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!”Revalidation, the sequel
Happy start to the new academic year to those who celebrate! To mark the coming of September, we’ve asked Stephen Thornton, Reader in Politics at Cardiff University, to return to his 2023 blog about what an ‘ideal’ Politics/IR degree looks like to reflect on the outcome of his revalidation process. Thank you as ever to Stephen for the guest post!
So, nearly three years ago – having been tasked with leading the upgrade of undergraduate degree programmes in my department – I wrote a blog about my hopes and (mostly) fears regarding this revalidation process, as it was called. The blog led a few weeks later to an online event put on by UCL’s excellent Centre of the Pedagogy of Politics at which various learned and experienced folk, and me, discussed aspects of this process under the banner ‘What does a good Politics/IR degree look like?’ I still don’t know the answer to that, but, since then, I have played a role in transforming Cardiff University’s Politics and International Relations undergraduate curriculum. The number of modules we offer has been significantly reduced, degree pathways have been made more distinct, and a variety of new capstone projects have been added to the mix. I’ve also learned a few things about the revalidation process along the way, some of which might be worth sharing.
Continue reading “Revalidation, the sequel”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’ “A Slacker’s Guide to the Teaching Track
It’s been very fun being one of a rare breed: a Professor in an education-focused role! One really big perk has been getting invited hither and yon to talk about my career and give dubious advice. Since it’s August and hopefully even go-getting and driven academics are managing to slack off a little bit (with all solidarity and many apologies to the Admissions Tutors amongst us), I thought I’d take my chance to poke to a bit of fun at all the strategic careers advice out there and reflect on some of the ways I’ve managed to be modestly successful by ignoring it. No-one reading the ALPS blog in August is a slacker, admittedly, but if you have any aspirations to slack more, please pull up a chair….
Inoculation and epistemic competence: training students to handle misinformation
We’re grateful for today’s guest post from Eloise Harding from University of Southampton, based on her recent presentation at the joint UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics and Aspire conference at UCL. Eloise is a Senior Teaching Fellow in Politics and Director of Programmes in the Politics And IR department at University of Southampton
Today’s Politics classroom is on the frontline of a battle against misinformation, disinformation, clickbait and bullshit, and we need to develop a pedagogy that can respond robustly to these challenges. I’m not claiming to have the perfect solution, but have spent the past three years developing some starting points.
Continue reading “Inoculation and epistemic competence: training students to handle misinformation”Reflecting on this year’s UCL CPP events, Part 2: ‘Relational Pedagogy Without Foundations’
This post is the second in a series that offers reflections on the panel events hosted this year by the UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics (CPP).
The first post summarised some of the key ideas discussed in our spring panel on ‘Relational Pedagogies Inside and Outside the Classroom‘.
This post sets out how these ideas have influenced a piece of SoTL research that I am in the process of developing and on which I welcome feedback.
To recap, during the Q&A at our spring panel, the following question was raised: Many of the practical recommendations made by relational pedagogues are appealing, but do we need to sign up to the ‘theory’ to endorse them?
This 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 now turn.
Continue reading “Reflecting on this year’s UCL CPP events, Part 2: ‘Relational Pedagogy Without Foundations’”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.
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!
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!).
Online panel event: Relational Pedagogies Inside and Outside the Classroom (5 March, 4.00 – 5.00pm)
We at the UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics (CPP) are excited to share with you the details of our second online panel event of the year on the theme of ‘Relational Pedagogies Inside and Outside the Classroom’.
It will include contributions from the following panellists alongside time for audience Q&A:
Kate Schick, Associate Professor of International Relations, Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Claire Timperley, Senior Lecturer in Political Science, Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Karen Gravett, Associate Professor in Higher Education at the University of Surrey, UK
Regular readers will be aware of the work that Kate and Claire have recently published in this area, as summarised in their their September 2025 ALPS post on Spacious Learning in Political Science.
The event will run as a Teams webinar on Thursday 5th March, 4.00-5.00pm (GMT). If you would like to attend, please register beforehand on the following event page, whereupon you will receive access details: UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics webinar: ‘Relational Pedagogies Inside and Outside the Classroom’.
We hope for a wide-ranging discussion on issues such as the benefits and challenges of relational pedagogy; different forms of relational pedagogies; discipline-specific considerations for relational pedagogy (especially the disciplines of political science/IR); relational pedagogy beyond the classroom, e.g., the role and importance of pastoral activities; institutional and cultural pre-requisites for effective relational pedagogy.
We look forward to seeing you there!