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Amber A. Díaz
Department of Political Science
Duke University
326 Perkins Library
Box 90204
Durham, NC 27708-0204

 

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Pedagogy Statement

The status of international relations as an area of scholarship within the social sciences means that my students learn by reading books and articles, listening to lectures, taking exams and quizzes, participating in class discussion, and developing their own original analytical work via research projects. In facilitating learning through these methods, I view my role as an instructor to be akin to that of a Scout leader. In the classroom, my responsibility is to impart the skills students need for dealing with the texts, and to provide ample resources and opportunities for them to independently test and develop their skills.

Just as a Scout leader accompanies the Scouts on camping trips when they are first learning the techniques for outdoor survival, I consider it to be my responsibility to be available to listen to students' ideas and respond to their concerns as they are working through the first stages of a project. For this purpose, I hold regular office hours every week and am available for e-mail discussions and meetings with students after class and by appointment.

Then, much as the Scout leader lets the more advanced Scouts go on their excursions alone in order to demonstrate their capacity to independently apply the skills they have learned, I see the term papers that students produce at the end of PS93D and PS158 as the result of their ability to synthesize the techniques discussed in class with their own interest in a particular subject area, which together produce a new work of scholarship that shows the students' abilities to theorize in their own right about international relations.

Part of creating a learning environment that challenges students to develop their analytic faculties entails significant preparation on my part. In selecting tools that are well-suited to these goals, I have found that various forms of technology are extremely salient. In particular, Blackboard and PowerPoint are the resources I most frequently use. In conjunction with the other TAs and the course instructor, I use Blackboard as a repository for course materials, evaluation materials, announcements, grades, and discussion fora. PowerPoint is the format I prefer for class lectures, as it elicits visual engagment beyond that permitted by a traditional lecture style. It is also a helpful study aid for students to download off of Blackboard following class. The class lecture I gave in PS93D on 29 November 2006 is available here in PDF format.

Less technologically complex methods that I have found especially helpful are in-class quizzes, essay exams, and reading and discussion questions that bring the students into conversation with each other; all of these are ways to transform an often passive understanding of the readings into a vibrant and growing web of knowledge. Although news quizzes generally assess students' factual grasp of important world events, my goal with the reading quizzes is less to evaluate how well students remember particular details of a text than it is to prompt them to make connections among the various theories and historical cases we encounter in the class. Ideally, the reading quizzes are a launching point for section discussions.

Examples of quizzes, discussion questions, and a midterm exam essay question I created for PS93D (2006) are available on my website here. In a somewhat different arena of political science, I taught a freshman seminar on political satire at my previous university. One of the key components of the course was for students to build off of what they had learned through the readings and discussions to create their own original works of political satire.

Overall, I am convinced that the best way for students to learn in international relations and political science more generally is to have a variety of both technologically advanced and traditional resources available to them. Thus, in completing assignments, they will be actively engaging their critical thinking and analytical skills so that they are not merely repeating decades of institutionalized thinking about these topics, but rather they may approach the discipline critically and innovatively and ultimately devise their own unique works of scholarship.