Strategies for Making Large Lectures More Interactive
Active learning is what we would like students to be doing in a lecture: thinking about and engaging with the content, rather than copying slides.
What Is ‘Active Learning’ and Why Is It Important?
Interacting with content through active learning has some compelling advantages over ‘delivery mode’ lectures. It helps to maintain student concentration & deepens learning.
Pedagogy and Pop Culture: Pop Culture as Teaching Tool and Assessment Practice
While pop culture is not without its problems, it offers differing, potentially more accessible insights on the international that are not found in standard IR textbooks.
The Challenges of Teaching Popular Culture and World Politics
A common mistake when teaching popular culture and world politics is to overestimate the skill set that students will bring with them into the course.
Imperial Imaginaries: Employing Science Fiction to Talk about Geopolitics
Pop Culture stages debates on complex topics associated with the history of imperialism, geopolitical thinking and the relationship between territory, space and power.
Beyond Babylon? Teaching International Politics in the 21st Century
IR students are rarely taught to apply reflexive perspectives to world politics – nor are they sensitized to non-American, non-Western, and female scholars’ perspectives.
Student Input into Teaching Materials
Trusting the student voice (with a tiny bit of steering) and trying new things has paid off in multiple ways for me, and hopefully for the students in my classes too.
Learning to Teach
College teaching is much like any other profession in that there is a skill set that one must develop. Universities and colleges can and should do more to help early career academics become better teachers.
Banned
Teaching politics in China is going to be a different experience. The prospect makes one pause and recall the sorts of freedoms we enjoy in the West and the way professors do sometimes take them for granted.
A Crisis Resolved
Through taking part in the devised Crisis Simulations, the POL 210 students have emerged with a settlement as planned and hopefully a greater appreciation for the complexities of international politics.
