In 2011, the American Political Science Association stated that integrating issues of diversity, inclusiveness, and equality into political science curriculum and pedagogy was crucial to the success of the discipline in the twenty-first century. Although consensus is forming about the need to teach diversity, the question of how to do this effectively remains open. This article describes an archives-based assignment in an introduction to American government course created by the authors of this article—a professor of political science and the college archivist—that includes greater understanding of diversity and engaged citizenship as learning objectives. For this assignment, students are immersed in archival material about their own college and tasked with analyzing the political actions of previous generations of students as the civil rights and women’s movements emerged, as the student population became more diverse, and as the campus reacted to national and local events relating to racial intolerance and injustice. By examining their college’s political past—both the conflicts that animated the community and the student-led efforts to make the campus more inclusive—current students engage with issues of diversity and political activism in a way that helps them better understand themselves and their role as citizens in a democratic nation.

This article explores the value and application of using comic images to teach difficult political texts. We presented either visual or textual portions of the Constitution to 71 American 18- to 22-year-olds using Survey Monkey Audience, measuring and comparing their knowledge of the Constitution before and after viewing. Respondents viewing the comic of congressional duties experienced statistically significant gains in pretest to posttest mean knowledge scores. Respondents viewing the text also experienced an increase in mean scores pretest to posttest; however, these changes were smaller and not statistically significant. This indicates that students may better comprehend content from visual depictions of difficult texts. We conclude by providing an example of one way that we use comics of political texts as a tool for student learning in an international civics exchange program.

One of the most alarming trends of the past decade has been the rise in authoritarianism and the growing support of strongman politics among citizens of democratic regimes. College instructors have a unique opportunity to challenge such thinking at a time when many of their students are still forming their political beliefs. Using a game, instructors not only can show students the perils of authoritarianism, they also can potentially expand students’ appreciation of democracy. This article describes a game suitable for this purpose. Students take on the role of workers, soldiers, and rulers in a military dictatorship to learn about the “guns-and-butter tradeoff” and authoritarian uncertainty.

In the last decade, text-analytic methods have become a fundamental element of a political researcher’s toolkit. Today, text analysis is taught in most major universities; many have entire courses dedicated to the topic. This article offers a systematic review of 45 syllabi of text-analysis courses around the world. From these syllabi, we extracted data that allowed us to rank canonical sources and discuss the variety of software used in teaching. Furthermore, we argue that our empirical method for building a text-analysis syllabus could easily be extended to syllabi for other courses. For instance, scholars can use our technique to introduce their graduate students to the field of systematic reviews while improving the quality of their syllabi.

What information can I trust? What sources should I include in my paper? Where can I find a quote that fits my argument? Undergraduates ask instructors, classmates, and/or librarians these questions. Meanwhile, instructors bemoan the gap between their expectations for student writing and the finished products. Navigating a large volume of scholarship and critically evaluating potential sources is straightforward for faculty who have long passed key information literacy (IL) thresholds. However, students usually have not reached these thresholds themselves. We offer practical tools—grounded in a new framework for teaching IL—to address these challenges. We demonstrate how instructors can (and should) teach IL skills, with or without direct assistance from librarians. We recommend encouraging students to build context around information sources and slow down as they search. Implementing these tools moves students from passively synthesizing a limited set of (possibly biased) materials to engaging in genuine scholarly inquiry.

In recent decades, institutions across the United States have increasingly emphasized global education as a prerequisite to successful existence in a diverse yet interconnected world. At the same time, there is increasing awareness that the decline in international studies (IS) has resulted in the United States being ill prepared to address complex global challenges. King (2015) lamented that the United States now increasingly lacks regional experts who understand the country-specific challenges and can place them in a larger global strategic context. How the discipline engages students in a global environment matters; however, the field provides little guidance on how to design global studies majors. IS and global studies are apparently both important and neglected. This study examines the curricula for IS, international relations, international affairs, and global studies programs housed in political science. By reviewing more than 100 programs that offer bachelor’s degrees, the authors identify similarities and differences in curricula and present a summative model of a typical IS program housed in political science departments.