Teaching International Relations In A Time Of Disruption

This volume asks how we, as International Relations scholars, support our students, and indeed each other, to create classroom spaces that foster the critical curiosity and engagement required to understand and live in a world that feels dangerously disrupted? In an era of globalization, disruption, and pandemic, International Relations educators need to reflect upon how teaching helps constitute the discipline and position our students to contribute to the advancement of International Relations as a discipline and practice. Through exploring innovative approaches to teaching and learning, this volume ensures that International Relations keeps up with the contemporary needs of students and student learning, and takes advantage of the opportunity to advance as a discipline now and in the future. As we move through ‘pivots’ online and ‘transitions’ to remote learning in the midst of a pandemic, the need for attention to student learning is only made more prescient and urgent.

This volume asks how we, as International Relations scholars, support our students, and indeed each other, to create classroom spaces that foster the critical curiosity and engagement required to understand and live in a world that feels dangerously disrupted? In an era of globalization, disruption, and pandemic, International Relations educators need to reflect upon how teaching helps constitute the discipline and position our students to contribute to the advancement of International Relations as a discipline and practice. Through exploring innovative approaches to teaching and learning, this volume ensures that International Relations keeps up with the contemporary needs of students and student learning, and takes advantage of the opportunity to advance as a discipline now and in the future. As we move through 'pivots' online and 'transitions' to remote learning in the midst of a pandemic, the need for attention to student learning is only made more prescient and urgent. Heather A. Smith is Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia. She is the recipient of the 3M National Teaching Fellowship (2006), the Canadian Political Science Excellence in Teaching Award (2012), and a two-time recipient of the UNBC Excellence in Teaching Award. David J. Hornsby is a Professor of International Affairs and the Associate Vice-President (Teaching and Learning) at Carleton University, Ottawa. Published in both the biological and social sciences, he is also a recognized lecturer having received the Faculty of Humanities and Vice-Chancellor's Teaching Award (2013), Wits University, South Africa.

This volume asks how we, as International Relations scholars, support our students, and indeed each other, to create classroom spaces that foster the critical curiosity and engagement required to understand and live in a world that feels dangerously disrupted? In an era of globalization, disruption, and pandemic, International Relations educators need to reflect upon how teaching helps constitute the discipline and position our students to contribute to the advancement of International Relations as a discipline and practice. Through exploring innovative approaches to teaching and learning, this volume ensures that International Relations keeps up with the contemporary needs of students and student learning, and takes advantage of the opportunity to advance as a discipline now and in the future. As we move through ‘pivots’ online and ‘transitions’ to remote learning in the midst of a pandemic, the need for attention to student learning is only made more prescient and urgent.

This comprehensive guide captures important trends in international relations (IR) pedagogy, paying particular attention to innovations in active learning and student engagement for the contemporary International Relations IR classroom.

This volume on international studies pedagogy helps us think purposefully about the worlds we teach to our students and it shows us why engaging in reflective practice about how and what we teach matters. The Handbook also provides strategies to engage students in a variety of ways to reflect on and engage with the complexities of the world in which we live.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically disrupted instruction across higher education. What have International Relations scholars learned from the experience of teaching through this situation? Contributors to this volume consider three themes: how they have adapted to new modes of instruction, what constitutes appropriate care for our students amid crisis, and how we as an epistemic community should prepare for future disruptions.

Despite the long history of decolonization as a ‘third world’ political project, decolonization as an intellectual project has gained tremendous momentum in recent times, signalled by movements such as #RhodesMustFall, #BlackInTheIvory, and Why Is My Curricula So White among others. These movements situate the coloniality of power within ongoing practices in academia and seek to disrupt systemic racism and oppressive structures of knowledge production and dissemination. Assembling critical perspectives of scholars engaged in African Studies and other cognate disciplines on the continent and in the diaspora, the book elucidates and fuses ideas together to produce nuanced pedagogical advances in the service of students, academics, and educators. It contributes ideas on how to navigate systems, curricula, and academic contexts that have perpetuated a colonial toxicity that undermines Black agency and epistemic justice. This book will be of interest to students, researchers, educational leaders and policy makers across diverse disciplines interested in championing a decolonial praxis in academic spaces and universities.

This book provides a resource for political science faculty wanting to increase their research productivity and/or teaching effectiveness in a time and resource efficient way. Faculty from various subfields and institution types offer examples of how they align their research and teaching activities to “get more bang for their buck.” While some contributors discuss projects within the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) research tradition, others go beyond this approach and integrate their teaching and research in other ways. As a result, this volume offers diverse, innovative, and practical ways faculty can leverage the teaching/scholarship connection to both improve scholarly productivity and ground political science instruction in pedagogical literature.