During the past decade, we and our departmental colleagues have continually honed our introductory political science course, “The Worlds of Politics,” as a gateway experience in opening up to participants the intimate, multidimensional significance of politics for their lives. We emphasize that politics is everywhere: from personal consumer choices that students make to sweeping global currents such as the populisms that are reshaping their world. In doing so, we offer the discipline of political science as an analytic aid through which students can engage the world with enhanced awareness, sensitivity, and knowledge. It has become increasingly apparent that the heart of this enterprise lies with cultivating skills of thought and communication that compel deep reflection on our own cognitive presuppositions and no less so on those informing the political science discipline. An overriding learning objective of promoting academic as well as civic ethics of humane respect, mutual understanding, and intellectual freedom is thereby served.
The compass of the course is set by an initial three-week unit in which we first situate politics in what Gallie (Reference Gallie1955–1956) termed an “essentially contested concept”—one that is perpetually remolded by the constant flux of language, thought, and power such that we must be always keenly aware of the historical contingency of where we stand. Our students then are introduced to political science research methods, a now-foundational inclusion in the course intended to promote a critical-thinking mindset throughout our departmental curriculum. We do this by emphasizing the importance of assessing the analytic credibility and underlying biases of scholarly as well as nonscholarly political sources. We ground both positivist and constructivist methodological accounts in a consideration of the philosophy of science, thereby underscoring how all modes of inquiry entail fundamental assumptions about the character of reality. This unit coincides with the beginning of semester-long training in academic communication, developed as a series of three short but stringent writing assignments. These assignments are used to impel students toward discovering, analyzing, and documenting the premises that animate any political stance that they or others evince.
The balance of the course is flexibly organized around the disciplinary subfields: political theory, comparative politics, and international relations (IR). In each instance, we draw on historically enduring as well as timely, globally varied case studies, conveyed through differing media and experiential formats. A key aim is to underscore the inherent fluidity among these subfields, such as where we pose the self-reflexive question of whether political theory somehow embodies abstract ideas pointing toward a unifying notion of the good life—“canonical” “Western” ideas, no less (Bhargava Reference Bhargava2012, 3–55; Freeden and Vincent Reference Freeden, Vincent, Freedom and Vincent2013). Or, are the ceaselessly diverse lived expressions, experiences, and moral dilemmas of humankind’s political lives the stuff of which all three subfields, and much else besides, are simultaneously made? In any case, the aim is to help our students better orient themselves with strategies for intellectual and civic responsibility in a disorienting world that demands their care and commitment.
In any case, the aim is to help our students better orient themselves with strategies for intellectual and civic responsibility in a disorienting world that demands their care and commitment.
This article describes the successes and trials of our ongoing experiences in “The Worlds of Politics,” focusing on the challenges of cultivating self-reflective analytic outlooks and the opportunities available for fostering discussions that are deeply probing without devolving into unnecessary and counterproductive polemics. We propose insights into the quandaries entailed in trying to introduce the discipline of political science within a 13-week period and practical strategies for helping students differentiate between advocacy and analysis through the use of written assignments.
THE URGENCY OF TEACHING CRITICAL THINKING
It is axiomatic to our teaching that the world around us has always been and likely always will be politicized and that tumultuous events have always framed political science instruction, however we choose to depict the genealogy of the discipline (which would be an eminently worthy critical-thinking exercise, albeit falling outside of the current purview). That said, and remaining vigilant against problematic modernist tendencies to pose our own present moment as the standard against which to judge the past, we seem to be experiencing an era whose rapid series of bewilderments and dislocations call out for the urgency of critique—above all, “self-critique” (Fassin and Harcourt Reference Fassin, Harcourt, Fassin and Harcourt2019; Hartog Reference Hartog2017). Not least is the COVID-19 pandemic, whose resituating of in-class instruction within an online realm for the foreseeable future occasions profound self-reflection on human interrelations with one another and the natural world. Yet, paradoxically, this critique seems to be in characteristically short supply within a putatively “post-truth” world, wherein the “multiplication of so-called fake news and conspiracy theories” has merely “mimicked critical thinking” and rendered citizens more prone to becoming trapped within reverberating echo chambers of confirmation bias (Fassin and Harcourt Reference Fassin, Harcourt, Fassin and Harcourt2019, 3; Haber Reference Haber2020).
Pedagogically, a key development for our teaching is that there now appears to be a more pronounced division among students regarding their varying perceptions of how overtly partisan politics should intrude on the classroom. Emblematic of this divide is polarization over student perceptions of “social justice”: what the term means and what it encompasses, as well as its relevance in the classroom. The present-day use of the term “social justice,” particularly on university campuses, is predominantly understood as “a series of taken-for-granted political propositions, including the centrality of race and gender in constructing inequality and the need for state intervention to overcome it” (Zimmerman Reference Zimmerman2019). The conflation between social justice and partisan politics, for many students, seemingly has solidified the impression that those who care about social justice are politically “left-wing” and, consequently, that those who are “right-wing” necessarily devalue social-justice principles.
With regard to teaching, the overlap between the understanding of social justice and current political events also creates something of a “political minefield” for those professors who aspire to instruct in as politically neutral a style as possible. From our standpoint, our class is numerically large, diverse in myriad characteristics, and open to students from all departments and all levels of undergraduate university education. Whereas our own professional commitment to instruct in a politically neutral manner underscores our intellectual ambition of shaping a classroom environment wholly open for critical reflection, the size and diversity of our student body also, by our logic, obliges such neutrality. To interject personal, partisan leanings in any direction within a class of more than 150 students almost certainly would be at odds with a percentage of the student body. Interjecting in such a way could have, at the least, a chilling effect on students who hold differing political opinions and, worse, might lead to accusations of “power over” for grading and evaluation disagreements. A recent study by Giersch (Reference Giersch2019) supports the supposition that students respond to professors’ politics in a multitude of ways and, as a result, suggests that political neutrality is the safest bet for attracting and retaining a broad set of students. Beyond institutional considerations of enrollment and student satisfaction (or dissatisfaction), instructors’ privileging of their own political viewpoints risks fostering an “ideological intolerance” that is inimical to the academic spirit of critical inquiry (Boyers Reference Boyers2019, 33).
The exercise of teaching a political science class in a politically neutral manner is indispensable to our endeavors in teaching critical thinking. From the outset, we consider the Greek etymological origin of criticism, krinein, which connotes judgment and discernment—cognitive faculties that can be cultivated only if students are given the free space and encouragement to participate in genuine dialogical thinking that demands the constant questioning of our own presuppositions, in conjunction with openness to other possibilities (Moon Reference Moon2008; Reese Reference Reese1996, 149). This means inspiring students toward deep, respectful engagement with fundamentally alternative visions of political life, thereby ameliorating our own potential tendencies toward hunkering down into our own viewpoint—a typical if not necessarily unique trait of our social-media–fueled, echo-chamber age (Tully Reference Tully2016).
The exercise of teaching a political science class in a politically neutral manner is indispensable to our endeavors in teaching critical thinking.
Fundamental, furthermore, is the self-reflective exercise of “thinking about your own thinking” and thereby working to “overcome[e] bias…arising internally…[as well as] externally” (Haber Reference Haber2020, 103). Ironically, we can appreciate how the aspiration to present competing interpretations of political phenomena could be misperceived as a partisan choice in the current era of polarization. Our abiding aim, however, is to cultivate students’ receptivity to the simultaneous juggling of competing arguments.
LESSONS FROM THE COURSE
We encourage students to actively critique the perspectives on the study of politics that we convey to them. At the beginning of the semester, we state explicitly that our goal is not to superimpose specific political opinions and neither do we seek to make our own opinions or biases manifest to our students. We also acknowledge that this is a difficult—and perhaps impossible—endeavor because our own sources of education and institutional milieu have fundamentally shaped our academic practices. In numerous iterations of the course, we have observed that students seem to respond positively to these upfront instructor statements. During the course of a semester, we have noticed that students occasionally try to draw out a direct political opinion from us with their questions in class. Our usual response is to remind students that our own personal opinion is not immediately germane to their learning and critical thinking and then to steer them into considering the competing arguments surrounding the situation in question. To date, we have received overwhelmingly positive feedback with this strategy. Examples of comments from the course-experience surveys include: “…very open to different viewpoints and created an environment where people were comfortable sharing their opinions”Footnote 1; and “they share that they are here to educate us so we can make our own informed decisions and opinions, rather than put opinions onto us. I really respect that.”Footnote 2
In our effort to not only explain the need for critical thinking but also to model it as a process for our students, we have found it helpful to design course components around assignments geared toward different types of cognitive exercises designed to foster an awareness of competing perspectives. The ordering of the three written assignments for the course is an attempt to “scaffold” the skill development of students’ own evaluative skills. The first assignment is a news journal, which we use as a “low-stakes” writing assignment (Elbow Reference Elbow, Sorcinelli and Elbow1997). The use of low stakes provides a less formal writing assignment in which students can simply offer their own reflections without the characteristic “heavy lifting” of research and analysis. In the news journal, we ask students to document the news that they consumed in a five-day period. On this basis, we ask for their reaction to the news at hand together with an assessment of how the news is politically relevant, an identification of any discernable bias in the coverage, and a reflection on how they encountered the news (e.g., overheard on the radio; via a friend’s suggestion on social media; or actively seeking out news material). We deliberately do not require a research-based critique of arguments. This has proven helpful for engaging students in an open conversation about news and sources (not the least of which, the enormous impact of social media on our consumption of information), as well as interconnections among information, the modes of its conveyance, and the political resonances of language.
In our effort to not only explain the need for critical thinking but also to model it as a process for our students, we have found it helpful to design course components around assignments geared toward different types of cognitive exercises designed to foster an awareness of competing perspectives.
The news-journal assignment provides a “relief valve” that allows students to freely offer their reaction to the news that they are relating. We assure them that we do not grade or judge their opinion or their choice of news. Nevertheless, the assignment is intended to apply our initial consideration of politics as an “essentially contested concept.” Grading this assignment assesses the clarity of the writing, following of instructions, and consistency of citations, but we otherwise refrain from a substantive evaluation of content. In line with the low-stakes approach, this assignment provides an accessible entry point for students to reflect on language and power, questions of expertise and credibility in sources, and their own information-consumption habits. As a mirroring strategy, we offer a verbal overview of our own news consumption after the students have submitted their written journals to demonstrate that such a reflective exercise can be ongoing and consistently revealing. For example, we note that we intentionally seek out news sources that do not have paywalls and we follow news coverage ranging across a broad ideological spectrum, from Jacobin to Breitbart.
The news journal helps to scaffold background considerations of bias before proceeding to the next writing task (Fisher and Justwan Reference Fisher and Justwan2018). The second paper is more demanding: the course’s “high-stakes” writing assignment (Elbow Reference Elbow, Sorcinelli and Elbow1997) in terms of the evaluative emphasis on research, analysis, and formal academic writing. We ask students to research a chosen topic by finding reputable sources on one of 10 potential topics, updated each semester according to topical political debates. They are asked to conclude the paper by undertaking a critical assessment of the various interpretive perspectives that they have presented. The goal is for students to provide a balanced view of two (or more) sides of an issue, without promoting one particular side or foregrounding their own opinion.
We introduce this assignment by discussing the distinction between “analysis” and “advocacy,” inviting students’ thoughts on whether a clear distinction is fully possible. This discussion has proven invaluable for helping students articulate their thoughts about what types of questions can and should be debated. One effective strategy has been encouraging them to consider different perspectives on an issue in terms of “strengths” and “weaknesses” of political outcomes for different stakeholders rather than more normative considerations of “good” and “bad” political opinions. We find that this assignment causes more uncertainty and apprehension than any other component of the course. Students are consistently uneasy about finding a level of balance between contrasting interpretive perspectives, as well as with the exercise of providing a contrasting perspective that may be at odds with their own values or perceptions. We have noticed that the more provocative the topic, the more difficulty students have in adhering to the assignment criteria. This was especially evident, for example, with a topic on gender equality (see the assignment overview in online appendix A); students who chose this topic struggled to outline the argument of less-progressivist ideological perspectives.
We have learned to incorporate prior student experiences into our in-class explanation of the analytical-paper criteria, making clear that the exercise of presenting competing perspectives by no means suggests anything definitive about their own preferences. We also have found it useful to pointedly engage students on the experience of critical thinking before they submit the assignment and in a subsequent debriefing. Our assessment of this assignment is that it is invaluable, if sometimes frustrating, to students precisely because it asks them to focus on what is rationally demonstrable through intellectual self-discipline (Çavadar and Doe Reference Çavadar and Doe2012). Student comments include: “[i]t is really nice with [the second] assignment that it makes room for analysis and deeper understanding of a subject”Footnote 3; and “…a good opportunity to reflect on what we have learned and for questions, to provoke us to think differently about different norms and ideas in politics.”Footnote 4
The third writing assignment targets the application of theory to practice. Students are asked to watch the documentary The Fog of War (Morris and Williams Reference Morris, Williams and Errol2003), which conveys “eleven lessons” from the life of the controversial former US Secretary of Defense (1961–1968) Robert McNamara. Students are required to outline a few examples of how specific strategically and morally fraught situations described in the film (e.g., the Cuban Missile Crisis, Allied firebombing of Japanese cities during Winter 1945, and the Vietnam War) might exemplify—whether tending to confirm, negate, or otherwise—some of the dominant presuppositions underlying competing theoretical streams within the IR subfield. We assess critical rigor by asking students to draw clear linkages between theory and practice following from their analysis of decision-making processes reflected in the movie. Moreover, we ask them to avoid making statements such as “I feel like…” or “It looks like…,” and instead to concentrate on the description of select events from the film to support their application of theory. Our central impression from this assignment is that students respond well to an assigned focus for the “practice” component of the exercise. At the same time, and similar to the second assignment, students often have difficulty engaging in an ideologically unbiased manner with concepts that they find unpalatable. The regularity with which they write that realist IR theory is inherently harsh, whereas social constructivist theory is congenial, is telling. Overall, we find that students who were receptive to feedback from the second assignment are better prepared for the exercise of objectively applying theory to practice.
The goal with these three assignments is to foster a gradation of critical-thinking skills using distinct exercises. The news journal is an exercise for personal reflection on individual habits and subconscious preferences; the analytical paper asks students to engage fulsomely with competing interpretive perspectives, regardless of personal political leanings; and The Fog of War paper is a venue for an attempt at applying IR theory to historical events. Our logic is to scaffold the concept of critical thinking by offering a series of exercises conducive to the cultivation of evaluative skills. In response to valuable questions asked by students in earlier incarnations of the course, we also endeavor to discuss strategies for distinguishing advocacy from analysis. These student questions probed whether it perhaps should be the purview of researchers—whether students, junior academics, or seasoned scholars—to engage in “advocacy scholarship” for the support of a particular cause or position. We now take care to make the point that our aim in this course is never to dismiss or discourage advocacy. Rather, our instructional practices and assignments are designed to help undergraduate students hone their own evaluative abilities so that any advocacy work they might choose to do is maximally informed by rigorous critical-thinking skills.
CONCLUSION
Teaching political science at the undergraduate level is fundamentally a process of instruction on and critical engagement with the deeply contested character of political ideas and practices. Students enter our class with a wide range of personal political preferences and arrayed notions about how the study of politics should occur. What we aim to cultivate in students, however, is the realization that critical rigor—although a timeless skill—can offer a guiding compass especially amid the disequilibrium of these highly polarized times.
We have developed a twofold approach toward the objective of fostering our students’ critical-thinking skills. The first element entails our determination to instruct in as politically neutral a manner as possible. A pedagogical stance of political neutrality models for our students the process of self-reflective, cognitive engagement with differing perspectives as an undertaking that is distinct from the expression and exercising of personal activism. This stance also encourages a learning environment within which students can practice their own critical-thinking skills without fearing evaluator retribution resulting from potential partisan contrasts with their instructors. The second element involves the design of assignments that approach critical thinking through a gradated progression of learning strategies.
Critical thinking—which we convey to students as demanding a diligent, ongoing process of questioning their own presuppositions as well as those of other minds—is a challenging principle to teach (let alone evaluate and grade the practice of) within the short time frame of an academic term. Our work with students has become an edifying exercise in reflecting on and attempting to keep in check our own predilections; this, as we seek to impart the value of both self-critique and outward-directed critical discernment as strategies for navigating our way through the partisan storm.
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS
To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1049096521000457.
