This article describes how comparative politics specialists can adopt community-engaged strategies and other innovative pedagogies to emphasize local–global connections. It discusses a comparative course on urban social movements that requires sustained, community-based learning. Students are placed in organizations advocating for refugee families, Latinx communities, and people in situations of homelessness. Engagement with community partners supports student learning in meaningful ways. Students apply social-movement theory to real-world situations, develop an understanding of activists and the communities they seek to empower, and gain intercultural competency by working with diverse groups. They also grapple with different modes of social action and models of citizenship. Most important, students learn to investigate activism comparatively through analysis of overseas cases. Bridging the local and the global in a single semester can be an arduous task, but undergraduates have embraced this challenge.

This article describes a semester-long classroom simulation of the Syrian conflict designed for an introductory international relations (IR) course. The simulation culminates with two weeks of multi-stakeholder negotiations addressing four issues: humanitarian aid, economic sanctions, ceasefire, and political transition. Students randomly play one of 15 roles involving three actor types: states, non-state actors, and international organizations. This article outlines the costs and benefits of simulation design options toward encouraging students’ understanding of IR concepts, and it proposes a course plan for tightly integrating lectures, readings, assessment, and simulation—regardless of class size or length. We highlight this integration through a discussion of two weeks’ worth of material—domestic politics and war, and non-state actors—and the incorporation of bargaining concepts and frameworks into the two weeks of simulated multi-stakeholder negotiations.

Political science instructors increasingly use interactive pedagogies that emphasize active learning over traditional lecture formats. I contribute to this effort by developing a data-based teaching method that relies on student-generated data to illustrate course concepts and to serve as a foundation for a variety of activities in political science classrooms. This article summarizes the technique based on my experience in an introductory course in American government. However, given that this method is not intrinsically limited to any topic or area, I also provide examples of how the basic framework may be applied to other subfields in political science. I conclude by calling for the creation of a network of teacher–scholars interested in developing, sharing, and refining best practices related to data-based teaching.

The blended flipped classroom is a partially online, partially offline course to teach social science research methods. Online, students watch video lectures, do readings, and complete short exercises to acquire basic knowledge of research methodologies and academic skills. Being set up modularly, the online environment offers flexibility regarding not only when to study but also what to study: students choose the methods they find useful for their thesis project. They then apply these methods and skills in a series of face-to-face workshops, which incorporate several forms of active learning, such as small-group work, mini-games, and in-class writing. Although more demanding than a traditional lecture course, the blended flipped classroom has had a positive effect on student performance in the research methods course as well as in subsequent thesis projects.

Many students in my undergraduate American politics courses struggle to see policy issues as complex. Too often, they get stuck making surface-level observations or jumping straight to personal opinions, falling far short of critical thinking. This article introduces an active-learning exercise—situational mapping—that provokes students to recognize and think critically about the complexities of policy issues such as immigration, abortion, campaign financing, and guns. Adapted from a grounded-theory research technique, the goals of this mapping exercise are to (1) help students see policy issues as messy, (2) encourage them to “wallow in complexity” rather than oversimplify, and (3) provoke them to think through complexities before forming conclusions. The learning exercise actively engages every student, is simple to prepare and implement, can be completed during a 50-minute class, and is flexible in its application. It also involves teamwork, informal presentations, moving around the classroom, and opportunities for creativity.

The use of course-management software such as Blackboard, Moodle, and Canvas has become ubiquitous at all levels of education in the United States. A potentially useful feature of these products is the ability for instructors to administer assessments including quizzes and tests that are flexible, easy to customize, and quick and efficient to grade. Although computer-based assessments offer clear advantages, instructors might be concerned about their effect on student performance. This article evaluates whether student performance differs between handwritten and computer-based exams through a randomized field experiment conducted in a research methods course. Overall, our findings suggest a significant improvement in student performance on computer-based exams that is driven primarily by the relative ease of producing thorough responses on the computer versus by hand.

Both social media use and the civic disengagement of college students continue to be on the rise, posing instruction challenges around how and what students are interested in learning in their college classrooms. This pedagogical case study examines the effectiveness of using Twitter to develop a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) that incorporates the use of social media learning—specifically using social media to expose students to a greater depth and breadth of contemporary topics—as a tool of instruction in a political science curriculum. I assess whether social media learning equips students with media literacy skills that aid them in engaging in civic dialogue, understanding public policy, and identifying stakeholders on all sides and aspects of an issue—potential precursors to deeper civic engagement. I find that students seem to overestimate their ability to learn about political issues and are skeptical of social media. However, the use of social media as a component of a PLE (1) provides a pathway for enhanced media literacy and deeper learning, (2) makes learning about an issue more appealing, and (3) engages students who are less interested in a traditional classroom delivery.