Political Science

How can civic education keep pace with changing political identifications and practices of new generations of citizens? This paper examines research on school-based civic education in different post-industrial democracies with the aim of deriving a set of core learning categories that offer a starting point for thinking about how to address changing citizen identity styles and learning opportunities in various online and offline environments. The preponderance of school-based civic education programs reflects traditional paradigms of dutiful citizenship (DC) oriented to government through parties and voting, with citizens forming attentive publics who follow events in the news. The authors expand upon these conventional learning categories by identifying additional civic learning opportunities that reflect more self-actualizing (AC) styles of civic participation common among recent generations of youth who have been termed digital natives. Their AC learning styles favor interactive, networked activities often communicated through participatory media such as videos shared across online networks. The result is an expanded set of learning categories that recognize the value of different citizenship styles and emerging online environments that may supplement or supplant school civics.

College campuses have taken on increased responsibility for mobilizing young voters. Despite the discipline's commitment to civic engagement, political science departments play a minimal role in this programming. This article outlines a course structure – including learning objectives, course outline, and assessments-that treats a campus-wide voter mobilization drive as the basis of an applied political science course. Transforming a campus voter mobilization program into a political science practicum offers advanced skill-building for students seeking political careers and links learning objectives to real world activities. Participants report gains in both knowledge of campaigns and grassroots campaign skills. We argue this type of course particularly benefits students attending colleges and universities in geographic areas that receive little attention from political campaigns as well as those students for whom the traditional route of gaining political experience – an unpaid, off-campus internship – is impractical or even impossible.

During the 2016 election season, the authors-a collection of staff, faculty, and students at a rural, four-year comprehensive college-piloted a new format for a student-driven, campuswide, nonpartisan voter mobilization campaign anchored in a political science course and supported by a credit-bearing internship and advanced graphic design course. We argue that this project offers a model for how collaboration between student affairs and academic affairs can transform the nonpartisan voter mobilization campaign into a site for interdisciplinary, cross-campus service-learning projects that benefit the student participants and the campus community. This article outlines the advantages and challenges of the project and concludes with recommendations for those interested in implementing a similar program.

Questions of how to support students in conversation across and about different perspectives regularly appear in discussions about civic engagement. Students with clear political positions and a desire to engage with political institutions, however, are themselves a rarified group on many campuses. The gulf between students who seek to engage their peers in civic action and those who see establishment politics as irrelevant, alienating, or hopeless may be more significant than any partisan divides. Thus, a liberal arts program committed to voter mobilization should help engaged, active students think carefully about the audience for their efforts and how best to communicate with those whose perspective of political participation varies significantly from their own. This article argues that personas, a tool common in design, can be incorporated into civic engagement programs to help students with a strong civic identity understand how to bridge this divide. This article discusses the...

This paper outlines our response to fundamental challenges confronting undergraduate political science education. While enrollments in the political science major have declined at many institutions, including our own, we believe a structured APD approach offers an opportunity to capitalize on the wave of youth activism as well as the turbulent moment in contemporary politics by framing our major as the place where students can go to learn more about how we reached this particular political moment, think about what it takes and means to make change in a thoughtful, meaningful way, and equip themselves with the tools to interpret both the rhetorical and institutional contexts in which they hope to make this change while also overcoming some of the hurdles posed by the distribution model that remains the prevalent structure of many political science undergraduate programs.

ABSTRACTAlthough most instructors care deeply about student writing, they often give little attention to the part of the writing process over which they maintain complete control: the assignment itself. Yet, the written prompt that we distribute is often where student confusion (and confused writing) begins. Using Bloom’s taxonomy as inspiration, we offer instructors a typology directly linked to course objectives, which we believe can be readily understood by student writers.

College campuses have taken on increased responsibility for mobilizing young voters. Despite the discipline's commitment to civic engagement, political science departments play a minimal role in this programming. This article outlines a course structure-including learning objectives, course outline, and assessments-that treats a campus-wide voter mobilization drive as the basis of an applied political science course. Transforming a campus voter mobilization program into a political science practicum offers advanced skillbuilding for students seeking political careers and links learning objectives to real world activities. Participants report gains in both knowledge of campaigns and grassroots campaign skills. We argue this type of course particularly benefits students attending colleges and universities in geographic areas that receive little attention from political campaigns as well as those students for whom the traditional route of gaining political experience-an unpaid, off-campus internship-is impractical or even impossible.

During the 2016 election season, the authors—a collection of staff, faculty, and students at a rural, four-year comprehensive college—piloted a new format for a student-driven, campuswide, nonpartisan voter mobilization campaign anchored in a political science course and supported by a credit-bearing internship and advanced graphic design course. We argue that this project offers a model for how collaboration between student affairs and academic affairs can transform the nonpartisan voter mobilization campaign into a site for interdisciplinary, cross-campus service-learning projects that benefit the student participants and the campus community. This article outlines the advantages and challenges of the project and concludes with recommendations for those interested in implementing a similar program.

This essay examines how François Debrix's Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping: The United Nations and the Mobilization of Ideology "revisions global politics" and complicates scholarship in international relations and human geography by situating his analysis at the level of simulation, conceptualizing United Nations peacekeeping efforts as trompe l'oeil games that "fool the eye." Specifically, it analyzes how Debrix's analysis pushes the borderlines of scholarship in human geography by going beyond the critique of Cartesian perspectivalism with its attendant masculine mind/body dualism that is often levied at mainstream geographical discourses by critical and feminist geographers. After doing this, this essay outlines how Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping casts a critical light on the foreign policy analyses disseminated by scholars such as Samantha Power and Thomas Weiss, who ascribe specific "moralizing intentions" to international institutions like the UN. This essay ultimately argues that Debrix's analysis of the "New Word Order" and disciplinary neoliberalism is increasingly relevant in the contemporary setting, where YouTube and TikTok videos and images contribute to the proliferation of individualizing empty frames.