Pedagogical Journeys through World Politics

This edited volume is a collection of twenty-three autobiographical narratives by successful teachers of global politics and international relations. The diverse contributors (from a variety of institutional contexts, sub-disciplines, and countries) describe their development as teachers, articulate mission statements for their teaching, and link both to pedagogical practices that exemplify their teaching philosophies. Rather than provide specific recipes for authoritative techniques, the essays empower readers as creative developers of their own approaches to teaching global politics. They demonstrate the multiple ways that instructors have grounded deliberate pedagogical designs in a variety of deeper philosophical commitments, and resources are provided to facilitate discussion and collaborative deliberation between groups of readers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Jul 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9783030203054

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© The Author(s) 2020

J. Frueh (ed.)Pedagogical Journeys through World PoliticsPolitical Pedagogieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20305-4_1

1. Introduction

Jamie Frueh¹  

(1)

Center for Engaged Learning, Bridgewater College, Bridgewater, VA, USA

Jamie Frueh

Email: [e-mail]

In the global division of labor, academics are apportioned two broad sets of responsibilities. The first is to create and curate the information that societies designate as knowledge—descriptions, insights, and explanations that have been deemed truthful, valuable, and worthy of being preserved. Universities are repositories of societies’ accumulated wisdom, and academics serve society by organizing that knowledge and generating, evaluating, and authenticating new knowledge claims. To secure a career as a knowledge worker, academics master a disciplinary canon and demonstrate a propensity to contribute to its expansion. Academics practice scholarship, the methodical search for novel insights and the collective evaluation of their knowledge value. Societies rightly reward those with expertise in the myriad complexities that undergird everyday life, although research that seems far removed from practical societal problems can inspire questions about the value of the whole enterprise. Indeed, some of academia’s more arcane deliberations can feel a lot like public art—a meaningful but luxurious indulgence. Nonetheless, academics do get paid to think about stuff—to pose thoughtful questions and work to answer them—and the most successful scholars are compensated with both a very comfortable lifestyle and significant prestige. This is good work if you can get it.

This volume concerns the second broad category of academic responsibility: academics teach. They acculturate society’s emerging agents into its intricate webs of knowledge and meaning. Education presents complexity so that uninitiated individuals can make sense of it and integrate it into their pre-existing worldviews. It succeeds when those individuals value both the extant complexity and the processes of sense-making. Especially in capitalist democracies (premised as they are on the participation of reasoning individual choosers), society as a whole benefits when citizens are knowledgeable, thoughtful, reflective, ethical, and wise deciders who make choices that align their behavior broadly with societal trajectories and the choices of others. Citizens in these liberal systems all benefit when individuals make good choices, and education is the social mechanism for producing good choosers. Academics serve that goal by preparing those who will participate in, lead, and improve its institutions. They do this by giving their students both resources that enable successful decision-making and practice using those resources. This is not just good work; it is important work.

One of the aphorisms that emerging academics learn as they are acculturated into the profession is that there is a tension between the scholarly responsibility and the teaching responsibility. This tension goes beyond the normal stress of allotting time and energy among the opportunities life presents. The tension is also about identity; it presents a choice between being a scholar and being a teacher. Academics in training receive messages both subtle and explicit that they should focus their time and energy on scholarship, until or unless they are forced to teach. While we do not have any tricks for magically expanding reserves of time or energy, the contributors to this volume reject both the false choice between the responsibilities of scholarship and teaching and the implicit disparagement of those who devote themselves to teaching well.

The best evidence we have for our claims is personal, and the most effective way to organize such idiosyncratic evidence is through stories. In these chapters, good teachers of global politics tell the stories of how they came to be good teachers of global politics. Unlike most of the published work on teaching and learning in Political Science and International Relations (IR), the chapters are not designed as evidence-based pedagogical recipes to be followed, but rather as empathetic encouragement that anyone can become an inspiring teacher and assurances that it is worth the effort. The volumes on which this one is modeled—Joseph Kruzel and James Rosenau’s 1989 Journeys Through World Politics and Naeem Inayatullah’s 2011 Autobiographical International Relations: I, IR—are collections of autobiographical essays focused on the authors’ development as researchers, theoreticians, and scholars. The editors of these volume felt the need to justify a format—autobiographical essay—that diverged widely from the traditional scholarly treatise. They did not, however, justify scholarly research and theory development as legitimate subjects for scholarly narratives. For a volume on teaching, such a justification seems prudent.

A Case for Pedagogy

As a result of the widespread perception that teaching is a sacrifice of academic opportunity, most prospective global politics academics, most programs that train them, and most institutions that hire them invest too little (time, energy, thought) preparing them for the second set of academic responsibilities. As a general rule, doctoral programs in Political Science and IR do not teach emerging academics how to teach, and when they do, they tend to provide only rudimentary instruction focused primarily on the practicalities associated with being a teaching assistant—grading rubrics, discussion topics, and preparing an occasional lecture (Ishiyama et al. 2010; Gaff et al. 2003). Trepanier has found that [d]espite discussion and evidence that graduate students are not prepared to teach, there has been little formalized training developed in Political Science graduate programs(2017: 141–2). A 2010 survey of 122 Political Science doctoral programs found that only 41 offered a course or guided practicum on teaching and only 28 of those required at least some students to take the course (Ishiyama et al. 2010). The general disciplinary assumption seems to be that academics, having spent so much of their lives in classrooms, have simply absorbed effective pedagogy by osmosis. Deep exploration of the purpose and meaning behind teaching is too often left up to chance, and to supervising professors, who, given the dominant incentive structure at doctorate-granting universities and the dearth of opportunities for professional development in this area, are likely to have neglected such exploration in their own careers. This lack of attention is also evident at a disciplinary level: of the 97 professional awards listed on the International Studies Association (ISA) website, teaching is only recognized by two, which together have only been presented five times (ISA 2018). It seems unlikely that this neglect is unique to IR, but the stakes of undergraduate teaching are higher for our discipline and in this century.

Partly as a cause, partly as a result, many academics see teaching as a burden, a distraction that costs energy that would be better spent (and rewarded) doing disciplinary knowledge work. Given the benefits earned by those who excel at the profession’s creative/curatorial responsibilities, paying attention to pedagogical skills can seem actively harmful to one’s career prospects. Axel Heck’s chapter in this volume describing his pedagogical efforts in the research-centric German higher educational system is evidence that it sometimes is. But even for most moderately successful scholars, teaching well provides a better chance to make a lasting impact on the world than disciplinary knowledge work. Helping undergraduates become engaged observers, empowered choosers, and persuasive leaders creates multiplier effects that are almost always subtle and untraceable, but which are real and can have significant impacts as students actualize their agency.

The discipline’s disproportionate emphasis on academia’s knowledge responsibilities not only colors how academics spend their time and the identities to which they aspire, it also influences what they think teaching is. The responsibility to create and curate knowledge and the responsibility to acculturate undergraduate students into those regimes of knowledge pull academics toward different pedagogies. Appropriating Robert Cox’s (1981) precept, teaching is always for someone and for some purpose. If the discipline emphasizes academics’ creative/curatorial responsibilities, if academic see their societal value as based on information (hard-earned and rare) that they own, being a teacher becomes primarily about transferring that valuable knowledge to students. Knowledge is power, and an academic’s identity as a teacher (and students’ identities as students) is reduced to the students’ abilities to master a certain field of knowledge, or at least the portion of it allotted to a particular course.

For academics who instead prioritize the responsibility to acculturate, professional focus shifts from the structural power of knowledge to the agency of students. Agency is the rhetorical core of liberal individualism and thus late-modern capitalist democracies. If the purpose of education is to prepare emerging citizens to contribute to those societies, teachers/students are valued not as containers of pre-existing knowledge, but as unique, creative minds who can participate in the continuous, collective sorting through of competing claims of all sorts. The focus of education shifts from the transferring particular knowledge to the nurturing of processes and attitudes that make liberal individuals successful. Education and educators serve society not just by ensuring that future generations know the right stuff, but also by empowering students as citizens who analyze and appreciate complexity, communicate ideas effectively, work with others to solve problems, and approach challenges with confidence in their own creativity. Effective teaching is evaluated not just by how much the teacher/students know, but by how they think and what they do with their knowledge.

A Case for IR Pedagogy

Even with an acknowledgment that a college education should mobilize the social agency of emerging citizens, the case must still be made that teachers of global politics should help carry this burden, instead of leaving the task to areas of the curriculum more directly focused on students’ selves (perhaps humanities courses or first-year seminars). The most basic argument in favor of this proposition is that all teaching should be designed to nurture agents by helping students appreciate and work with the complexities, paradigms, and methods of exploration particular to the instructor’s area of expertise. But global politics has distinct pedagogical advantages over other disciplines when it comes to creative, engaging, and empowering teaching and learning. Most obviously, global politics courses provide opportunities for emerging agents to practice wrestling with the kinds of complexities they will confront in an increasingly globalized world, and drawing attention to global political issues unfolding in real time provides evidence of the practical value of our courses. But beyond content, other characteristics of IR make it possible for the discipline to become a model of student-centered undergraduate teaching.

The subjects of global political studies span the entire scope of contemporary human experience, which encourages students to connect their identities to the issues, ideas, interests, and communities of distant others. Handled with care, this global scale alone can challenge assumptions and provoke genuine surprise and curiosity. Weighing one’s immediate normality against the vast diversity of practices and beliefs that human societies treat as normal can be uncomfortable, but it can also inspire the kind of sincere questions that are the foundation of student engagement. Analyzing global interactions and relationships can lead students to discover ways they are similar to those we have long considered to be different and to create new understandings of what it means to be different. By providing the opportunity to question contemporary assumptions, values, and patterns of behavior, the study of global politics can not only help students navigate these complex relationships more successfully, it can also encourage them to invent ways to make these global interactions more constructive and more peaceful.

In addition, we teach politics—the processes communities go through to decide what is important and what to do about it. Global politics classrooms can be sites of negotiation over issues that have yet to be settled, and instructors and students can enter those spaces as participants in a continuous and challenging set of public and private deliberations. This opens up pedagogical opportunities unavailable to instructors using knowledge-based pedagogies to teach the facts of geology, anatomy, or accounting. Global politics classrooms are spaces where students can engage the complexity of modern, liberal citizenship by bringing in their own unique perspectives and creative ideas. Here, they can be authorized to practice agency, to sort through thorny issues about which smart people disagree and author their own views on those subjects. Students will disagree with each other and with the instructor, but such frictions can be empowering of collaborative deliberation and should be presented as such. Students can learn to attend critically to the arguments of others, to break arguments down into their component pieces and put them back together again, to work with others to explore ideas and policy proposals, and to contribute their own analysis and assertions to these deliberations. They can learn to build arguments and support their conclusions with evidence and rationales. Participation in global political negotiations offers special pedagogical opportunities to nurture the agency of students.

At the same time, the subject matter teaches humility. General education students often are convinced that they hate politics because it involves conflict and seems to reject straight answers they can memorize. Of course, the discipline does have some settled knowledge, and students must be provided some context, common vocabulary, and guidance if their deliberations are to be productive rather than merely frustrating. While not all of the authors in the volume agree, I believe teaching global politics should involve lecturing to model analysis and demonstrate methods for sorting nuances that deserve attention from those most likely to be smokescreens or noise. But global politics also presents plenty of opportunities for students to hear their professors say honestly, I don’t know. Smart people disagree about complex issues like North Korean nuclear weapons, the causes of economic inequality, and solutions to the Syrian civil war, and the smartest people approach these global political topics with a healthy dose of intellectual humility. More than many other subjects, studying global politics makes one suspicious of simplicity. Our courses can be opportunities for students to build analytical agility and practice (on their own and with others) finding patterns in the complex flow of contemporaneous events.

The disciplines of Political Science and International Relations maintain healthy conversations about how to translate these advantages into tactics and techniques that teach global politics well. Starting in 1968, the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) quarterly, PS: Political Science and Politics began publishing research and informative articles about teaching and learning in the discipline (although pedagogy is just one of the journal’s numerous and broad areas of interest). Craig (2014) documents a significant increase in published articles on teaching and learning over the past two decades. In 2000, The International Studies Association launched International Studies Perspectives (ISP), which included pedagogical analysis as one of the four types of articles it publishes. In 2005, APSA launched the Journal of Political Science Education (JPSE) to deal exclusively with research related to pedagogy in Political Science. As the value of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) has increased in academia generally, the prestige and audience for work on the pedagogy of IR have also grown (see the comprehensive International Political Education Database maintained by the UK’s Political Science Association Teaching and Learning Network). APSA has run an independent Teaching and Learning Conference since 2004, although beginning in 2018, every other year the conference will be held in conjunction with APSA’s annual convention. ISA has two sections devoted to education—the Active Learning in International Affairs Section and the International Education Section—and as part of its 2017 annual conference, ISA sponsored full-day teaching workshops (on simulations, online curriculum, and writing assignments). In 2018, ISA renamed these workshops the Innovative Pedagogy Conference and moved them to be held in conjunction with regional ISA conferences. That same year also marked the third biennial European Conference on Teaching and Learning Politics and the third annual Pedagogy Workshop at ISA’s Northeast Regional Conference.

These resources have helped many of the authors in this volume throughout their pedagogical journeys, often providing powerful solutions to practical teaching problems. Owing in part to the current American academic culture of assessment, however, most existing work on Political Science pedagogy is focused on finding and passing along evidence (often quantitative/statistical) that particular tactics and techniques promote student learning. The essays in this volume are instead devoted to the personal, philosophical, and identity-based contexts of such tactical decisions. The authors attest that pedagogical philosophies and tactical proficiencies interact continuously and iteratively over the course of a career, and that contemplation can add continuity and identity to that flow. The authors model the strategic investments of reflection and creativity required to become teachers worthy of their students’ potential and contend that anyone can overcome the challenges to become a successful teacher of global politics.

Organization of the Chapters and the Book

While each chapter tells a personal story, authors have built their essays around a broad common structure. The best adventure stories begin in a context readers find familiar, and each chapter opens with reflections on the (often inauspicious) first steps of the author’s pedagogical journey. The reflections anchor developmental stories about these teachers and their approaches to pedagogy. How did they learn to teach IR? What have they learned about teaching global politics to undergraduates that they did not know when they started? What kinds of pedagogical approaches have they come to believe in and what have they learned to avoid? What specific practices or techniques epitomize their approaches to teaching? All the authors acknowledge that their pedagogical adventures continue and that the hallmark of exemplary teachers is the ongoing process of attending to one’s teaching, not any specific techniques or tactics. The adventure is in the processes of reflection, exploration, requesting help, training, trial and error, failure, evaluation, and starting the cycle all over again. What emerges from these narratives is that good teaching requires creativity, agency, and honest hard work. Lastly, the essays conclude with summarizing statements of teaching philosophy, pedagogical mission statements at this point in the authors’ careers. What motivates their teaching? How do they explain teaching global politics to colleagues from other disciplines? How do they explain the purpose of the work of studying global politics to students?

As should be obvious by now, the tone and the rhythm of this volume are intentionally different from those typical of the discipline. Editors of other autobiographical and autoethnographic IR collections (Kruzel and Rosenau 1989; Inayatullah 2011; Dauphinee and Inayatullah 2016) have pointed out how difficult it can be for authors to suppress their scholarly training (detached academic arguments, foundations in the disciplinary canon, data as evidence) and just write about themselves. The authors in this volume approached the prompt’s instructions and suggested structure in a variety of ways, and readers will undoubtedly find themselves drawn to some styles more than others. Some authors use citations and footnotes, for example, while others were more comfortable with a basic narrative storytelling style. As an editor, I saw my job as two-fold: to ask questions to help authors find their best pedagogical development narratives, and to help them communicate those narratives clearly. I tried not to meddle too much; the stories are often very personal, and the authenticity of each voice is critical to the