I’ve been back on the Mahara podcast to discuss my work on relational grading. I am very happy with the title of the podcast.
Continue reading “A rebel with a cause!”Reflecting on recent UCL CPP events, Part 3: ‘Disability, Technology, and Inclusive Education’
This post is the third in a series reflecting on events hosted by the UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics (CPP) last year.
The first and second posts discussed, in some detail, ideas raised in our spring panel on ‘Relational Pedagogies Inside and Outside the Classroom‘.
This post offers some more tentative reflections on our autumn panel on ‘Disability, Technology, and Inclusive Education’. For reasons that will become clear, I shall be oscillating between the usual blog format and the lesser-spotted bleg (this one, not this one…).
My main aim in organising this panel was to bring together educators who have thought deeply about how technology can make higher education more inclusive for disabled and neurodivergent students, and who share a concern that widespread advances made during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic have been lost in the rush to ‘return to normal’.
Initially, my hope was to hear mainly from people who teach politics (understood broadly) and have published their thoughts and reflections in disciplinary SoTL. But I was unable to find much, if anything, in the usual outlets (e.g., those covered in Jeremy’s SoTL round ups) that included a focus on inclusivity gains during the early part of the pandemic and subsequent losses.
This was a surprise because, more generally, inclusivity is a strong theme in our discipline’s SoTL, as is co-production, and most of the disabled students we teach have a clear view on this: according to Disabled Students UK, 85% of disabled students report that they would benefit from the continuation of online teaching and learning options introduced during the early stages of the pandemic.
It seems to me that there are three possible explanations for my inability to find much disciplinary SoTL reflecting this perspective:
Continue reading “Reflecting on recent UCL CPP events, Part 3: ‘Disability, Technology, and Inclusive Education’ “Reflecting on this year’s UCL CPP events: ‘Relational Pedagogy Inside and Outside the Classroom’
This year, the UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics (CPP) continued its tradition of hosting a series of themed online panel events.
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.
To keep things complicated, this first post will focus on the second of this year’s two panel events, which took place in the spring on the theme of ‘Relational Pedagogies Inside and Outside the Classroom‘.
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?
The third question chimed with a SoTL research idea that I had been toying with prior to organizing the panel and gave me the confidence to pursue it further. This culminated with a presentation of my work-in-progress on ‘Relational Pedagogy Without the Baggage’ at the recent CPP-ASPIRE conference on ‘The Education Track and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in PIR’, to which I shall turn in the next post in this series.
Disability, Technology, and Inclusive Education
This academic year, the UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics (CPP) is hosting a series of online panel events. Our first event on 4 December was on the theme of ‘Disability, Technology, and Inclusive Education‘. In this guest post, one of the panellists at that event, Martin Compton (College Lead for AI and Innovation in Education, King’s College London), offers further reflections on how best to use technology to facilitate the inclusion of disabled and neurodivergent students, the extent to which changes required in the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic improved inclusion for disabled students, and whether those improvements have been maintained.
I was delighted to be invited to speak at the UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics’ recent panel on Disability, Technology, and Inclusive Education. My current role at King’s College London (AI and innovation in education lead) can sometimes mask my wider faculty development and student engagement passions related to inclusive education but this was a perfect opportunity to connect these aspects of my work. The invite prompted me to reflect again on my own position, shaped by both professional and personal experience. I spoke alongside two people whose work I admire greatly. Dr Miranda Melcher’s coherent thinking, scholarship and advocacy of high impact interventions were passionately shared. And my former colleague, Ben Watson’s, leadership in digital accessibility at UCL has had cross-sector impacts. It was a great opportunity to be reminded of the clarity of their arguments, their commitment to practical change and their willingness to challenge the limits of established thinking.
My own starting point in this space is relatively simple. Digital tools, and now generative AI, have already changed what is possible for many learners, especially those who have been historically marginalised. A significant complicating factor is that these same tools can widen divides at the same time. I understand the many good reasons to resist certain developments in educational technology. I understand the arguments that warn of harm and the potentials for exacerbating marginalisation. So to that end, I am neither a technological determinist nor a tech evangelist. I do, however, feel concerned by the strength of anti-technology narratives that often drown out successful inclusive applications and hard-won gains. Too often accessibility is an afterthought as opposed to embedded practice. In a 2023 paper, (co-authored with Ben and Dr Alex Standen, now at LSE), I argued that there was a risk (already apparent in fact) that progress made during the Covid lockdown period, and recently expanded through responsible uses of AI, would be undone wherever opportunity to ‘return to normal’ presented itself. But, wilfully ignoring or winding back on approaches that can narrow engagement and attainment gaps should never be on the table. We need to hold on to what worked for those whose needs and voices are so often the least heard in policy discussions.
Continue reading “Disability, Technology, and Inclusive Education”Online panel event: Disability, Technology, and Inclusive Education (4 December, 4.00 – 5.00pm)
This year, the UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics (CPP) is once again hosting a series of themed online panel events.
We are delighted to share the details of our first event on ‘Disability, Technology, and Inclusive Education’, which is taking place on Thursday 4th December, 4.00-5.00pm (UK time).
It will include contributions from the following panelists alongside time for audience Q&A:
Martin Compton (College Lead for AI and Innovation in Education, King’s College London);
Miranda Melcher (Educational Technologist, Learning Enhancement and Development (LEaD) department, City, University of London)
Ben Watson (Head of Digital Accessibility, UCL)
The event will run as a Teams webinar. If you would like to attend, please register beforehand on the following event page, whereupon you will receive access details: Webinar: ‘Disability, Technology, and Inclusive Education’.
We hope for a wide-ranging discussion on issues such as how best to use technology to facilitate the inclusion of disabled students; the extent to which changes required in the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic improved inclusion for disabled students and, if so, whether those improvements have been maintained; the current state of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in this area.
The event is primarily aimed at academics working in politics (or adjacent) departments who have an interest in pedagogical research and best practice in this area.
We hope to see some of you there for a thought-provoking discussion!
Scenario-Based Learning and Assessment (Part 1 of a Series)
This guest post is by Dr. Ray Mikell, an assistant professor of political science at Jackson State University, a historically black institution and urban research university in Jackson, Mississippi. He has taught courses and written test bank questions in American and comparative politics in connection with several widely used, introductory-level textbooks, and has worked with W.W. Norton & Co. and Pearson.
Editor’s Note (Pigeon, that is): This series adds to the sober discussion we’ve been posting about using AI in the classroom. In my assessment, this series highlights the importance of subject matter expertise. Ray has many years of experience in deploying relevant and accurate classroom exercise scenarios and thus has appropriate judgment in reviewing, evaluating, and editing LLM scenario outputs. Over to you, Ray!
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Could having individual students think through scenarios from the worlds of politics and government—about everything from international conflict to voter choices, and a whole introductory political science text laundry list of subjects—in an open-ended fashion help ease educator anxiety about cheating via artificial intelligence systems? Being at least a near-optimist, I wondered if such questions could help increase student skills in analytical and critical thinking as well.
A win-win? Maybe I’m naïve?
This is a conversation I started having with myself—and then a large language model (LLM)-powered online chatbot —in recent times for a couple of reasons: The first spark was faculty anxiety about LLMs and artificial intelligence, which many critics saw as plagiarism systems. (I came to share the unease over the past two years, despite some initial ambivalence.) Then, for freelance American Government test bank work I was doing in 2024, an editor asked me to write more scenario or vignette-oriented multiple-choice questions than usual. The rationale? In an era when LLMs can easily produce basic recall questions, coming as higher-order thinking was becoming more valued, it made sense to experiment.
Any political science instructor who has used publisher test banks over the past decade or two has come across these types of questions, in this case, what education researchers call context-dependent items. These typically introduce a brief story or scene before posing a course-relevant query. Some may be augmented by a data graphic, a photo, or video. Others are formatted as an item set, otherwise known as a testlet. In these (common in medical or health care-related education), a vignette is followed by two or more questions, often linked in step-by-step fashion. In effect, these are puzzle questions aimed at getting students to think critically about political situations and issues as they present themselves in our world.
Maddeningly, however, no research has ever shown whether these sorts of questions are demonstrably effective in increasing critical or higher-order thinking. I should know. In the late 2010s, I undertook context-dependent query experiments with a few introductory-level political science classes at Jackson State. Ultimately, I found only modest effects, at best, as far as knowledge retention and increasing critical thinking went (as judged via essays). Immediate online feedback had a somewhat stronger effect, but not a notably strong one.
Although the results suggested that these types of questions only slowly push students toward more analytical reasoning, I kept slipping scenario questions into student introductory-level classes and tinkering with question design. The rise of ChatGPT, however, led me to doubt how I would go about testing student knowledge and comprehension of course materials through such means.
More recently, amid a presidential administration where the federal government was not working in a textbook fashion, I had a change of heart. Maybe context-dependent questions had more worth than I thought? The major difference, it seemed, was that I could no longer see using essays to judge student recall and comprehension of course concepts and facts.
One way to adapt, I thought, would be to lean into pushing for more analytical thinking through open-ended scenario questions or prompts that students could address via essays, out-of-class research, presentations, and audio-visual content. It would not, I thought, be nearly as easy for students to try to skate by with LLM-provided responses to scenario prompts, given that the latter often can involve thinking through complex situations. Such assignments could require students to apply abstract concepts to real-world problems.
It was possible, of course, that LLMs could provide respectable responses to my prompts in the usual AI way, with clear and shiny, if bloodless, prose, thus proving my naivete. But to judge that, I had to jump right into AI-land. More specifically, I had a chat with Claude AI about the worth of using scenario questions to get around or above cheating and plagiarism. Although it, like all LLMs, aims to please users—which can seem seductively refreshing after reading peer reviews—the LLMs answers were nonetheless intriguing.
Next in this series: How Claude AI answered the prompts (preview #1: too many bullet points, long-winded, but would have kept students from having to worry about more basic concepts or facts about American government), what it had to say in conversation about (preview #2: it suggested incorporating data searches), and the questions about boosting critical thinking that its answers and information pose.
5 Strategies for AI-Resistant Assignments
I recently got to attend the University of Central Florida’s Teaching and Learning with AI Conference in Orlando, and it’s one I highly recommend for anyone interested in practical ideas on how to think about, resist, and use Generative AI in higher education. The presentations are all 25 minutes and the presenters make the most of their short time. I want to share some ideas from one of those presenters, Ashley Evans, professor and Program Chair of Software Development and Cloud Computing at Valencia College. While her field is obviously far from political science, her strategies for transforming assignments from AI-vulnerable to AI-resistant are easily adapted to our field, and worth considering. I want to note that these are my recollections and takes on Evans’ presentation; all ideas here are hers, not mine (excepting the adaptations to polisci). Her website is https://ashley-evans.vercel.app/ and she has told me she’s happy to talk AI with other faculty; contact her by email.
Evans’ stated goals for creating AI resistant assignments include:
- Reduce student ability to get high marks from solely AI-generated submissions
- Eliminate the ability of AI to complete the task in place of the student
- Challenge students to think critically about AI generated output, if used.
- Relieve instructors from the role of AI-detectives.
All of these seem like worthy goals to me. Most importantly in my mind, she’s interested in taking the weight off of faculty of trying to root out unauthorized AI use, not by banning it, but by revising assignments so that AI is genuinely not useful on the assignment, and by establishing grading criteria that focuses on completion of tasks that AI cannot do well. This is a tough balancing act, but one that I think faculty need to wrestle with as they figure out how much they want to incorporate AI into their classes.
With that, here are her five strategies:
Continue reading “5 Strategies for AI-Resistant Assignments”Individual exercises in the interactive lecture
A couple of years ago at the University of York, we switched from the 1-hour traditional lecture format to instead doing 90-minute interactive lectures. After spending years being a student with the traditional lecture format and then years again delivering that type of lecture, this was a break from a norm that took some getting used to. This has meant that, over the last two years, we have all spent time reflecting on and experimenting with this new format and asking ourselves – ‘what is it that makes a ‘good’ interactive lecture?’.
The answer, unsurprisingly, has been ‘it depends’.
One of the big factors is the number of students on the course.
I teach a third-year Green Politics module that usually is capped at around 40 students. With this relatively low number of people in the room, I’ve found it’s quite comfortable and natural to throw out occasional questions and gather responses as one would in a seminar. I have also found that providing breakout group exercises for 5-10 minutes has also worked well.
On larger modules (where I have between 200-300) students, my approach to interactivity has been different. I have made use of resources like Menti Meter to give students the opportunity to give quick feedback to questions using their phones/ laptops/ tablets/ etc; feedback that is then delivered live into a slides presentation. This feedback has then been a useful tool for hooking students back into the subject and making it feel more relevant and engaging.
Our larger modules are more likely to be in the first year and I took this technology-driven approach as, in the past, I have found that students are more at ease engaging this way at this early stage of their degree and in front of so many of their peers. By third year, I felt that students would be more at ease with contributing to a lecture-based discussion both because they would feel more comfortable in that environment and because the size of the lecture cohorts would have been reduced.
However, last week I had a first-year lecture where I decided to mix things up a little. I had slightly over 200 students in a very large lecture theatre for our Global Challenges module, where I had been asked to come and deliver a lecture entitled ‘Why is it so difficult to act on climate change?’.
Again, I used a Menti-based form of interactivity, asking students to rank how serious they thought climate change was and then spoke about the fact that 95% of them thought it was a ‘very serious’ or ‘somewhat serious’ issue is not surprising when we consider demographic factors and how this matches/ contrasts with other data.
I then used Menti again to ask students, using scales, to rank how important they thought each level of governance is to combating climate change (you can see the results in the image below).
After this Menti however, I then asked them to do some ‘lone research’. I popped the slide below up on the board, and told students they had 5 minutes to research the climate action measures that may have been adopted in their local authority, with the suggestion that we would then have some time to share some examples.
My hope for this exercise was two-fold. Firstly, I hoped that this break in the lecture-Menti-lecture format would help change the rhythm of the 90-minute lecture and therefore keep students engaged. Secondly, I hoped that getting the opportunity to research something ‘local’ would make students more keen to share than if I had simply thrown out a question that was not as specific to them. In case I found that my call for people to share their examples fell on stony ground, I was ready to go with my own example of local authority action to try and get things rolling…
Well, I didn’t need the back-up plan! In fact, eventually I had to say “sorry, we’ll have to stop taking examples there, otherwise we’ll run out of time”. Hands shot up the moment I asked if anyone wanted to share the results of their research. It was fantastic to see that students were also really taking in each other’s responses and responding both to the slide prompt and to other examples they had heard.
So, what was it that worked here? My thinking at the moment is that this exercise benefitted from building on a low-cost earlier form of interaction that was related (responding to the Menti about the importance of the different levels of governance), because it did give students something a little different to do in the lecture, which kept things fresh, and because in Week 2 of their first year, it gave them a chance to speak about where they had lived prior to coming to university.
I have another lecture with the Global Challenges cohort in a few weeks’ time and so I’ve already started thinking about how I can try and repeat this format. I’ll keep ALPS posted with how that goes!
Chatbot your Syllabus
I just attended the Teaching and Learning with AI Conference in Orlando, and my brain is brimming with ideas on how to use AI in support of students and faculty. I think most of us remain stuck in the Chat GPT mindset, concerned about academic integrity and students using that platform to write their papers and discussion posts. I’m not downplaying either that, or the privacy and ethical concerns about AI. But that’s just one part of the conversation. In the last two years there has been an explosion of other tools that could have positive impacts in the teaching and learning environment, and as Jeremy noted, we should be talking about those, too.
If you’ve ever had the urge to say, ‘its in the syllabus!’ to a questioning student, I’ve got some good news: there’s an AI for that.
Continue reading “Chatbot your Syllabus”Generative AI in the classroom
Many contemporary conversations about innovations in teaching and learning will eventually touch on the same subject – AI and its place in higher education. There have already been some great posts on ALPS covering a range of angles for exploring AI and political science education, including protecting the integrity of assessments, the choice to adopt or resist AI in the political science classroom, on AI and specification grading, and on AI and the pace of technological change. ALPS is not alone in this attention to AI. PS: Political Science & Politics published a piece by Ardoin and Hicks in April detailing fears of AI-driven academic misconduct and suggested methods for successfully using AI as a learning tool. Looking at WonkHE’s coverage of AI over the last year shows the extensive and profound effects that AI-related concerns and applications are already having in the sector.
However, one thing that has been largely overlooked to date is the idea of bringing AI into the political science classroom, not as a tool for research, for writing essays, or summarising texts, but as a subject of study.
The generative AI tool ChatGPT has experienced a meteoric rise in its widespread adoption. It took 2 months for ChatGPT to reach 100 million users. Comparing this to TikTok’s 9 months, Instagram’s 30 months, and Spotfy’s 55 months, shows just how rapid the uptake of the chatbot has been. ChatGPT is now being hyped as a replacement for Google Search, with many using it as a first port of call for answering queries. This gives ChatPGT and its developer, OpenAI, an enormous amount of political power and opens up the potential for generative AI to be a vital subject of political science study.
A recent paper published in the Journal of Political Science Education by Stefan Kehlenbach, entitled ‘The Impact of Infrastructure: Considerations of Generative AI in the Classroom’ set out this case well. One section at the end of Kehlenbach’s article stood out to me:
All elements of political science research are impacted by AI in some way, and so by asking important questions about its usage we can leverage its popularity to ask the important questions that political science wants to answer. How does the spread of AI impact lawmaking now that policy makers are beginning to use generative AI as a part of the lawmaking process? What role does AI play in national defense? Should an AI system be allowed to make decisions about who to attack, or how to deploy troops? How might this impact the existing structures of warfare and the responsibility to protect? How does the flow of rare earth minerals, microchips and other building blocks for AI impact what we think about political economy? These questions are more interesting and more important than the questions about its pedagogical effectiveness.
Kehlenbach (2024, 8)
I found Kehlenbach’s paper extremely thought provoking and would really recommend giving it a read. It got me thinking about how, if ChatGPT is providing answers to political questions, it might be shaping political debates in a way that is not yet fully appreciated or engaged with. It also struck me that if we do respond to Kehlenbach’s call and make ChatGPT and other forms of generative AI a subject of study, this might also provide a foundation for students to be more critical in their own use of the tool.
To start thinking about how generative AI might be used as a subject of study in the political science classroom, I went to ChatGPT and (ironically, I know) asked ‘Should people stop using generative AI because of its negative environmental impacts?’. I’ll post the lengthy response below but it won’t surprise you to learn that the result was a big “no”. The response is one that I can definitely see political science students getting a lot of discussion and analysis out of in a classroom-based exercise. It was a response that, interestingly, struck me as starkly similar to some of the contemporary defences that fossil fuel and other carbon-intensive companies make – that they provide a valuable service, boost the economy, and that it is up to governments to provide regulation.
Having these kinds of critical conversations in first-year political science classes could be a useful way to begin analysing the power of generative AI and to develop a more sceptical approach amongst students to outputs from tools like ChatGPT. Pairing that analysis with a core piece of reading on different understandings and forms of power would allow for these conversations to be analytically rigorous, rather than descending into debates of whether students like/ dislike using generative AI. Terry Hathaway’s ‘Lukes Reloaded: An Actor-Centred Three-Dimensional Power Framework’ is one piece of reading on power that I have found that students really enjoy engaging with and is a useful basis of analysis.
It’s clear that, whether you love it or hate it, the debate around AI in education is not going away anytime soon – despite the problems that plague tools like ChatGPT. By incorporating generative AI as a subject of study, we can at least prepare students to critically analyse its broader societal impacts and the power structures it influences. This approach will not only enhance their understanding of AI but also equip them with the analytical tools needed to navigate and challenge its role in contemporary politics.
