Engaging IR Undergraduates through Collaborative Learning
Instructor: Jamie Frueh
This workshop provides both philosophical foundations and practical advice about how to create stimulating and effective learning environments through the use of collaborative learning techniques. Collaborative learning is a strategic approach to empowering students as participants in their own education that makes pedagogy more active and interactive. The techniques are adaptable to all size and level of classes, and are particularly well suited to the study of global politics. Career course participants learn pedagogical techniques, practice their use in small "base" groups, and discuss ways to avoid problems often associated with student discussions in undergraduate classrooms. Base group members workshop ways to adapt collaborative learning pedagogy into their own syllabi and jointly craft discussion questions likely to provoke undergraduate student thought and participation.
Grants and Fellowships: How to get them, where to find them, and how they can bolster your scholarly success
Instructors: Caleb Schmotter & Julie Taylor
Do you want more funding and time for research? Do you want to partner with other scholars and organizations to achieve your research goals, raise your visibility, and enhance your influence within your university?
This workshop teaches research development--the practice of pursuing outside funding to achieve specific research aims, while also building the long-term research prospects of individual scholars and their institutions. While faculty are often offered professional development opportunities to improve research skills or proposal writing, they are rarely challenged to think about the larger picture: building sustainable, long-term strategies for supporting their research and professional objectives. And yet, as research costs climb, skills alone are insufficient. A more strategic approach is needed to compete for resources and use them to their fullest advantage. This course prepares scholars to navigate the shifting external funding environment.
Introduction to Network Analysis
Instructor: Annelies Kamran
This course is an introduction to the use of both quantitative and qualitative network analysis as a research methodology in the social sciences. Students will learn the historical background of the methodology; how and why it developed, and how it has been used in different fields before moving on to discussion of how to generate network data, explanations of the most commonly used measures, and how they should be interpreted. It will introduce the free and open source network data application Gephi and guide students through hands-on examples of data manipulation, analysis, and visualization.
Teaching International Relations in a Post-Truth Era: methodology, politics, evidence
Instructor: Ilan Zvi Baron
Expert knowledge and what counts as evidence are both under sustained attack, posing a threat to our vocation as academics. When what counts as evidence is so easily dismissed in the public sphere, how are we as educators to teach our students how to discern "fact" from "fiction"? Yet, even this dichotomy is problematic. It is not always clear what facts are, and neither should we dismiss meaningful narratives that help us to navigate our way in the world. As educators, the easy answer here could be to focus on methods and what tools of analysis yield factual evidence. However, this approach only replicates the problem by ignoring how the production of "facts" contributes to the political and public crisis over facts that characterize a post-truth politics. Consequently, this course takes a different approach by focusing not on method, but on methodology and on how as educators we can use methodological debates to help navigate our way through the challenges of teaching international relations in a post-truth/alternative facts world. The course addresses how the scientific method can undermine itself when deployed in the public sphere, how the "absence" of evidence can itself serve as a source of evidence, and why we need to be sensitive to the existence of different methodologies and their respective forms of knowledge production.