Jeremy Moulton – Active Learning in Political Science ©

July 1, 2026July 1, 2026

July SoTL Roundup

We are back with the latest installment of the monthly SoTL roundup, wherein, each month (as the name implies), I scroll through Journal of Political Studies Education, Politics, PS: Political Science & Politics, International Studies Perspectives, and European Political Science to bring to you, esteemed ALPS reader, the latest SoTL publications.

Journal of Political Science Education

Bauer, V. A., & Hönnige, C. (2026). Teaching Statistics: A Quasi-Experimental Analysis of Ensuring Undergraduate Student Success by Teaching and Exam Format Choice. Journal of Political Science Education, 1–20.

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.

June 2, 2026June 1, 2026

The ASPIRE Awards 2026

A year ago, at King’s College in London, the ASPIRE Network – a network for teaching-track academics working in Politics and International Relations – was launched. One of the pieces of work we wanted to do with ASPIRE was to recognise and amplify the often overlooked and under-appreciated work that teaching-track colleagues are doing in our field today. With that in mind, we decided to launch the ASPIRE Awards, which, we hope, recognise the breadth and depth of work that colleagues on Teaching & Scholarship contracts do.

Today, we are delighted to announce the winners of the inaugural ASPIRE awards, celebrating the outstanding contributions of colleagues across teaching, scholarship, leadership, and support within the teaching track community.

The quality of nominations was exceptionally high, and we would like to thank everyone who took the time to submit nominations and to recognise the work of colleagues across the discipline. We, the ASPIRE board, had a really challenging task to pick winners for these awards, and it was a really inspiring experience to see all the incredible work that ASPIRE members are doing.

The winners are as follows:

May 31, 2026June 11, 2026

June SoTL Roundup

Journal of Political Science Education

Caivano, D., & Deo, N. (2026). Students Matter: Comparative Reflections on Decolonial Pedagogy in Political Science. Journal of Political Science Education, 1–19.

Hendrickson, P. (2026). Play It Again, Sam: The Use of Iterated Games To Illustrate Student Decisionmaking*. Journal of Political Science Education, 1–27.

May 20, 2026May 20, 2026

Call for papers: Postgraduate Teaching Conference

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

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

May 15, 2026May 15, 2026

Registration open: CPP x ASPIRE Conference

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

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

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

Hope you see you there!

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.

May 1, 2026May 1, 2026

May SoTL Roundup

We are back with the latest installment of the monthly SoTL roundup, wherein, each month (as the name implies), I’ll be scrolling through Journal of Political Studies Education, Politics, PS: Political Science & Politics, International Studies Perspectives, and European Political Science to bring to you, esteemed ALPS reader, the latest SoTL publications.

Journal of Political Science Education

Hamerly, I. (2026). Enhancing Political Science Education: Evaluating the Impact of Networking Skills Training. Journal of Political Science Education, 1–6.

Maranto, R., Bradley-Dorsey, M., & Bork, N. (2026). Political Science Majors Are More Tolerant of Controversial Speech. Journal of Political Science Education, 1–16.

O’Dell, R. K. M., & Minghini, S. E. (2026). Classroom UNSC Simulations for Building Student and Instructor Confidence, Leadership, and Negotiation Skills. Journal of Political Science Education, 1–18.

April 15, 2026April 16, 2026

GTA training: What is best practice in the UK?

This guest post comes to us from Dan Keith, Adam Fusco, and Chris Featherstone, all of the University of York’s Department of Politics and International Relations. This is the second in a five-part series that they are delivering, all on the important subject of training Graduate Teaching Assistants. You can read the first post in the series here.

Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) make a valuable contribution to undergraduate education in UK politics programmes. They deliver a large number of teaching sessions – often seminars and workshops – and GTAs assess a significant volume of student work. GTAs can serve a crucial role in undergraduate student’s entry into the politics discipline.

The benefits of providing robust training to GTAs are clear. It supports their confidence, boosts self-efficacy in classroom management, improves student engagement, and helps them to refine instructional strategies. Effective training also helps integrate GTAs into their departments, promoting a genuine ‘teaching community.’ However, despite this, there has been relatively little recent discussion about how Politics GTAs in the UK actually are—or should be—trained.

Different models for training GTAs have been recommended. These broadly fall into three categories:

April 8, 2026April 8, 2026

Call for abstracts! CPP x ASPIRE Conference

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

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

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

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

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

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