Active Learning in Political Science ©

September 7, 2011July 31, 2015

Putting APSA ideas into practice

One of the APSA panels I attended was the “Unique Approaches to Teaching Political Science” panel and there were some neat ideas there I wanted to share.

Patrick McGovern of Buffalo State College presented his department’s approach to teaching introduction to political science in “Teaching Res Publica and Individual Rights in the First-Year Political Science Course,” coauthored by Laurie Ann Buonanno. (As an aside, why is it that we never have catchy names for our pedagogy papers?). The standout details on this course were that it was an intro for majors only and is grounded in 3 texts: Joseph Ellis’ American Creation; Anthony Lewis’ Gideon’s Trumpet; and Larry Diamond’s Spirit of Democracy. The premise of the class is the push and pull between individual and community. I liked this idea–my own intro to politics course is an elective aimed at non-majors and focuses on the need for and role of government but uses film and fiction to explore the ideas– and it made me wonder how many departments have a core ‘intro to politics’ class for their majors, and whether this is a desirable thing. Recently I found myself explaining to students about the sub-fields of polisci, and faced a number of blank looks when I explained why American politics is its own field and considered the gateway to the major.

McGovern did give a shout out to IdeaLog, which has a good quiz to help students see where they stand ideologically. I prefer the OK Cupid Politics Test, but that’s because students are alternatively amused and horrified when they find out they share their politics with Darth Vader or Stalin.

The other two papers–“Engaging Students in the Classroom: How Can I Know What I Think Until I See What I Draw” from John Hogan and Paul Donnelly at the Dublin Institute of Technology and “Engaging Student’s Creativity on Exams: Writing Political Science Poetry” by Natalie Jackson of the University of Oklahoma and Elizabeth Wheat of Western Michigan University–dealt with using creative arts to engage students. Hogan and Donnelly start off their first class of the semester with asking students to first draw the answer to the question ‘what is Irish politics?” and afterward, explain their drawing, first in writing, then in groups, and then in wider discussion. The stated goal is to help students master critical self-reflection and create space to examine their existing knowledge and assumptions. The Jackson and Wheat presentation discussed using poetry as an extra credit device on exams, which seems like a neat idea but ultimately I don’t really see the pedagogical value in it. I decided to try it out immediately on a quiz in my US politics class last night and while the entries were amusing, I remain unconvinced that this adds to my student’s learning in any way. If we want to achieve the sociologist goal of ‘diversity of voice’, then it should be in the form of a more extensive project than a simple extra credit assignment.

September 6, 2011July 31, 2015

APSA Thoughts

I have a love and hate relationship with APSA, but one thing I like is that it kicks off the year. I always come home with more energy to work. Tomorrow I’ll be posting about some of the active learning ideas I encountered at panels, but today I’m going to take a time out to talk briefly about a disturbing trends that I saw and would love to discuss in the comments.

Panels are DEPRESSING. Its rare that I leave a panel feeling happy that I attended instead of just downloading the papers on my own time. There are plenty of reasons for this, but I think the most prominent one is that our format for exchanging knowledge at conferences is fundamentally flawed. All the research that we know about how people learn best, and our preferred method is to have a group of individuals talk at the audience and each other for an hour and a half and then (if we are lucky!) allow for questions and dialogue with the audience. I wish I could say that the teaching and learning sections did better, but one of these panels was the worst offender, with only ten minutes left for questions, and most of those more technical ‘how-do-I-do-this’ type questions instead of genuine discussion.

I much prefer the working group model of ECPR’s joint sessions, round-table style conversations, or the track method at TLC. I would love to see us just throw out the rulebook, look up from our own papers, and talk to each other. Perhaps that’s wishful thinking, but I do want to think through some other models that would really allow us to engage with each other and perhaps, even–dare I say it?–teach each other about our findings.

Edited to add: Nina posted about the working group model at APSA which also sounds like a better method and one that could be applied more broadly.

September 2, 2011July 13, 2016

Floods and Famines

The march of Hurricane Irene up the East Coast reminded me of how difficult it is to get students to connect recent events with abstract concepts, especially when students lack direct experience. In students’ thinking, fate explains all. Floods, famines, and wars “just happen.” Somalia is desperately poor and violent because it’s Somalia. Students will donate money or time to a charity because they think it’s a good thing to do, but they don’t examine the role of economic or political institutions (or the lack thereof) in creating human suffering. So for lack of a better term, here is what I call the Hurricane Game:

Tell students to write down, in the form of a list, everything that they do in a typical day. Then say that a hurricane has blown through the night before while they were asleep. Select a student to begin reciting his or her list. The first item will probably be something like “wake up.” Ask the student “do you usually wake up because of an alarm clock?” If the answer is yes, respond with “there’s no electricity, you’re alarm clock didn’t ring, you’re awake, but you don’t know what time it is. What do you do next?” Go through a few more items in the student’s list in a similar fashion — you can remove heat, piped water, refrigerated food, and electronic financial transactions as needed. Students will rapidly find themselves at a loss for what to do, and at point they can form small groups to strategize if they wish. You may even wish to inject a highly contagious disease or zombies into the equation.

Getting students to realize how much of their lives are on autopilot can lead to discussions of everything from social contract theory to markets to public administration. For example, why are there emergency exits and who mandates them? What happens if this doesn’t happen? Why do some people know how to grow food but others don’t? Why do we assume food we haven’t grown ourselves is safe to eat? Why does that food go from a farm to our kitchen table? What happens if someone tries to take that food and there is no enforceable body of law prohibiting theft?

A good book that gives a real-world example of some of these questions is Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers.

August 27, 2011February 13, 2015

Archaeology

Though I suspect that this activity is applicable much more broadly than an introduction to methods class, next week I will be trying an exercise I call the Archaeologist’s Quandary.

Class size : 10-50 students

Time required: 30 minutes at the end of one class bridging to the beginning of a second class.

Purpose: Ice Breaker that helps students think critically about interpretation and facts.

Break class into several small groups, likely 4-5 groups ( will be trying this next week so I will let you know how it goes).

Supplies: Ideally, a couple sets of markers and one big sheet of paper for each group.

Instructions: Tell each group to create an imaginary civilization, to imagine themselves within it….to think about every aspect of how those people lived and governed. Then, have them imagine their civilization was wiped out and is being rediscovered in an archaeologist’s dig. Have them draw a map of the dig site and all the artifacts that the researchers will find. Give the students 20 minutes to plan and develop their dig site. Assign them homework to continue working on the map and the details of each artifact.

At the beginning of the next period, have the students trade their maps for someone else’s map. Now ask each group to study the new map very closely. Ask them to develop a narrative of what that map represents and what each of those artifacts means.

Each group will present their narrative of the other group’s dig site. Then the original groups provide their original meanings.

Takeaways: It is my hope that this lesson gets my students thinking carefully about the kinds of ways we try to represent the social world, the ways in which artifacts can be interpreted differently, and discuss ways in which we need to talk to the original society members in order to get clarification. This is first and foremost a way to get a foot in the door about qualitative methods, but also a way to think about research and interpretation in an exercise that helps the students become familiar with each other while being creative.

Although the exercise may be more fun than functional, its higher points about interpretation should stick with the students as they struggle with methods concepts.

August 17, 2011February 13, 2015

The Citizenship Test: Confronting Citizenship in the US Politics Classroom

Ninety percent of my incoming students in my introduction to American Politics course cannot pass the US Citizenship test. This may not surprise those of us who teach it, but it sure surprises them, and is therefore one of my favorite exercises to use in class.

On the first day of class, I hand out an ‘Ungraded Pre-test’ of ten questions—of course, unbeknownst to them, this is an actual citizenship test. I tell them it is simply a way for me to know where they stand as the course starts so that I can keep the material at an appropriate level. They turn it in, and we say nothing more about it until the second class. At that point I hand back the test—as a bonus, this is a great chance to practice their names—and we go over it together. I have them raise their hands to indicate who got ten, nine, eight right, noting those who answered six or more correctly, but still say nothing about the actual purpose of the quiz.

I then start a conversation about citizenship, currently by discussing the ongoing Birther movement’s accusations against Barack Obama and the Arizona immigration laws. We talk about who should be allowed to be a citizen, and what the rights and responsibilities of a citizen should be. It is only after they have voiced their existing views that I reveal that most of them (and it is always more than 80%) failed the citizenship test. They are usually some mixture of surprised, horrified, and embarrassed at this revelation, but it promotes very open and self-reflective discussion of immigration and the naturalization process, particularly when we compare US policy to those of countries that require military service of their citizens.

As a bonus, at the end of the semester I give them the test again (with 10 new questions), and usually no more than 10% fail—giving the students a sense of accomplishment, and me some direct evidence of learning.

The official US citizenship test questions can be found at http://www.uscis.gov/USCIS/Office%20of%20Citizenship/Citizenship%20Resource%20Center%20Site/Publications/100q.pdf

August 13, 2011February 7, 2015

Leaving the Room Open to Unexpected Learning

Several weeks ago while playing a few rounds of the prisoner’s dilemma I came across an opportunity to learn from my students. The game went in this way: Students were to play one round of the Prisoner’s Dilemma (rat out your partner in order to win more, or cooperate to reduce a prison sentence).

A pair of women in the corner simultaneously cooperated. For those unfamiliar with the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the standard of the game is for both people to rat out their partners. Sometimes people do cooperate but normally they don’t.

We discussed the gave at some length and then I began the standard social scientific move to iterated repeat games. I asked the students to play 9 rounds of the game. After 9 rounds the two african american women were still cooperating though they had never talked before in class prior to this game.

Here is where it got interesting. I explained that in general we should expect people to cooperate some but not all the time. The students nodded along. The two women in the corner looked at me quizzically. So I knew there were potentially different explanations for why cooperation and defection were good or bad strategies. So I asked the students: “ladies, why were you constantly cooperating?” Another student, a while male, tried to explain to them how they were being irrational. That they needed to realize that they weren’t maximizing their opportunities.

And one of the pair said, “You people don’t really know what it is to grow up in an environment where security really is a problem.” She said: “In my part of town you don’t cheat people or rat them out. You can’t, no matter how much money you might get from it, because you don’t know if the person you cheat is going to show up and shoot up your mom’s house, or kill your brother.”

The classroom recoiled in horror.

I could have shut this down. Clearly we had entered a space in which the student offered up a lived experience to question the theoretical conclusions. A lived experience that ran close to being socially, economically, and racially charged.

It is at these moments that we must decide whether to let it ride or to embrace it and try to dig deeper into it. At once, here were two women presenting the room with an entirely different perspective. One that most had never been privy to. The learning was shifting immediately beyond the theoretical importance of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, to understanding a diversity of perspectives, to how to think about who was in the room, to try to consider what truth and the imperatives of action really dictated.

I was reminded that active learning isn’t always planned learning. Control is the purpose of the rules in a game, but what exactly we are trying to control is the question.

My challenge to reader is to consider the way in which control is leveraged in active learning, and to question just how much we really need and for what purpose.

My thoughts keep going back to that awkward silence and the exasperation of the male student toward the continued cooperation of the two females. It was such an eerie and powerful thing to say….so much so that I’m not even certain what we learned exactly, and I suspect that this is the point of exposure to new perspectives. Not so much that we come out with clear conclusions, but that we throw them into a controlled disarray.

August 10, 2011June 29, 2016

Solving the Reading Problem: The Weekly Critique

One of the most common complaints that instructors have is that students do not complete the readings. No matter how interesting or unique or provocative they are, many students fail to crack their books at all prior to an exam, and some of those who do fail to retain any of the information or arguments. For those of us who use those readings as a foundation for a class session, this behavior can lead anywhere from mild irritation to downright aggravation.

One way to solve this problem in an upper level seminar is to turn the reading from a passive exercise to an active one. Assign the readings by week, rather than by session, and have your students write an analytical response on the readings each week. Each critique must also pose a discussion question at the end. Papers are typically two pages, though that depends on the type and number of readings assigned. They are posted the day before class and shared online in a discussion forum. The discussion questions and different perspectives can then be used as a basis for discussion that week. Scoring is based on a check plus/check/check minus/pass/fail system (which loosely corresponds to A-F) but no comments are made by the instructor after the first week or two.

I tried this in Spring 2011 in my Environmental and Energy Security class, an upper level seminar with ten students, with great success. All of my students came prepared to class having completed and thought about all the readings. In addition, their writing occurred throughout the semester, allowing multiple grading opportunities and a chance to improve their writing. The papers also made prep for class very easy: I facilitated a conversation and provided context, but the students drove the discussion. Quiet students could be drawn in to the conversation without fuss, since their perspective was already public. Finally, grading is minimal. It only took a few moments to read through the critiques and see what level of effort and insight students brought to their papers.

The downside is that students will whine about having to actually do the readings and write every week. But in a class that is really built around the readings, my students came to appreciate being forced to do the readings and to think about them, and they liked that their work was brought so obviously into the class through the discussions. It made them feel like their work was driving the course. I was able to be a true facilitator and participant rather than just their teacher, and the critiques were cited as a positive on my evaluations rather than a negative.

August 8, 2011June 29, 2016

A is for ‘awful’ or ‘awfully good’?

One of the joys of the teaching process is that you tend to get your feedback at a point when you can’t really do anything with it until the next time you run the class. You might argue that students get the same deal, but that’s another matter. So here’s a quick and easy way to do some mid-stream modifications, using an “A-B-C” exercise.

After a few sessions of your class, when things have bedded down a bit, take 10 minutes to do this. Give everyone in the class 3 post-it notes (other brands are acceptable). Ask them to put one idea (anonymously) on each note as follows:

One note on something that they want to Abandon in the class;
One note on something that they want to Begin;
And one note on something they want to Continue.

Once they’ve written them, they can post them on the whiteboard/blackboard/wall. With all the notes, you can then do a quick review with them, grouping similar points together and giving your first impressions.

The next class, you need to come back with some constructive feedback, to show that it’s not just been an exercise in raiding the stationery cupboard. Think about what’s reasonable to change, both in terms of effort and benefit, and about the reasons for not changing something (rather than just dismissing it out of hand).

This all works surprisingly well, it’s timely and it shows students that you do listen to their constructive input. Even if it doesn’t result in big changes, it’s still a valuable group-building technique.

The only word of caution is if you have a class that is not working in some major way: because this is quite public and open as a process, it might cause more instability than it solves.