Room for manoeuvre: A report on experiments in alternative teaching and learning methods in politics

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article reports on three different experiments in alternative methods of undergraduate teaching in a Department of Politics at a British university over the last five years. The experiments showed that quite simple innovations in teaching methods can raise substantially the level and quality of student participation and performance in seminars as well as their writing skills, and that most students are capable of reaching and maintaining high levels of intellectually serious commitment to their studies. These innovations illustrated that achieving these levels is far less a function of the calibre of particular students than it is of the methods which engage all students' interests and energies and whose structure starts from a premise of much higher than usual expectations of them, requiring sustained hard work to be met. The article also seeks to show that despite constraints on innovation in university teaching methods and the absence of any real institutional incentives for academics to ...