Teaching Skills – Active Learning in Political Science ©

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 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 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.

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:

December 30, 2025December 30, 2025

Why We Need to Talk About How We Train the Next Generation of Politics Teachers

This guest post comes to us from Dr Dan Keith of the University of York’s Department of Politics and International Relations. This is the first in a five-part series that Dan and other colleagues in the department at York will be delivering, all on the important subject of training Graduate Teaching Assistants.

Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) play a key role in undergraduate education in Politics and International Relations in many universities. Often PhD students themselves, they bridge the gap between high-level research and the seminar room.

Yet, despite their vital role, training for GTAs remains a “missing conversation” in UK Politics departments. While the US and Canada have a more robust body of scholarship on this area of pedagogical development, the UK landscape has been remarkably quiet. This is despite research from Newcastle University which highlights that GTAs have mixed perceptions of the usefulness of training initiatives.

As Amanda Rosen’s insightful ALPs post highlighted there is a need to open debate on the purpose and delivery of GTA training in politics. For instance, where do we strike the balance in GTA training between an “on the job” approach and formalised training?

November 20, 2025November 20, 2025

Liberality in dissertation supervision

This guest post is by Dr. Nat Rutherford, Lecturer in Political Theory in the Department of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. Nat’s primary research interests are on why we disagree about morality and politics and how these disagreements bear on the legitimacy of political institutions. He also works on the methods of political theory and the relationship between moral philosophy and political philosophy.

One of the virtues I try to realise as a teacher is liberality. ‘Generosity’ would probably be the more common colloquial term, but generosity implies a degree of supererogation that doesn’t capture the spirit of the virtue I have in mind. In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, he understands liberality as the virtue related to wealth and money, but I’m using it here in a wider sense to mean giving freely and taking sparingly (not least because I haven’t got any money to spend on my students). Like most teachers, what I have to spend is time and attention.

October 31, 2025November 11, 2025

Office Hours: Year One (Part 2)

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, checking how the first couple months have been, and looking back at some of the thoughts our cohort had in their first reflection.

Thank you again to Dr. Polina Beliakova (American University – School of International Service), Dr. Jennifer Ostojski (Indiana State University), Dr. Brooklyn Walker (University of Tennessee-Knoxville), and Dr. Charmaine Willis (Old Dominion University) for contributing and letting us get a glimpse at the first-year life.

September 16, 2025September 19, 2025

Guest post: Decolonising politics curricula: Exploring the experiences and views of racially minoritised students

This guest post is from Dr. Siobhan O’Neill, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester. At the 2025 Political Studies Association’s Teaching and Learning Network, Siobhan was awarded the Jacqui Briggs Prize for the best teaching and learning article in Politics in the last year. It is therefore fantastic is have this post from Siobhan, sharing more about this brilliant piece of work.

I was recently pleased to receive the Jacqui Briggs Prize for an article I wrote for Politics titled ‘Decolonising politics curricula: Exploring the experiences and views of racially minoritised students.’ In the article, as well as in the wider PhD project that preceded it, I shared some points of action in terms of decolonising curricula. You can read the article in full here or the PhD thesis, with a full list of ‘recommendations for change’ here. These drew directly from the experiences of racially minoritised students who participated in the study as well as building from the strong scholarship in this area.

October 18, 2024October 16, 2024

An IR Theory “Cheat Sheet”:

This semester I am once against tasked by my institution to introduce a new crop of students to the magical world of international relations theories. Yet, as many of us, who do that regularly, know, teaching theories in international relations can be a difficult feat, as many of our students (most of the time freshmen and sophomores) engage with abstract ideas/frameworks for the first time. In particular, keeping together the purpose of theories, why we have different ones, and what their core assumptions are in how they approach the world can be daunting – for both the student and the teacher tasked with that role. As a visual learner myself, I have adopted two measures in my classes to convey visually the meaning of theories and why we have them. Below, I briefly discuss them.