A Contingency Approach to the Undergraduate Political Science Major (original) (raw)
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Political History and/as the Future for Undergraduate American Politics Curriculum
This paper outlines our response to fundamental challenges confronting undergraduate political science education. While enrollments in the political science major have declined at many institutions, including our own, we believe a structured APD approach offers an opportunity to capitalize on the wave of youth activism as well as the turbulent moment in contemporary politics by framing our major as the place where students can go to learn more about how we reached this particular political moment, think about what it takes and means to make change in a thoughtful, meaningful way, and equip themselves with the tools to interpret both the rhetorical and institutional contexts in which they hope to make this change while also overcoming some of the hurdles posed by the distribution model that remains the prevalent structure of many political science undergraduate programs.
Journal of Political Science Education, 2020
Prepublication version of forthcoming piece. Despite the essential position of introductory courses within most political science department’s curriculum, comprehensive comparisons of introductory requirements for majors have been somewhat rare. In this manuscript, I report on the state of introductory requirements through analyses of data from 381 national liberal arts colleges and universities (164 colleges and 217 universities, respectively) that offer a major or its equivalent in political science. My analyses reveal that a great deal of curricula diversity exists across departments: while nearly 30% of departments require at least 3 distinct introductory subfield courses, another near-30% do not require any specific introductory courses. Despite this diversity, an introductory course in American politics represents the de facto standard introductory course within the discipline. In comparison, a general, cross-subfield introductory course in political science is required in a minority of the departments sampled. My analyses reveal that structural and curriculum-based variables, including the total number of courses required, whether or not a department grants Ph.D.’s, and faculty size, are correlated with a general introductory requirement.
Two sides of the same coin: political science as professional and civic education
European Political Science, 2020
While the relevance of political science is often evaluated with respect to its scholarly impact, evaluations of the teaching impact are rare. This paper offers a step towards strengthening the societal relevance of a political science degree. We treat the societal relevance of political science as a matter of the (non-)academic career preparation and civic education of its graduates. We are therefore interested in the career paths and individual learning outcomes of Austrian political science graduates. Data from the Graduate Monitoring and semi-structured interviews show that most graduates work outside of academia, moreover, as our results show, many graduates state that they had to acquire additional skills for their professional careers. Consequently, future curricula might consider a stronger focus on non-academic career preparation. At the same time, however, graduates highly value the civic dimension of the programme and the impact it had on their political agency.