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Public Health Simulation
This is a guest post from Sarah Fisher, Assistant Professor Politics at Emory & Henry College, written with Roger Yu, PhD Candidate in Biomedical Engineering at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Public health crises require coordination between scientists, government officials, and the public. This past summer, we had the opportunity to combine courses on biotechnology (taught by Roger) and international relations (taught by Sarah). We created a simulation to illustrate some of the challenges officials face when dealing with epidemics. Prior to the simulation, students in the biotechnology course learned about viruses and watched 2011 film Contagion. The international relations students focused on state responses to the recent Ebola crisis (some resources included the Stuff You Should Know podcast and discussion of Ebola songs).
Teaching Trump #2
A follow-up to Amanda’s post about teaching in the time of Trump. Trump’s campaign and administration represent an opportunity to teach about racism in the construction of national identity. I stumbled into this subject accidentally in my globalization course last week, with an assignment that asked students to write a response to “Is France or the USA a more global society?” Students were supposed to reference the following items:
- Zoe Chace, “Act One: Party in the USA,” This American Life, episode 600, 28 October 2016, http://tal.fm/600/1.
- Sarah Shin, “Alain Badiou on riots and racism,” Verso Books, 22 August 2011, http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/681-alain-badiou-on-riots-and-racism-daily-humiliation.
- Justin E. H. Smith, “Does Immigration Mean ‘France Is Over’?” The New York Times, 5 January 2014, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/does-immigration-mean-france-is-over/.
- David Wong, “How Half of America Lost Its F**king Mind,” Cracked, 12 October 2016, http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/.
Yesterday I heard this radio report about residents of Newton, Massachusetts, one of the wealthiest and therefore whitest communities in the USA: Continue reading
Teaching Trump
I’m struggling with how to approach my classes right now. I’m teaching introductory courses in international relations and American politics, and therefore the actions of the first couple of weeks of the Trump Presidency are highly relevant topics of conversation. Political Science professors often talk about what level of neutrality to maintain in their classroom—do you try to appear neutral, despite having clear political opinions? Or do you make your own perspective clear, and assure students of your fairness to their own beliefs?—but regardless of your politics, the hyper-polarizing nature of the new administration’s actions make the neutrality side harder and harder to justify, even as taking a partisan angle becomes more likely to shut down discussion.
When I struggle on these sorts of issues, I turn to fellow educators, who are producing excellent work struggling with this and other aspects of teaching about the exceptional nature of the 2016 election and the Trump Administration. This is particularly helpful while I’m still sorting through my own thoughts and considering the approaches I want to take. Under the cut are some thought pieces I’ve seen freely available around the web on these issues to give you a place to start in case you too are struggling with Teaching Trump. Few of them offer specific lesson plans, though, and so for those, I turn to the ALPS community, either as comments or in the form of guest posts, to start building specific lectures or lesson plans to engage students on this extraordinary time. Continue reading
Making alignment work
I’ve just been helping a young child who lives in my house with their French homework, practising sentences for a test that’s coming up. I imagine that many of you will have done the same, either in the parent role or the child role (or both, for that matter).
For me, it was a pointed demonstration of the perils of alignment in teaching. The child is going to be testing on their ability to write out a series of sentences, so is focused entirely on that. Thus, when I ask them to read out the sentences, I get something that even I know isn’t good pronunciation: ‘magasins’ is remembered as ‘being like mega, but maga, and then sins’.
In short, this child, like pretty much every learner, is learning to the incentives that are provided: if the teacher isn’t going to be bothered about the speaking, then why should the child? Continue reading
The Social Security Game
Today we have a guest post from Tyler Chance, a doctoral student and instructor at University of Missouri-St. Louis. He can be reached at trc6df [at] mail [dot] umsl [dot] edu.
Social Security and its financial problems is one important policy issue that is probably not on the minds of most U.S. college students. The Social Security Game (http://socialsecuritygame.actuary.org/#make-your-choice-now ), created by the American Academy of Actuaries, is a fun activity that I use to teach my students about policy choices. The game’s goal is simple: fix Social Security so that Americans can receive retiree benefits after the year 2034. You can choose to reduce benefits, increase revenues, or apply a combination of both. The game provides quick videos that explain the different viewpoints behind each policy alternative. After each decision you make the game uses estimates from the Social Security Office of the Chief Actuary to calculate how close you are to fixing the problem.
I like to use the game in my Introduction to American Government course, as well as in my Congressional Politics course, but it has wider applications. When I teach Introduction to American Government, the game demonstrates why paying attention to this policy issue is important and how it can be messy and hard to fix. I first have the class vote on whether we should reduce benefits or increase revenues. From there we vote on subcategories; for instance, if we voted to reduce benefits, we would then need to choose from a range of options provided by the game, such as increasing the full retirement age, reducing Cost-of-Living-Adjustments, and lowering benefits for future high-income retirees. A class in which students have diverse political ideologies quickly illustrates just how complicated the Social Security reform can become.
When I teach Congressional Politics, the game functions as a mock legislature. In this project, I play the role of a newly-elected president acting on a mandate to reform Social Security. I assign each student a specific legislator and have them research their stance on the issue and the demographics of their constituency (or you can provide students with that information on index cards). I then encourage the students to work through the game with their constituencies in my mind. So far, solving the problem of Social Security has been close to impossible for my classes, which allows me to show institutionalized gridlock and constituent-based constraints in practice.
The game can also be effective as an individual homework assignment. Have the students play the game and share experiences. Were they able to solve the problem? What route did they take—benefit reductions, increased revenues, or a mix of the two? Why did they choose a particular strategy?
Where Did Your Stuff Come From?
Most American students are challenged to understand the extent to which international trade affects their lives, and the way that the US trades with the world. I can (and have) shown statistics about trade and economics in very graphic and immediate form, but numbers in the scale of trillions are hard to conceptualize.
To combat that, I asked students in an introductory international politics class to go on a scavenger hunt. They were tasked to find one item from each of 5 world regions – Europe, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East & North Africa, and Asia & the Pacific. They had to take a picture of the ‘made in’ indicator (and part of their student ID, to ensure that they didn’t just go grabbing stock photography or Instagram stuff) and post it to the class learning management system’s discussion board. To sweeten the pot, I offered 2 bonus points for unique entries, where no one else posted something from that country. Specialty foods and beverages were excluded (no taking a picture of a bottle of Stella for Belgium).
Students went crazy hunting for stuff. The two bonus points were apparently a huge incentive, with students finding and posting additional items when someone else duplicated “their” country.
Table for one
I’d like to pretend that the situation I’m about to describe is the result of some very careful planning, but I’ll assume that you all know enough about how universities work these days to know that it very much isn’t the case. Whatever the reason, when semester starts in a fortnight, I’m going to be teaching a module/course to a single student.
I’ve met my class earlier in the year and he seems very pleasant, so I’m sure it’ll be a great experience. But it’ll also be a brand new experience: that Oxbridge post that I never quite managed to secure, perhaps.
Of course, I’m prepping for this, because I won’t be able to use a lot of the tools in my pedagogic kit. No ‘discuss in pairs’, no simulations (not of the kind I run, in any case), not even flipping, since every single bit of face-to-face contact will be individually tailored to the one person. Continue reading