly useful exercise for you, as a tutor, to sit down and write out what it is you are looking for in students’ work. This helps clarify expectations for me and helps me think about what and how I will teach. When team-teaching, working with other tutors to clarify not only what the assessment criteria are but also what they mean in practice is extremely useful for making sure that teaching and marking are fair and consistent. And working with students to help them understand marking criteria doesn’t so much help them ‘tick the right boxes’ in a spoon-feed way, but, much more importantly, understand what skills they are learning and why.

For my current module, the assessment is a portfolio, and the assessment criteria are as follows (although I do allow students to negotiate them, which I won’t dwell on here but will come back to another day):

  • Depth of understanding of how politics and power are shaped by, and shape, the natural world
  • Ability to weave together ideas from the module into your own coherent text
  • Depth and originality of critical evaluation of your own relationship with the natural world
  • Ability to argue for your perspective on how nature should be governed or cared for, by whom and in what ways, including use of reasons and evidence
  • Appropriate selection of multimedia on the portfolio
  • Ability to write appropriately for a particular audience (please specify: eg visitors to an exhibition, policy-makers, everyday readers of narrative non-fiction)
  • Creativity of your work on the portfolio
  • Evidence of learning and development over time in the module
  • Depth of critical engagement with the module materials and readings
  • Extent of additional research and further reading
  • Craft of writing, including readability, spelling and grammar
  • Accuracy of bibliographic materials

I like the approach of starting with a noun plus preposition, like ‘depth of’ or ‘ability to’, because it demonstrates that these are skills one can be better or worse at in a qualitative sense. Thus, this is not a box-ticking exercise for students but rather an invitation to engage in deep and dialogical reflection on what, for example, the ‘ability to argue’ or ‘appropriate selection of multimedia’ really looks like in practice.

It’s very important not to stop with listing the assessment criteria, of course, but rather to make them the centre of an ongoing conversation. Here is my top tip: every time a student asks a question about the assessment, or about what ‘good work’ might look like, I bring it back to the assessment criteria. So, let’s say they ask, ‘does my portfolio need to be consistent week by week?’ I will say, ‘Is that in the assessment criteria? No. So, I won’t be looking for that. If it’s something you want to learn, that is, how to create your own consistent style, that’s great – you can do so and add it to the assessment criteria for your self-assessment. But it’s not necessary from my point-of-view.’

Here is my top tip: every time a student asks a question about the assessment, or about what ‘good work’ might look like, I bring it back to the assessment criteria.

Or let’s say they ask, ‘Can my writing be more personal?’ I will say, ‘Is it in the assessment criteria?’ This is a longer conversation – the answer is, yes, I am asking them to give an account of their relationship with the natural world, so more personal writing in the first person is clearly appropriate. However, if they are using part of their portfolio to write for policy-makers, this can lead to a deeper conversation about what sort of writing, evidence and argument a policy-maker might be interested in. Distinguishing these different crafts of writing and talking about when they are appropriate, or not, is much more useful for learning than just prohibiting one of them without explaining why.

Other ways of getting students to engage deeply with the assessment criteria might include:

  1. Guided marking exercises where students mark examples of work with reference to the assesment criteria. Your aim here is to get them to focus on the criteria and not make the sorts of vague comments (‘this was not well structured’) that they have probably experienced themselves at times.
  2. Peer feedback where the focus is on giving each other feedback according to one or more of the assessment criteria.
  3. Formative feedback from the tutor where they have to tell you which criteria they want feedback on. (I have a form and they can’t have their feedback unless they tell me which criteria they are particularly interested in.)
  4. Self-assessment where students have to tell you how well they met the criteria, and where they could have done better.
  5. Any other discussion with examples of the criteria and what they mean, preferably iteratively, so they can improve over time.

Summative feedback should also, of course, refer constantly and closely to the assessment criteria. But by that point, this is just an exercise in demonstrating that you could be trusted to do what you said you were going to do. To return to the QAA discussion on racially inclusive criteria, the return of summative work should not be an opportunity to say: ‘Ta-DAH! This is what you should have done.’ What the students should have done should be clear right from the get-go, or else how can they learn how to do it?

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Tools for Discussion: An Interpersonal Growth Toolkit

Today’s guest post is from Dr. Allison Anoll at Vanderbilt University!

Classroom discussion is a common pedagogical tool, but many instructors and students alike find themselves lost with the lack of structure.  Equally problematic, standard approaches to grading participation that simply count how often students speak can (re)produce racial and gender disparities.

How can we, as instructors, lead effective discussions? How can we help students grow in their interpersonal skills while also ensuring classrooms are inclusive spaces?

In my small, seminar classes I use a tool for structuring and assessing participation I call the Interpersonal Growth Toolkit.This tool relies heavily on a framework developed by Stephen Brookfield in The Skillful Teacher, where he argues that classroom discussion skills need to be taught just like any other learning goal. The Interpersonal Growth Toolkit provides students with learning goals for classroom discussion, tools for achieving these goals, and regular sources of feedback from the instructor about progress.

Here’s how it works. I start by identifying skills I want students to learn and practice in the discussion setting. In my classes, that’s: 1) humility; 2) confidence; and 3) social science thinking. I provide students with a detailed list of tools for how they can practice each of these themes. For instance, to practice humility, students can,

  • Provide credit to classmates for ideas and inspiration by using their name in comments.
  • Ask the group for a moment of silence to slow the pace of discussion and allow you (and others) time to gather your thoughts.
  • Find a way to express appreciation for what is new, interesting, or challenging in the discussion. Be specific about what has helped you understand something new.
  • Make a comment or ask questions that encourages others to elaborate on their ideas.

I then ask my students to identify which of the three areas—humility, confidence, or social science thinking— they are weakest in as a discussion participant.  My students then develop an individualized growth plan by identifying 2-3 skills in their area of weakness they want to try out in class. They write these skills on an index card that I hand back to them at the beginning of each class for the first two weeks. At mid-term, they write a brief reflection on how they think they are doing in their area of growth and what they want to work on for the rest of the semester. In combination with my own notes, I prepare mid-term feedback for each student about their performance in the three areas and tools to try in the second half of the semester. Students receive a final grade for their participation based on their growth and performance in each of the three areas.

This approach increases the quality of classroom discussions immensely. Not only do students and the instructor have a clear sense of what people are supposed to be doing during discussion time, but students themselves can become advocates of inclusivity in the classroom. Students who lean towards dominating a discussion are asked to think about how they can use their skills to draw others in; students who are nervous speaking up are provided with skills for finding their space and ways into a discussion. Using this technique, I have seen students grow immensely over the course of a semester with quieter students getting bolder and more dominant students using their skills to build bridges between other’s ideas. In my seminar courses, it is the norm to hear from every student multiple times over the course of a discussion.

This approach and assessment are well-suited for relatively small classes (less than 20 students). In larger classes, it is more difficult to build a community of trust that fosters vulnerability and to find enough time for all the students to practice their skills. However, this tool is suitable for any level of instruction: I use it with freshman, seniors, and even new graduate students. Instructors should feel empowered to adapt the skills they want students to learn in the discussion as long as they also provide specific tools to complement these skills. Want students to practice intellectual curiosity as a core skill instead of humility? Develop a list of tools that students can practice in a discussion to build this skill. You can look at chapter 8 of Brookfield’s The Skillful Teacher for more tools to consider.

To implement this assessment, remember to include a learning objective in your syllabus that highlights interpersonal growth as a key goal of the course.  I use, “By the end of the course, you will be able to:demonstrate growth in discussion techniques including close listening, speaking with evidence, challenging with respect, and summarizing others’ contributions.’’

Keeping track of student contributions and how they fit into each assessment category can be difficult to do on your own while also leading the discussion. When I use this tool, I hire an advanced undergraduate or graduate student to sit in class with me and keep track of student contributions. I use these notes to develop feedback and grades for my students.

You can find details about The Interpersonal Growth Tool Kit here. The document also includes a rubric. (In general, I’m a big fan of rubrics, but that’s a topic for another day.) Happy discussing!

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Social Annotation: how to look at a cartoon

This week in class I’ve been using the social annotation software Talis Elevate with students to help them understand what ecofascism is and some of its key features. This is a very important thing to do early on in a module about the politics of nature because ecofascist discourses, as well as materials that might draw unknowingly on some ecofascist tropes, are very common when we talk about nature and landscape. I therefore always want this acvitiy to be almost the first thing we do, so students can recognise and critique far-right narratives as soon as they encounter them. Before delving into the specifics of the exercise, though, I want to acknowledge that it was particularly difficult to talk about the antisemitic elements of ecofascism this week because of the unspeakable, horrific violence taking place in Israel and Gaza. Antisemitism is always hard to talk about, as are the other topics we touched on in class including racism more broadly, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and eugenics. But it was particularly tricky at a moment like this. I will try to write about the charged nature of our classroom conversations another time, when I have had chance to sit with them. For now the difficulty is simply worth noting, so I don’t give the impression that technical fixes like Elevate can enable us to avoid the complexity of some of the conversations that we nevertheless must have.

Returning to social annotation, though, what Elevate does is quite simple. It allows students to click anywhere in a text or an image to create a pin, to which they can add a comment. Students can agree and reply to each other and I can see the conversation as well as judiciously replying or agreeing too. Nothing is anonymous, so it has the feel of a classroom conversation, but it enables students to engage with the image together and in conversation outside of the class.

In this instance, I put a cartoon on Elevate that had previously gone viral among nature-lovers and others on social media and asked them to note any key features, discuss what is going on, what political ideas are being advanced and whether the ideology underlying the cartoon has a name. In the previous week’s work, we had done a reading that touched on ecofascism, so it shouldn’t have been a new concept for most students in the group.

You can see the full exercise and how last year’s students did with it in this video:

The beauty of using a cartoon like this is that it is very concrete and students could pull out lots of individual features of the image from the whiteness and size of the family in the foreground to their heteronormativity; from the implicit racism and homophobia of ideas about ‘shrinking cities’ to the eugenicist implications of the anti-vaccine and mask imagery; from the ableist assumptions to the antisemitic coded langauge. Having noted all these individual elements before class on Elevate, the classroom discussion itself then enabled us to bring them together, to understand how ideologies contain lots of disparate ideas, tropes and discourses, that together produce a vision of the world, and to make sure we would be on the alert to any one of these problematic ideas in future by understanding how they link to all the others. In keeping with my overall focus on what I want students to be able to do as a result of the class, I hope they will be able to recognise, describe and challenge ecofascism in future and quickly understand that it’s not a good thing to ‘like’ or ‘share’.

I’ll write more about my adventures in social annotation later in the term, especially if they work out. (As you can see in the video, I haven’t quite cracked when and how to use it, yet.) Let us know if you have used it yourself and have any thoughts about when it is, or isn’t, useful.

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Classroom Discussion Techniques: Handling the Dominant Derailer

We all know the type: the student who is the first to speak in response to every question and drags the discussion in their preferred direction. Either unknowing or uncaring that they are dominating the conversation, they suck out the air from a room of open discourse, creating a challenge for the instructor and potentially frustration for students who might otherwise want to join in. Of all the challenges facing us in leading a productive conversation, this is the one I hear about the most.

Let’s examine five ways of handling the Dominant Derailer.

  1. Establish Class Rules
  2. Acknowledge and Ally
  3. Redirect to a Parking Lot
  4. Return to an Essential Question
  5. Use Discussion Entry Tickets
Continue reading “Classroom Discussion Techniques: Handling the Dominant Derailer”
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‘We sit in silent judgement’: the ‘visceral rhetoric’ of classrooms

On Friday, it was the first seminar of the year for my Politics of Nature module – a couple of hours of pure joy each week in autumn term in the midst of a job with less teaching and more admin than there once was in my life.

I take very seriously the advice that we could all stand to take out a bit of content from our teaching. Less is more when it comes to deep engagement. I therefore allow my first seminar of the year to breathe a little, taking the opportunity to get to know the students, answer their questions in full and set the tone for the work that lies ahead. I have discovered that it really does pay dividends to do this. When I was a new teacher – piling in all my knowledge and all my enthusiasms on students so that it felt like a tidal wave – I used to suffer as much as the next person from the silent classes, where getting anyone to say anything was like pulling teeth. My classes these days – with hard-won experience – are much livelier and chattier, and students quite often tell me that they find them a place where they feel they belong and can talk openly.

There are lots of things I do that cumulatively help me achieve this – and no guarantees, of course, that one year things won’t go wrong. But that first session of the year that sets the tone is really an important one. I’m therefore going to tell you what activities I do and also some thoughts on my embodied pratice. The activities are easy enough to adopt, but I think it is the combination that makes it work.

As regular readers know, I start out by making a public commitment to learning everyone’s name. They have already filled in a questionnaire where they may have given me a pronunication guide, and I have already looked up their online UCL record, so I have seen a photo and I know their year and programme. We go round and introduce ourselves, perhaps with a bit of detail about why we’re in the class. The questionnaire (I may write more about this in a future post) will already also have helped me to get to know them a little, so if relevant, I can refer to that in passing in conversation. For example, ‘Oh yes, you’re the student doing your dissertation on farming? Great to have your expertise in the class!’

Next, I make sure that everyone understands what a ‘norm’ is (as there are many Politics students in the class, someone can usually give a really pithy definition by this point in their degree). And then, I ask them to find out the name of the person or people sitting near them and have a chat about what the norms have been in University seminars up till now and how useful those classroom norms have been for learning. A lot of animated conversation and laughter usually ensures. Then we go back into plenary and we discuss those norms, how they feel and whether we want to carry on with them or do something new.

I want to stress now what this activity isn’t. It is not an exercise in crowd-sourcing or agreeing ‘ground rules’. This may be an activity that works for you – in which case, as they say, carry on. But whenever I have tried this, it always ends up with a pious recitation of very nice rules, all of which go unobserved for the rest of term. My activity is something different. It is a conversation in which we really try to reflect on how it feels to be in a classroom, what is going on in everyone’s head, what our fears, frustrations and insecurities are, and how hard those things are to change.

Lots of things reliably come up in that conversation. One student this time said, ‘As everyone on my degree programme knows, in seminars, we sit in silent judgement.’ The whole room burst out laughing – clearly this hit a nerve. Students talk about not wanting to speak unless they are certain of the answer. About fearing the judgement of others if they get something wrong, even though they know that they are putting the brakes on their own opportunity to learn. About the constant worry of ‘cancellation’ even as they also fear that hate speech will not be addressed because of ‘freedom of speech’. About imposter syndrome and feeling stupid. About resentment towards the person who ‘sounds clever even if he [yes, they say, it’s usually a he] hasn’t done the reading’. There is so much going on under the surface of our classrooms.

The one thing I don’t try to do in these conversations is solve all this. And this is where the embodied practice comes in. I was listening today to a great podcast with Stephanie Larson who has written a book about ‘visceral rhetoric’ (which I am now so excited to read!). Her research is not on classroom dynamics, but she does use one classroom example to explain what ‘visceral rhetoric’ is. She explains that whilst a long tradition in the study of rhetoric assumes a deep commitment to argument and rationality, it is often embodiment and emotion that in the end enable listeners to come to judgement: ‘the body of your professor will tell you something before that person even speaks. You could imagine yourself in a large lecture: that person who walks on stage, stands behind a podium (if they can stand) is going to […] shape audiences’ perceptions of credibility, of how good of a professor this person is going to be.’ Whether we are lecturing or not (and I avoid it as much as I possibly can, which I may also write about another day), students are looking to our ‘visceral rhetoric’ to set the emotional tone of the classroom experience, to decide if they trust us, to enable their own effective practice of visceral rhetoric to emerge.

So, what I do is try to be relaxed, open and calm as they tell their stories about classroom norms. I really listen. I don’t fill every pause, but let the silence sit as the feelings and the courage to speak bubble up slowly. I try to display warmth and understanding. I sympathise. I smile and laugh with them. That laughter is incredibly important, actually – the public, joyful, communal, and embodied acknowledgement that we do some ridiculous, self-defeating things because we’re scared or judgemental or both. I don’t come up with rules or even many suggestions, though I do ask questions like, ‘And is that a helpful norm?’ or ‘How would it feel if we didn’t do that?’ or ‘Will we try to do something else in this classroom?’ I do my best to show that I understand it’s complicated. We can’t sort this all out rationally with a set of rules. We have to work at it slowly and patiently, as a set of embodied practices.

Usually – as this year – we end with a mutual commitment to do our best. To say no to hate speech but yes to getting things wrong. No to shunning but yes to challenge. No to holding forth pointlessly and yes to questions. No to fear and yes to learning. There will be times it won’t work, when it will be hard, when someone will go away from my classroom feeling miserable or wishing they had said something or nor said something, or deeply angry with me for correcting them. There will be plenty of times when I kick myself for insensitvity and occasions when I front up and apologise. The point is not to get it perfect, but to notice when we don’t and to keep going. I’ll let you know how it pans out this year. Meanwhile, feel free to give any of this a try yourself and let us know what happens.

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“The Great Veggie Burger Debate”

Last week I conducted a simulation in my European Union Politics class, which is an upper-level undergraduate course with 18 students. The simulation is called “The Great Veggie Burger Debate”, building on the European Union’s 2019 Amendment 165, which proposed to ban the use of meat-related terms, such as “sausage” or “burgers”, for products such as “veggie burgers” or “veggie steaks” which did not contain any animal meat in them. In 2020, this Amendment was blocked by the European Parliament. In my simulation, the Amendment is back on the board, the European Parliament is leaning towards yes, and the Council of the European Union, meaning the body of nation-state ministers responsible for this policy area, has to vote on this issue (again).

This is my second time running this simulation, and I think it is a useful teaching tool to illustrate parts of the policy making cycle in the European Union and the weighing of nation-state interests vs. European-wide interests in said cycle. This time around, though, I decided against really prepping my students for the simulation week. Luckily, I teach the class three times a week, and I utilized each of these days for concrete steps to have a fruitful conversation on the last day.

Advertising Agency: Ruf Lanz, Zurich, Switzerland

Monday:

At the top of the class I handed out the text of Amendment 165, putting into context its blocking in 2020, outlining key interest groups (environmentalists vs. farmers/agricultural workers), and providing a step-by-step guide on how to proceed. I briefly talked about the instructions, let me students chose which of the 27 countries they would like to represent (I only have 18 students, so I grouped some of the closer aligned countries together), and reminded them of qualified majority voting numbers (pass: 55% of countries, 65% of population; block: at least 4 countries, 35% of population).

My students spent the rest of the class (approx. 30mins) researching their country, looking specifically at the strength of interest groups, what sort of industries dominate, vegan/vegetarian populations, government statements, how their country had voted earlier, and whether their countries already had similar legislation on the books (i.e., France). I instructed them to have a 1-minute speech ready for the next class (no requirement for free speaking, bullet points encouraged).

Wednesday:

On the second day, each of my students positioned themselves/their country regarding the amendment. Some of them were well thought out; some not so much. But ultimately, we almost had a half and half situation of yeses and nos. I then allotted time for the groups to come together, think through their arguments, and approach the other group for conversations. We encountered an interesting situation, because the no-group, those pushing for a blocking of this amendment, realized quite quickly that they had the numbers to block it. Even though I tried to stir the pot a bit, the group stonewalled any attempts of my attempts to create disunion or attempts by the other group to converse. As a heads up for the third day, I instructed each group to determine a speaker to summarize their position at the top of the class. The yes-group spent the remainder of their class conducting research, strengthening their arguments for the last day. The no-group sat around, avoiding eye contact with me.

Friday:

On the last day, each group’s speaker summarized their position. The yes-group, as the “losing group”, had a well-prepared speech and more evidence. The no-group quite briefly just reiterated their stance and emphasized that they have the numbers to “win”. I positioned myself as a mediator, taking notes during the statements, and then invited my country representatives to engage in debate. It was interesting to see how well-formulated the yes-arguments were, touching upon citizen representation, consumer protection, and environmental concerns. The no-group, in the debate at least, did not have convincing arguments, disregarding any environmental concerns, and harping largely on the idea that consumers can distinguish between veggie burgers and real burgers and do not need more guidance. We voted after about 20minutes of issue debate. One no-student decided to switch his vote to the yest group, stating that their arguments were stronger. The vote, nonetheless, was moot, given the qualified majority voting rules and the strong hold the no-group had on a block of the bill.

A couple of thoughts:

  1. I do not think the lack of preparation prior to the presentation really affected the quality of the simulation. The students were “prepared” through 4 weeks of lectures/activities on the European history, institutions, and the way policymaking works in the European Union.
  2. Using an actual policy that has been debated and voted on was beneficial because it allowed students to immediately have research material readily available.  
  3. I made it a point to debrief after the simulation with concrete questions, allowing the students to reflect on their behaviors and positions. Here, we discussed the strength of arguments vs. qualified majority voting, the meaning of stonewalling on one vs. reiterative occasions with their fellow member-states, and most importantly the weighing of nation-state interests vs. European-wide concerns in the Council of the European Union.
  4. It was interesting to see this immediate adopting of winner and loser mentalities. Some no-students later stated that the yes-group’s arguments were quite convincing, but they “didn’t want to lose”.
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My number one top teaching tip ever

Before I reveal my number one top teaching tip ever, I’m going to keep you in suspense for just a moment to tell you what my Politics of Nature class are doing this week. Don’t worry, it isn’t really a digression.

They are going out to find out the name of at least one plant.

Alarmingly, last year, quite a few of the students – who had opted to take a class on the Politics of Nature, don’t forget – had a lot of difficulty in naming any plants or other wildlife. When I asked them to ‘meet me by that silver birch over there’, a look of terror came into their eyes! One student asked me if buddleia and lavender were the same plant.

I’m not laughing at them and it’s not their fault – they were never taught how to differentiate between plants, so the world has ended up looking to them like a ‘green blur’.

We learned together that learning the names of plants is a political act: the world comes into focus in new ways. We start to become aware of the beauty, the detail, the nuance, the complexity of the world around us. We respect it and love it more, take care of it better. One student even made a wonderful podcast about the experience.

So, perhaps it is already obvious what my teaching tip is. But if not….

…[drumroll]…

It is this: Learn your students’ names.

Depending on the context you work in, you may find this piece of advice obvious or even strange. When I was studying Czech for my undergrad, there were only three of us in the year, so it would have been most peculiar if my tutor, the language teacher, the librarian and all the other students hadn’t known my name. If you are in this fortunate position, you can carry on thinking about the plants.

On the other hand, perhaps you are thinking that you can’t learn your students’ names. Your memory is too poor, you can’t pronounce half of their names, you are not too good with faces, you will get two students mixed up and embarrass everyone, you are too busy, too stressed and too tired, your class is too big. I completely understand this because I fall into all of these categories too.

Nevertheless. I promise you. If you want to be a great teacher: learn their names.

There are tricks you can employ. Your University system probably has photos of all the students in your class with their names in the record system. You can make it into a game and quiz yourself publicly at the start of class every week. You can send round a questionnaire asking them to provide a pronunciation guide. You can humbly ask them to keep correcting you and assure them that it will be worth it once you get it right and you really get to know them all. I have never had anything other than a warm response to the effort, even though I do often muddle two students up in the first couple of weeks of term. (I sometimes get someone’s name wrong even after teaching them for weeks – but then, my mum sometimes calls me by my sister’s name, so I think most people recognise that this is just being human.) You can even make a prize available for any student who can get all their classmates’ names right on a quiz by the middle of term, thus roping everyone into the game.

The biggest class that I have learned all the names of had 80 students in it. If you never teach a group smaller than 80, then you are really broadcasting rather than teaching, and perhaps different rules will have to apply. But when I have taught larger groups (up to 500 some years), at least in my department, we did some teaching to the whole cohort in lectures, but we also had small group teaching in classes of 20, and Teaching Assistants worked alongside us. In that case, I would learn the names of my small classes and I would ask the Teaching Assistants to learn the names of theirs. So, as a student, someone on the teaching staff knew your name. Yes, I know that your TAs are busy and stressed and not paid enough. Still, they are the teachers of the future, so why would you deprive them of the top teaching tip ever? I still get emails from erstwhile TAs thanking me for making them do it and assuring me that they still learn all the names now. It really is that good a tip.

Once you know someone’s name, you can differentiate them from the others. You will, almost without realising it, learn a bit about them. You will be able to ask them really relevant questions and tailor your teaching to what matters to them. You will inspire their respect and loyalty because they are in relationship with you. You will, at least if you are anything like me and my former TAs, be happier, because you are developing an understanding of the people who surround you – in all their wonder and individuality and diversity – and you are seeing what your work as a teacher is doing for them as individuals over time. If someone starts behaving discourteously, or in a way that interferes with their learning, or someone else’s – as Jennifer described last week – asking them by name to stop and having a conversation with them as someone they know and trust is much more likely to help. And also makes them less likely to do it in the first place, I tend to find. Once students realise you know them, they will seek your good opinion, knowing that you will remember it was them and not someone else.

It breaks my heart a bit how many students tell me that I’m the only teacher at Uni who has ever learned their name. At UCL, we take attendance. I once sent the register round and got it back to discover that someone had been signed in despite self-evidently not being there in the room. This brought home to me that students take it for granted that their tutor doesn’t know their name or whether they are in the class or not. This is incredibly sad. You can imagine how I hammed up my response(!): explaining how shocked and offended I was that students would blatantly falsify the register for their friend in front of my nose, how hurtful it was that they would do something like that even when they knew how hard I worked to learn their names and knew fine well who was there and who wasn’t. The absent student was in my office before the end of the day to say sorry. We were all fast friends again very quickly once apologies had been proffered, but it stuck with me as a worrying example of how cynical and thin the average classroom relationship has become.

In a world of metrics, big student numbers, loneliness and isolation, knowing your students’ names is a political act. It shows them they matter. It shows everyone involved that teaching matters. It is by far the most important thing I will be doing in the first couple of weeks of term.

What are your top tips for remembering and pronouncing those names?

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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?