In mid-September 2025, we started a blog series, “Office Hours: Year One”, where three 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 5 of the series. It is the end of the road for these first years. They took the time to reflect on their first couple of semesters back in May, and then I decided to sit on it for too long because life admin got in the way. But (!) couched in their reflections is a well of experience and advice for anyone starting their assistant tenure-track/senior-lecturer jobs today or in the next couple of months. We hope it is helpful. Wishing all a great start to the semester!
Thank you again to Dr. Brooklyn Walker (University of Tennessee-Knoxville), Dr. Charmaine Willis (Old Dominion University), and Dr. Jennifer Ostojski (Indiana State University) for contributing and letting us get a glimpse at the first-year life. We appreciate their contributions and their advice!
In this blog series Drs. Michael Toomey, Andrew Judge, and Jenny Morrison (all University of Glasgow) explore how board games can be used as effective pedagogical tools to bring abstract concepts to life in the classroom. Each entry focuses on a specific game, outlining its mechanics, practical classroom applications, and any possible adaptions or limitations to its use within a standard seminar set up. In examining individual games, they aim to provide a support resource for educators seeking to experiment with games as part of their classroom activities, as well as engage critically with when and why we might use games within teaching. This month the series continues with Jenny Morrison’s review of Billionaires and Guillotines.
In this new blog series Drs. Michael Toomey, Andrew Judge, and Jenny Morrison (all University of Glasgow) explore how board games can be used as effective pedagogical tools to bring abstract concepts to life in the classroom. Each entry focuses on a specific game, outlining its mechanics, practical classroom applications, and any possible adaptions or limitations to its use within a standard seminar set up. In examining individual games, they aim to provide a support resource for educators seeking to experiment with games as part of their classroom activities, as well as engage critically with when and why we might use games within teaching. This month we continue with guest contributor Patrick Shea’sPeople Power, a game about political economy and conflict.
When I ask my students in the first class session in my Political Economy of Conflict course why conflicts happen, the answers tend to centre on power and territory. These answers are understandable, but they limit our ability to assess the motivations, strategies, and consequences for those involved in conflict. People Power: Insurgency in the Philippines, 1981-1986 is a board game that helps highlight the different political economy elements of conflict.
How does it work?
Designed by Ken Tee, People Power is part of GMT Games’ COIN (Counterinsurgency) series — a family of wargames that share gameplay mechanics across a range of historical conflicts. In this game, each player controls one of three factions: the Marcos Government, the insurgent New People’s Army (NPA), and the nonviolent Reformers. Each faction pursues asymmetric goals — the Government seeks territorial control and patronage, the NPA builds resistance through guerrilla operations, and the Reformers shift popular opinion through activism. Each turn, a card is drawn from an event deck that determines both the order in which factions may act and a historical event that players can choose to trigger. Factions that act on one card must pass on the next, forcing difficult decisions about when to act and when to wait. The game is organised into two Campaigns that culminate in Election Rounds, where victory is checked, resources are redistributed, and popular support can shift.
In mid-September 2025, we started a new series, “Office Hours: Year One”, where three 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 4, and spring is upon us! In this post, we are checking in to see how things are in their first second semester, and whether goals are holding up.
Thank you again to Dr. Brooklyn Walker (University of Tennessee-Knoxville), Dr. Charmaine Willis (Old Dominion University), and Dr. Jennifer Ostojski (Indiana State University) for contributing and letting us get a glimpse at the first-year life.
In this blog series Drs. Michael Toomey, Andrew Judge, and Jenny Morrison (all University of Glasgow) explore how board games can be used as effective pedagogical tools to bring abstract concepts to life in the classroom. Each entry focuses on a specific game, outlining its mechanics, practical classroom applications, and any possible adaptions or limitations to its use within a standard seminar set up. In examining individual games, they aim to provide a support resource for educators seeking to experiment with games as part of their classroom activities, as well as engage critically with when and why we might use games within teaching. This month the series continues with Jenny Morrison’s review of Class Struggle, a boardgame on the capitalist system.
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.
As much of this summer has been a washout in the UK, I want to suggest that university staff and students make the most of whatever sunshine we can get. And one way of doing this is to turn student supervision into a shared walk.
Walking meetings are becoming increasingly common, as seen in that badge of honour, a TED talk, on their advantages (Merchant, 2013). There is also an increasing interest in outdoor education (Priest, 1986: 13-15), perhaps informed by the experiences of teaching during the pandemic. Walking supervision sits at the intersection of these two approaches, and could be a useful part of the supervision toolkit. Here I outline the benefits and challenges of this approach, so that you can see if it might work for you.
Benefits:
1) It can provide a literal breath of fresh air! This can be particularly useful for doctoral supervisions as the PhD takes several years and so a way of keeping the meetings fresh can be a particularly useful tool
2) Walking supervisions can help to build the student-supervisor relationship by creating a shared task that they can both equally contribute to, and complete together. Furthermore they can provide an opportunity for students to take a leading role, even at an early stage e.g. by planning the route or being responsible for directions, which can help build their confidence, and practice taking ownership of their work
3) Taking a walk can allow a move away from hierarchically-coded spaces. By taking a walk instead of the student coming to the supervisor’s office or lab, both parties can meet on more equal ground. Or if the campus as a whole feels exclusionary (consider how accessible it is, who the buildings are named after, or the extent of the space given to graduate students) then talking a walk away from campus can provide a release
4) If students are stuck in a tricky part of their research, or feeling blocked while writing then physically moving while talking it through might prompt a breakthrough. After all, a study by Oppezzo and Schwartz found that ‘walking boost creative ideation in real time and shortly after’ and that ‘walking outside produced the most novel and highest quality analogies’ (2014: 1142)
5) Walking supervision can provide benefits for both physical and mental health for both participants. Being outdoors has significant mental health benefits, with just twenty minutes spent outside proven to lower stress levels (Hunter et al., 2019) and bring about cognitive improvements (Weir, 2020). Furthermore, Lee and Kim’s analysis of the sedentary habits of university students found that ‘as sitting hours increase, university students’ stress, anxiety, and depression significantly increased despite controlling for sex, economic level, body mass index, underlying disease, and health self-management’ (2019: 164). Given the increasing pressures that staff and students in UK higher education are facing, any opportunity to try something that might help alleviate stress is surely welcome.
The advantages to walking supervision, and the benefits it can being for both students and supervisions, are clear. But there are limitations to this approach that need to be considered before suggesting a walk.
Challenges and Mitigations:
1) A walking supervision might not be physically or mentally possible for many people, either due to immediate capacity or the knock-on effects of expanding energy on such a task. Having the capacity to take a walk may not be obvious and may also change over time. Alternatively, a walking supervision may undercut needed accommodations e.g. it may be more difficult to record a discussion while walking. A walking supervision should therefore be an option, rather than requirement. Perhaps consider whether an adapted practice could bring about some of the benefits e.g. sitting outside in a neutral space could bring many of the same benefits
2) Intersectional concerns may mean that not all staff and students feel comfortable, especially if the walk takes participants away from familiar safe spaces. The Glover report for example highlights that the countryside is seen ‘as very much a ‘white’ environment’ (2019: 70), and consideration of the route to be taken (and how to get to and from the start and end points) will also be needed. Trying to avoid routes that need specialised walking equipment or further transport will also ensure accessibility.
3) Some staff and students may feel that the breakdown of hierarchy that walking supervision offers is a disadvantage, rather than a benefit. Setting boundaries is identified within the literature as a key task for any supervisor (e.g. Eley and Murray, 2009: 57) and Parker-Jenkins argues that ‘it is critical to maintain this divide’ for the sake of both parties (2018: 57). A more formal relationship within clearly coded spaces may be more comfortable for some.
Walking supervision is therefore not appropriate for every student or supervisor, or for every supervision meeting. But thinking through whether this would be a good fit for your supervision meetings can be a prompt to examine what you need from supervision meetings, and to explore if there are any adaptions or changes that can better support everyone and bring some fresh air and sunshine (however metaphorical) into your workday.
Bibliography
Eley, A., and Murray, R. (2009) How to be an Effective Supervisor, Maidenhead: Oxford University Press.
Glover, J., Dixon, J., Mukherjee, S., Reynolds, F., and Fiennes, J. (2019) Glover Report Landscapes review: National Parks and AONBs, London: HM Government.
Hunter, MC, R., Gillespie, B.W., and Yu-Pu Chen, S. (2010) ‘Urban-Nature Experiences Reduces Stress in the Context of Daily life Based on Salivary Biomarkers’, Frontiers in Psychology, 10(722), pp. 1-16.
Lee, E., and Kim, Y. (2019) ‘Effect of University Student’s Sedentary Behaviour on Stress, Anxiety and Depression’, Perspectives in Psychiatric Care, 55(2), pp. 164-169.
Oppezzo M., and Schwartz, D.L. (2014) ‘Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking’ Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), pp. 1142–1152.
Parker-Jenkins, M. (2018), ‘Mind the gap: developing the roles, expectations and boundaries in the doctoral supervisor–supervisee relationship’, Studies in Higher Education, 43(1), pp 57-71.
Priest, S. (1986). ‘Redefining Outdoor Education: A Matter of Many Relationships’, The Journal of Environmental Education, 17(3), pp. 13-15.
Weir, K. (2020) ‘Nurtured by Nature’, Monitor on Psychology, 51(3), pp. 50.
Wollston, C. (2021) ‘Depression and Anxiety ‘The Norm’ for UK PhD Students’, Nature, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03761-3, (Accessed 26th May 2022).
Using drama-based pedagogies with first-generational political theory students
The newly formed Teaching Political Theory Network and UCL’s Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics (CPP) recently co-hosted an online panel event on the theme of ‘Methods and Challenges in Teaching Political Theory’. In this guest post, one of the panellists at that event, Ruairidh Brown (Forward College, Lisbon), offers further reflections on using drama-based pedagogies to overcome barriers to the study of political theory facing first-generational students.
“Well, I would like to see Mr Rousseau come down and do a shift with me in the Gallowgate; soon see how long he holds on to those views.”
The Gallowgate is a street in Glasgow known both for its association with Celtic football club and for its reputation as one of the roughest streets in the city. It was where the student quoted worked as a barman when not studying for his politics degree. He was a mature student, older indeed than I was at time of teaching, and had disclosed over our seminars a hardened pessimism cultivated over many years serving pints in Glasgow’s roughest bars.
It was no surprise he had found Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s claim that ‘men are naturally good’ ridiculously absurd.
I nevertheless endeavoured to explain Rousseau’s optimism. I related his thought against the backdrop of the French Enlightenment; as reversal of the Christian tradition of original sin; as a seminal moment in revolutionary socialism. He was buying none of it. Whatever framework I placed it in, he insisted such philosophical optimism would collapse at the threshold of his Gallowgate bar.
In truth, the more I gave intellectual context the more I lost him, as the more ‘intellectual’ I made it the less relevant it appeared to him. I needed to change track: reconstructing the world of Rousseau would not help my argument, I needed instead to make it more relatable to the world of my student – I had to bring Rousseau into the Gallowgate.
The Portal Between Worlds
We can think of the interpretation of political thought as a portal: the historical world from which the thinker writes at one side, the contemporary reader at the other. The text is what connects them; interpretation taking ideas from one side and translating them into the other.
The attention we pay to each side is, however, rarely equal. As academics, and teachers, we frequently prioritise the world of the thinker, with emphasis being put on reconstructing their historical context in order to gain accurate interpretation of their meaning.
This is in part the legacy of Quentin Skinner’s Cambridge School, hallmarked by a meticulous dedication to reconstruction of the political and linguistic context in which a past author wrote as to determine exactly what he or she could, and could not, have said.
Political Theory – and especially International Political Theory (IPT), in which my specialism lies – does have its issues with Skinner, especially on how such focus on history can be reductive, eclipsing consideration of contemporary relevance to the point of collapsing the portal between worlds.
Nonetheless, whilst IPT does aim to highlight the relevance of historical thought for the present, it still puts incredible emphasis on the need to reconstruct the historical context first before translation into the present can be attempted. Interpretatively, there is a soundness to this as it prevents us projecting ideas into the past and becoming guilty of anachronism.
Pedagogically, however, this can create a challenging environment for students as they are left with a forest of intellectual, historical, and linguistic context to navigate through before relatable ideas can be located.
The study of Thucydides, the embarking point for most IPT programs, gives clear illustration of this. Before we can even begin discussing ideas, students must quickly orientate themselves in a very strange and alien world: Corcyra and Corinth? Mytilene and Melos? And Lacedaemon, that’s Sparta? And that is before students even get to concepts rooted in the Classical Greek linguistic context, like Nomos and physis. Students’ very first encounter with IPT is thus being thrown into a dark wood of unfamiliar places, people, and words.
Importantly, not all students are thrown in with equal navigational tools. Typically, those who are ‘first-generational’ – those whose parents did not receive higher education; received State education; and/or are from low-income backgrounds – do not have the same background knowledge or tools to quickly reconstruct this historical linguistic context as, say, those who went to private schools with Greek on the curriculum. Nor do they have as much time to dedicate to this reconstruction, often having to work one, or even two, jobs to maintain their studies. They often instead feel alienated by theory classes, failing to see the relevance behind the thick phalanx of contextual tress, and abandon theory for something ‘more relevant’ to their world.
Providing the right machete that will allow the student to cut through these trees and uncover the core relevance needs to be an educator’s primary aim.
Finding Relevance
Alcohol was the machete that came to mind for my Glasgow barman.
I asked him if alcohol made the behaviour of his clientele worse.
Worse of course, he conceded.
And did poverty and disadvantage turn many to drink?
Yes, indeed, it was intergenerational.
We were thus able to turn our conversation into a discussion about the ‘nature’ of his customers versus the structural factors that led them to behave this way (though admittedly I was borrowing a lot from T.H. Green here, inspired as he was by Rousseau, rather than explicitly the Genevan himself).
Turning to J.S. Mill the next week, we centred the liberty principle on a debate over minimum pricing, not only as it was a current hot topic amongst my students at the time, but also as we could build on the entry point of alcohol and responsibility from the previous week.
For the following week on freedom of speech, I let the class identify and vote on a topic. They voted for the controversy over a planned Orange March in a neighbouring town. I created a role play for that week, where they simulated the local council deciding whether to let the march go ahead or not.
I found this approach resulted in greater participation amongst my students. The Glasgow barman notably had a lot to say on these subjects, but I also found students who had up to that time been largely silent get more involved; for, whilst they may have struggled to grasp aspects of the philosophy, they often had views on these local issues and, from these, I could introduce the main points of theory on more familiar and accessible ground.
The Most Simple Encounters
I have since then endeavoured to make my students’ first encounters with thinkers occur on more familiar ground. This often involves drama-based learning, where I reconstruct a relatable scenario in which they can first discover ideas.
This can of course be challenging and intensive work, as it requires changing classes according to students’ concerns and having some knowledge of these concerns. This arguably worked well with a largely homogenous Scottish audience, whose concerns I had a degree of familiarity with as a fellow Scot. This can be more difficult, if not impossible, in more heterogenous classrooms or with demographics more distant from the teacher – as I would learn when I left Scotland to teach in mainland China.
Nonetheless, one does not always need an elaborate pedagogy or classroom plan based on familiarity with students’ present concerns to learn from this. It simply requires one to be more sensitive to the situation in which the students are encountering these works. This can be achieved, I have found, by simply distilling a concept to its simplest and most relatable articulation for that audience – our machete to make first cuts into the forest of ideas.
This academic year, the UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics (CPP) is hosting a series of online panel events. Our second event in the series was on the theme of ‘Liberating the politics curriculum: theory and practice’. In this guest post, one of the panellists at that event, Helen McCabe, together with Helen Williams and Andy Fisher, offer reflections on findings from a project at the University of Nottingham, led together with colleagues in Politics and IR and Philosophy.
Questions around why Politics curricula are so often “male”, “pale” and – consequently – “stale” have abounded in the last few years, often linked to wider calls to “decolonise” Higher Education, research, and teaching. As well as this, there has been increasing recognition of, and concern about, the award gap between white undergraduate students and those from Black and minoritised ethnic backgrounds. Closing this gap needs a multifaceted and multidimensional approach, much (though not all!) of which is out of individual academics’ control. However, some elements of a curriculum-based approach are in our control – for instance, as educators we could make significant efforts towards regularising ethnic presence on the curriculum (and diversifying it in other ways).
Making politics curricular more diverse in a variety of ways is a positive pedagogical aim, but efforts in this direction face several challenges. Many of these are practical, as we found when investigating this issue. Sharing best practice can save time, but overall, a balance needs to be found between securing sufficient institutional “buy-in” to succeed, and the whole endeavour appearing to be something being inauthentically imposed from above, causing resistance.
One reason diversifying the curricula is an important thing to try and do is that descriptive representation matters to students and for student outcomes. If we care about diversity and the attainment of all our students, we should be mainstreaming perspectives that are not the traditional white, European, middle-class, male ones. What is more, these diverse perspectives should not be an “add-on” treated in one special week. Nor should authors from specific minoritised groups be treated only as experts on issues seen to affect that group (e.g. female authors included on reading lists for the one week on feminism in a political theory course, but not in other weeks on other topics).
However, there are several barriers for engagement, which might be termed: principled, implacable and practical.
Principled challenges and how to address them. People may be put off by the terminology around “decolonising”, feeling it is either an attack on their current practice (implicating them in colonialism), or that it is not a term which ought to be used in a UK context. That is, decolonising the curriculum is a laudable endeavour in countries which were colonised (e.g. South Africa, where the movement began). But it is not appropriate in countries which were colonisers (such as the UK). These principled reasons for not engaging can be at least somewhat overcome through careful use of – and discussion around – terminology (see our collection of Useful Resources) and awareness around the internal and external politics of this kind of project.
Implacable barriers are harder to overcome. Some people do simply reject the pedagogical bases for diversifying the curriculum along ethnic (or gendered) lines. One version of this view holds that students should be introduced to a range of views, but it is the ideological spectrum which should be diverse, not authors’ demographic data. Another version sees these kinds of efforts as “gimmicky”, and does not want to engage. These barriers may simply need recognising, with related decisions taken about which battles to fight.
A different version relates to some academics’ deep-seated aversion to teaching anything on which they do not themselves feel “expert”, which limits their flexibility around what they teach. (And damages their well-being when they feel forced to teach something on which they are not, in their view, “an expert”.) Although for some this might be an excuse not to develop their teaching year-on-year, it is easy to understand why academics may be very risk-averse in terms of changing their teaching such that they feel they are teaching topics or texts for which they do not have a deep understanding, not least given student expectations to be taught “by experts”, and the negative impacts on career progression and staff well-being from negative or low student evaluations. This may be increasingly an issue as lectures are more routinely recorded, and the likelihood of one slip or apparent revelation of ignorance “going viral”, with potentially wide, and severe, consequences. (This may also underpin reluctance to “diversify” reading lists and include writers who may be seen as controversial.) For these reasons, academics may appear implacably opposed to changing their teaching in any significant way, but this position may be softened by the same sorts of solutions which also aid academics who are positive towards the idea of diversifying, but face practical challenges.
Indeed, practical barriers to are the ones most commonly cited and experienced by academics. These include: lack of relevant decision-making power; lack of time; and lack of space.
The first is most commonly experienced by early-career colleagues (including PhD students) who might be able to introduce more diverse readings into seminars, but have no control over the content of lectures, modes of assessment, or the aims and objectives of a module. The second and third are more commonly experienced by those who have the relevant power, but lack the capacity to make use of it. Academics generally do not get as much time as is really needed to update reading lists; re-design assessments, lecture slides, reading lists and other resources; or gain the required expertise on new content. Even where these efforts are recognised in an official workload planner, the time allocated is not generally sufficient. And even where there are helpful resources which might be used, there is concern about garnering satisfactory expertise to bring something into the curriculum (as noted). There is also often as concern about what has to be taken out in order to fit in something new, given the limited time available for a module (e.g. 10-12 weeks). Escaping from that problem probably takes a significant module re-design and re-think: and colleagues are already suffering from a lack of time.
All these practical concerns are significant issues, which need to be taken seriously if curricula are to be diversified in a meaningful and sustainable way. Staff need time and resources to make significant change and feel confident in delivering new material, and this in turn necessitates buy-in from people with power within the University. However, if the move to diversify the curriculum feels imposed in a “top-down” and/or “gimmicky” fashion, this is likely to be counter-productive. Indeed, power structures in academia may need to be “decolonised” before the curriculum can be.
This academic year, the UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics (CPP) is hosting a series of online panel events. Our first event on 30 October was on the theme of ‘Using technology to teach politics’. In this guest post, one of the panellists at that event, Simon Sweeney (University of York), offers further reflections on the challenges involved in higher education’s embracing generative AI, where tools such as ChatGPT call into question issues of authorship and have profound implications for assessment.
A few years ago, we were worrying about students’ using essay mills, a form of contract cheating that plagiarism detection software struggled to identify. The Covid-19 pandemic and online delivery coincided with a reported increase in academic dishonesty (AD). In late-2022 the arrival of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) chatbots like ChatGPT is a further challenge to the integrity of assessment.
Universities realised that banning chatbots was not feasible, as AI has become an established feature in our lives and graduate employment. As educators, we need to respond positively to the opportunities AI presents, recognising its benefits and assimilating AI into teaching and learning practice.
This means developing strategies that accommodate students’ use of GAI while protecting assessment integrity.
