Joining “Us”; Creating and Maintaining a Discipline-based Learning Community (original) (raw)

A Community of Scholars Educating for Political Engagement

2010

Advancement of Teaching first conceived the Service Learning for Political Engagement Faculty Fellows Program in the autumn of 2006. The idea was to bring together a diverse group of faculty, eventually 23, from across California representing disciplines from engineering and English to agriculture and Asian American studies, from small and large colleges, as well as public, private, and faith-based institutions.

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.

A Contingency Approach to the Undergraduate Political Science Major

2020

There is a variety of curricular models for organizing the undergraduate political science major. Among them are the traditional distribution model, which exposes students to various subfields in the discipline, and the sequenced learning framework recommended by the Wahlke Report. Other structures include the student learning outcomes approach and civic engagement education, the latter a recent area of emphasis in the discipline. Embedded in these and other course arrangements are underlying theories of how students learn, what a curriculum is, its purpose, and its pedagogy. This study applies curriculum theory to current and potential models of the political science curriculum, describing the strengths and limitations of each structure as a platform for promoting intended learning. The findings suggest that the future political science major should not be a one-size-fits-all framework, but rather a choice from curricula that best address different learning goals and objectives, ki...

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.