Teaching Comparative Politics: A Guide to Making Choices

• In Event: New Strategies for Increased Teaching Effectiveness

Abstract

What are the choices involved in designing an Introduction to Comparative Politics course? During a 2019 APSA Teaching Symposium on Comparative Politics, we developed a guide for faculty designing this important and nebulous course.

Designing and teaching this course is particularly challenging both because the topics are so broad, and the scope is global. Because comparative politics is often a gateway course into the major, instructors often need to make costly decisions to offer a cogent and succinct introduction to understanding domestic politics on an international scale. Yet, instructors often cannot assume any prior knowledge of political science and are faced with covering a vast corpus of theories, methods, and substantive cases in a few weeks. Such challenges can also be exacerbated in a remote teaching environment, whose modalities can truncate class time and synchronous engagement .


We draw on our own experiences at public and private universities to illustrate the tradeoffs involved in designing an introductory Comparative Politics course. For example, instructors must decide whether to teach the course based on themes rather than based on country cases, use a textbook or create their own reading list, being discipline driven or letting current events drive the framing (to mention but a few) Each of these choices impinges on others and we show how one decision makes other choices more cogent in a form of loose path dependency. We reference the existing literature on pedagogy to discuss the advantages of certain types of assignments (e.g. student led, active learning) and share our experience with the time demands of some of these techniques and how that can factor into syllabus design. We refrain from offering the one best practice for teaching the course, but we hope our article leads to thoughtful and informed decision making especially for the first-time instructor.

Authors

• Nandini Deo, Lehigh University

• Julie George, CUNY, Queens College

• Meg Guliford, University of Pennsylvania

• Mary Anne Mendoza, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona