Advances in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

This section’s purpose is to allow participants to discuss and share their pedagogic research and responsibilities as scholars of political science. Also the section encourages the participants to reflect on how their experience and results of research can be used to enrich and improve teaching practices and the student learning experience and vice versa. It will allow participants to identify the challenges which may hinder desired practice, together with proposing ways of overcoming these barriers. We expect to showcase examples of good practice with the benefit of providing inspiration and encouragement for improving existing ways of teaching and learning. It is the relevance of this section across all of the sub-fields of political science, and therefore to all scholars, that makes it a vital one to support. Most of our panels will be devoted to discussing ‘new ways’ of teaching political science. Notably the use of new media and the demand for more methodological courses will be at the center of attention this year. This will enable the participants to discuss various pedagogic methods, different approaches to innovating Political Science courses and to evaluate their outcomes. Equally, the panels will allow us to address a range of important issues facing Higher Education in the 21st century, including quality assessment and internationalisation. Following most encouraging experience from convening a similar section during the ECPR 2013 conference in Bordeaux and 2014 in Glasgow we believe we should again offer opportunity for our colleagues to discuss important issues of teaching, learning, assessment and teacher development. PROPOSED PANELS Panel 1: The Times They Are A-Changin' – Teaching Political Science Methods and Politics in the Times of Transformation Chair: Philippe Blanchard, University of Warwick In recent times higher education has undergone massive transformations, under a variety of influences such as the Pisa-Reforms and those from political reformers. This has forced institutions and their staff to “reinvent” themselves on a regular basis. They have had to multiply the number of courses and to embed methods within preexisting ones. The demand for more methodological training at BA, MA and PhD curricula and even at staff levels is a huge challenge for political science departments. On the demand side, future political science graduates will need to cope with professional environments that are more demanding on more research skills, wether in journalism, consultancy, political organisations and unions, strategy units in private companies or third sector organisations. Rigour, creativity and the capacity to share and display complex knowledge in an efficient way are crucial in a world marked by abundant information but little capacity to make sense of it. In addition, technical developments have introduced new pedagogical opportunities and demands: Massive Open Online Course (MOOCs), Blended Learning, etc. As a result, teaching staff, especially junior scholars, who are often the ones in charge of methods courses, are under pressure. They struggle to have their innovative contribution recognised by senior colleagues or their department. Paradoxically, methods are sometimes presented as secondary courses, while at the same time they are what crucially differentiates reliable, empirically grounded knowledge from interesting, suggestive, but not proven ideas. This is connected with the necessity to make the technical aspects of methods more accessible and better embeded within other dimensions of political science (theory, results, practical applications...). This panel will focus on the one hand on research method training from a variety of Europe contexts, and on the other it will be a forum for exchange of experiences in methods teaching in politics. Papers may focus, among other angles, on a method, on a programme or on a piece of pedagogy. Panel 2: The 21th Century Teacher – Theoretical Approaches and Ongoing Didactical Debates in Teaching Political Science Chair: Ulrich Hamenstädt, University of Muenster Didactical methods of how to teach political science have become increasingly significant in the past decade. There is also a growing literature about different didactic topics such as creativity in teaching and active learning, and new ways to communicate knowledge to the students often based on new technologies. These developments are welcome in our discipline, but the theoretical approaches underlying this development are not always clear. We can also see contradictory debates about teaching political science, notably when it comes to new technical developments and new demands for structuring courses under the influence of political pressures. The panel welcomes papers that address the key questions raised here: (1) what are the significant didactical discussions in our discipline? (2) What are ongoing debates and theoretical approaches about teaching political science? Clearly both questions relate to each other and there is a huge domain for discussions in between that we are going to discover within the scope of this panel.