Political Science Courses Research Articles

Analysis and Evaluation of the Impact of Integrating Mental Health Education into the Teaching of University Civics Courses in the Context of Artificial Intelligence

In higher education teaching work, college students not only need to master the professional knowledge and professional skills they learn during their school study but also need to improve their self-education and self-cultivation and constantly improve their comprehensive ability of learning. At present, there are differences and relationships between the education of college students in civic and mental normal education, and how to play the role of the integration of the two educations has become a problem that needs to be considered in the current work of college students’ training. The integration between civic education and mental normal education can make up for the shortcomings of monolithic civic education and mental normal education work and also optimize the teaching methods between them from a certain perspective to achieve the development goals of complementing each other and not being independent of each other, so that students can understand more learning methods and contents that promote the normal development of their own minds and minds. In response to the problem that mind-normal education cannot be automatically integrated into the teaching of university thought and political science courses, in the context of artificial intelligence, this paper proposes a multi-channel-based mind-normal and ideological and political information fusion model. The model has two channels, BERT+CNN and BERT and BiLSTM-Attention; firstly, the pretraining model BERT is used to obtain the word vector representation of the fused text context; then, the CNN network of channel one is used to enhance the ability of local feature extraction of the text, and the BiLSTM-Attention model of channel two enhances the ability of long sequence text processing and is key. Finally, the fused features of channel 1 and channel 2 are classified using a softmax excitation function. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed model, experiments are conducted on public datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Mexican Americans with Moxie: A Transgenerational History of El Movimiento Chicano in Ventura County, California, 1945–1975

In Mexican Americans with Moxie, Frank P. Barajas eloquently makes a case that Ventura County was very much a part of the Chicana/o movement and by doing so forces a reckoning with Chicana/o movement historiography that largely omits mixed rural/urban settings. Ventura County is situated only four hours from the US–Mexico border and sixty miles northwest of Los Angeles, making it a top destination for Mexican migrants, who, he claims “also became Chicana-Chicano as they witnessed, participated in, and adapted to the cultural crosscurrents of the time” (p. 5, p.13).Barajas not only expands the regional parameters of the Chicana/o movement, he also argues that the Chicana/o movement was transgenerational and not solely made up of youth activists. He contends “that a collection of people from the Mexican American and Chicana-Chicano generations defined El Movimiento (the Chicano movement) in Ventura County” (p. 3). This transgenerational approach is what makes Mexican Americans with Moxie innovative. For Barajas, the Chicana/o movement was one that included two generations: “one born before World War II that came of age prior to the 1960s, and the other subsequently” (p. 2). He argues, and I agree, that Chicana/o movement historiography needs to move away from categorizing this politicized cohort as solely a youth movement.The book is divided into eight chapters, not including an introduction and conclusion. The first chapter sets up the political landscape of Ventura starting with the arrival of Cesar Chavez in 1958 and the establishment of the Community Service Organization (CSO) a year later (p. 14). Chapter 2 details efforts of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and CSO to end segregation in local schools as well as police brutality. This cross-racial coalition pre-dates the Chicana/o movement and sets the foundation for future efforts in the region to address racial imbalance in Ventura County. The third chapter turns to the formation of the Brown Berets of Oxnard and continues with a discussion of the CSO, Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), and Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA). Chapters 4 and 5 situate the legal struggles with the Oxnard Elementary School District to desegregate its schools and expose many of the school board members as successful in institutionalizing racism. These chapters also reveal what scholars of race and ethnicity have already confirmed—that housing segregation mirrors school segregation. For example, “Within schools, district officials created staggered attendance and playground schedules” (p. 115). Chapters 6 and 7 look at farmworker organizing efforts through the help of Chavez's UFW, highlighting the strike of Egg City, one of the nation's largest egg producers, on July 13, 1967, as well as other farm labor rights efforts. When UFWOC “led the men and women on a march through the city's streets,” students at Oxnard High School marched alongside them—demonstrating the cross-generational alliances during El Movimiento (p. 145). The final chapter, Chapter 8, follows the push by college students to bring Chicana/o studies programs to their campuses, especially at Moorpark College, and their efforts to hire Chicana/o faculty. This chapter also highlights how Chicana/o student activists worked with the Black Student Union at Ventura College to secure the Minority Student Center (pp. 176–77).For Barajas, it didn't matter much if one self-identified as Chicana/o, as was the case with César Chávez. What mattered most was the political engagement and consciousness against racist structures. Here, Barajas also emphasizes another important misjudgment of the Chicana/o community in the 1960s. The majority of Chicanas/os resided in mostly urban settings and consequently many had little to no experience working in California's agricultural industry. Yet they espoused, “WE ARE MEXICAN-AMERICANS, non-farmworkers who support Cesar Chavez . . . ” (p. 1). Chávez and the United Farm Workers union resonated with Chicana/o movement activists’ pleas for economic justice. The book demonstrates that indeed the Chicana/o movement was by all accounts and purposes a social movement that transcended generational lines (p.160).Although the book is rich in archival and oral histories, a discussion on the political significance of MAPA, Brown Berets, CSO, and others would have been helpful—mostly to hone in on how Ventura County differs or is similar to organizational chapters elsewhere. The discussion on desegregation could have also used further national context, especially because efforts to desegregate met similar resistance in other regions of the United States, more specifically, the East Coast. This conversation could have strengthened his argument and added to larger historiographical interventions.Mexican Americans with Moxie will undoubtedly be of use in Chicana/o studies, ethnic studies, social movement, history, twentieth-century race and ethnicity, and political science courses. Graduate and undergraduate students will find it an easy and enjoyable read. Barajas's book also serves as a reminder to today's young activists that they are part of a long trajectory of political activism.

Changing the paradigm? Creating an adaptive course to improve student engagement and outcomes in introductory political science classes

Adaptive learning (AL) courseware holds promise for helping break down challenges students face in college. In 2016–2017 we developed an AL Political Science course, Global Issues, implemented it across 51 classes and more than 5,200 students over the next two academic years, and initiated a study to assess student perceptions and performance. In each semester, except spring 2018 when half the sections used non-AL courseware, all sections were taught using the AL courseware. Across these AL sections and on every question in a survey of student perceptions, students gave highly positive perceptive ratings of the courseware. In the spring 2018 assessment of the AL courseware versus non-AL courseware, the perceptive differences between the adaptive and non-adaptive sections were statistically significant on 12 of 14 questions (though the difference in online classes was not significant and we found significant differentiation based on instructor rank). As for student performance, the difference between AL and non-AL classes again showed overall significance, though with marked between-instructor differences and again not in online classes. It is also important to note that first-year status informed the performance results, and the average DFW rate fell significantly once the AL courseware was introduced. Our findings support the case that AL courseware can be one tool that helps provide a useful foundation for student progression, satisfaction, and performance.

Can active learning be asynchronous? Implementing online peer review assignments in undergraduate political science and international relations courses

The phenomenon known as emergency eLearning saw many institutions of higher education switch from face-to-face learning to virtual or online course delivery in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The transition posed a unique suite of challenges to instructors and students alike, especially in the case of active learning pedagogy. This article reflects on the experiences of a multi-institutional, multi-term pedagogical project that implemented peer review assignments as opportunities for asynchronous but nevertheless active learning. We shared instructor experiences through the course design and application stages of courses in International Relations and political economy, discuss the ability of peer review assignments to create active learning opportunities in online courses, and reflect on our own pedagogical development benefited from the community of practice.

“Freedom of Information in the Classroom: Teaching for Empowerment in the Social Sciences and in Ethnic Studies”

This article describes public records request assignments in courses in political science and in Asian American Studies. Beyond commonly known activities like voting, volunteering, signing petitions or peacefully protesting, students should gain experience in exercising their rights to an expansive set of government records that fall within the domain of “the people’s business.” Few courses include public records requests (e.g., implementation of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and state sunshine laws) as part of formal coursework assignments at the undergraduate level, although responsive records would be useful in, for example, course papers and in class oral history projects. For scholars of Asian American Studies, the FOIA can be used to uncover invaluable data and information that would otherwise be unavailable in traditional scholarly publications, textbooks, news articles and online posts. More generally, many students report that they are more interested in politics, knowledgeable and empowered regarding their political efficacy, as well as critical of bias in information flows from pundits in the media and from other sources after completing FOIA exercises.

The Past is Holding Us Back: Applying Foresight to Move the Disciplines of Political Science and International Relations Forward

This article examines the extent to which the academic disciplines of political science and international relations (IR) are incorporating foresight or futures thinking into their work. The disciplines of political science and IR grapple with important issues that affect lives across the world and have the potential to influence the future in ways that reduce conflict, enhance allocation of resources, and improve processes in general. This article offers a review of the political science and IR literature and course content that incorporates foresight, concluding that only a handful of journals appear to be publishing research that applies foresight. Some academic institutions on the other hand are encouraging a more multidisciplinary approach to resolving global challenges with an eye toward the future in their course content. The article concludes with several recommendations on how political science and IR scholars can incorporate foresight’s best practices to ensure the disciplines are more forward looking and effective at shaping a better future.

POLITICAL EDUCATION TO INCREASE THE PARTICIPATION OF CONSTITUTIONAL LAW STUDENTS IN THE ELECTION OF DEWAN EKSEKUTIF MAHASISWA OF IAIN MADURA

The declining attention of young voters on several aspects makes political education very vital for the sustainability of democracy in Indonesia. Political education for students who are young voters in this case are students of the Constitutional Law is considered important to increase their participation at the tertiary level, namely the election of DEMA (Student Executive Council) IAIN Madura. This study used an approach to students of the Constitutional Law study program, Islamic State Faculty of IAIN Madura through observation and interviews as well as data collection supported by document studies through several relevant kinds of literature so that data triangulation was then carried out to produce valid data.
 The results showed that in the aspect of students' initial knowledge about elections from several informants of the Constitutional Law study program students obtained data that they already had a good understanding of. Then on the aspect of student perspectives on campus politics, some of them do not know information about the election of the chairman of the DEMA (Student Executive Council) due to several reasons behind it. So then to increase student political participation in the election of the chairman of DEMA the author formulated three political stimuli, namely through learning political science courses, through campus organizations, and mass media.

Adult learners' motivators from instructors' perceptions: a case of a political science program in vietnam

Teaching adult learners is not an easy mission for instructors. Among many factors affecting adult learners' learning, motivation seems to be the most significant. Studies on adult learners' motivation, especially on Vietnamese ones who pursue political science programs to become leaders in government offices and in the private sector, are still limited. Accordingly, this current study was conducted to investigate what motivates adult learners to be successful in their learning. Forty-six instructors who have worked with adult learners in political science programs for at least five years participated in this study to provide their perceptions of adult learners' reasons for taking an advanced political science course. A sixteen-item questionnaire was used to collect the quantitative data on teachers' perception of learners' motivators, and two focus group interviews were conducted to gain an in-depth understanding of the motivators stimulating learners to get involved and thrive in their study program. According to the survey results, the instructor participants perceived the desire to serve the community and the country and the trust of beloved people as the primary motivators for encouraging adult learners to continue their learning. Additionally, personal advancement and selfinterest were also believed to have a remarkable impact on adult learners' learning motivation. The research context contributes to an explanation of why these motivators were highly perceived as adult learners' motivators. The results also stated the important role of institutional support for them to stay focused on their learning and foster the values of their school comeback.

Review: Reactions to the Law by Minority Religions, edited by Eileen Barker and James T. Richardson

Reactions to the Law by Minority Religions is the third volume in a series of books initiated by INFORM devoted to the issue of minority religions and law. (INFORM is an independent educational charity based in London that focuses on minority religions and sects.) As co-editor Eileen Barker puts it, previous volumes published in the series have mainly concentrated on the place of minority religions in various political and legal contexts, while this latest book focuses on the way minority religions have reacted to the law. This volume enlarges research into minority religions by considering the wider picture of religion, law, and politics, particularly by providing the perspectives of minority religions to these social institutions and interactions with them. The editors have expanded the circle of contributors by inviting not only scholars from various disciplines—such as sociologists, anthropologists, lawyers—but other professionals as well as the members of minority religions. In other words, readers will find chapters written by scholars engaged for a long time in research on minority religions along with chapters written by human rights’ activists and adherents of minority religions.The book contains thirteen papers, providing wide range of perspectives into the way minority religions have reacted to the law in diverse geographical areas and different political systems, including democratic and authoritarian countries. Global north societies, however, are mainly represented. Groups covered include Japanese Tenrikyo and Aum Shinrikyo, the Estonian pagan group House of Tara, the Doukhobors in Canada, the Church of Almighty God in China, and the Unification Church, Scientology, Jehovah Witnesses, Essenes, and others. Contributors examine a variety of minority religions and their attempts to respond to the law, to challenge existing legal norms, and to find their own place in the existing legal frameworks. The cases discussed involve the reader in the historical circumstances of social inclusion of minority religions and very recent attempts by Western countries to exclude minority religions persecuted in authoritarian countries. In addition, the volume provides an overview of minority religions’ attempts to secure their rights with the help of international institutions, such as the Council of Europe, the European Court of Human Rights, and the United Nations. Finally, the book concludes with helpful theoretical generalizations on the way minority religions react to the law in contemporary society.In general, the volume is grounded on rich material based on various methodological approaches that contain historical and recent legal document and literature analyses, as well as empirical research with interviews and participant observation. The reader is able to compare and contrast how diverse minority religions act under various social and political conditions, and to consider what measures are taken in the fights for their rights. The strength of the volume lies in the assortment of cases, countries, and approaches, but one may also say that weakness also lies within the same diversity, as usually it might be seen as limiting more in-depth analysis. The evaluation at this point would depend on the position of the scholar and their expectations for the volume. In my opinion, the theoretical background for this book is solid and empirically grounded. The wealth of material presented invites the reader to contemplate further applications in future research.Reactions to the Law by Minority Religions contributes to understanding minority religions, their role and place in contemporary societies and states. It might well serve as a handbook for scholars of religions, sociologists, anthropologists, lawyers, and political scientists working in the field of religion, law, and politics. The variety of cases analyzed might be valuable material for courses in sociology, anthropology, political science, and law. The contributions from members of minority religions and their interpretations might serve as a solid background for additional research into those groups and their relations with society and state. Finally, the volume should be of interest for general readers looking at the way minority religions find their way through various legal and political contexts. By doing so, readers are reminded of the complicated issues that majority/minority boundaries create and how much effort and how many sacrifices minority religions might need to make in order to be recognized.

Researching SCSU's Hilton C. Buley Library's New Haven Mayoral Archives

Researching SCSU's Hilton C. Buley Library's New Haven Mayoral Archives

Political science and digital society: some issues of modern education in higher education (experience of the EU countries)

The course of political science in higher education is often read, to a large extent, as a theoretical course and affects the study of issues and problems of the formation and development of political institutions, processes and technologies. The focus is usually on the history of politics, the state as the central institution of the political system, political parties, political consciousness, culture, political relations, etc. However, it is very important that, when studying a course in political science, listeners understand the current political processes taking place around them. Some of them are well established, democratic processes, such as the electoral process. Others are associated with the impact of modern innovation processes on the political sphere of society. And in this case, political science as a science once again demonstrates its value in an applied format. For a deep understanding of this kind of political processes, additional aggregated information is needed, knowledge that should differ in such characteristics as relevance, novelty, compliance with modern development. In the modern digital era, it is necessary to additionally acquire knowledge about the digital transformation of political institutions, processes and technologies, including types of state policy, the most important of which is social. And it's not just the digital economy. This, first of all, digitalization of public administration (State-web) — Big Date management, blockchain, etc., as well as digitalization of business — the emergence and development of digital enterprises, etc. It is obvious that the use of digital technologies will become possible for the development of predictive political science. This article is largely a translation of German publications by scientists dealing with the development of modern political science education in the countries of the European Union, in particular, in the Federal Republic of Germany. The focus is on the impact of digitalization on the teaching of theoretical and applied political science.

Using a “Gateway Game” to Stimulate Student Interest and Build Foundational Knowledge

Active learning—and gaming, in particular—is now a well-established part of many political science courses. First, we discuss the design and implementation of a “Gateway Game”, a pedagogical tool with broad applicability and test its effectiveness in increasing student motivation, satisfaction, and learning. Crucially, we provide instructors with all the tools necessary to run the game in their classroom to experience this for themselves. Second, using surveys of classroom participants, we show that the game increases student satisfaction, motivation, and learning, suggesting that this game comprises an exciting entry point for learning in many environments. Third, we describe how this game can be integrated into a variety of courses and subfields.

A Compass During the Storm: Offering Students Critical Rigor for Polarizing Times

ABSTRACTTeaching and learning in higher education is occurring, unavoidably, within the broader civic context of today’s extraordinarily polarizing political times. We seek to help students situate themselves with respect to and, above all, thoughtfully assess others’ as well as their own perspectives on issues of profound contention, without contributing to exacerbated polarization ourselves. Specifically, we offer students in our first-year exploratory political science course a vital tool—critical rigor—for navigating but not being inundated by the storm. This article discusses our experiences in teaching the course titled, “The Worlds of Politics,” as we attempt to help students deeply engage in cognitive processes of critical thinking and analysis, without undue infringement from their own—and least of all our own—personal political biases. Our focal learning objective is the cultivation of critical-thinking skills that promote students’ drawing of distinctions between advocacy and analysis, as well as their discerning civic engagement.

Does a Wikipedia-based assignment increase self-efficacy among female students? A qualified maybe

Wikipedia has become one of the most used reference works, by students, educators, academics, and the general public, and there is a growing body of research exploring when and how students use the online encyclopedia. A smaller body of work examines the role of Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool for teaching information literacy and subject-matter expertise. Yet, despite the ubiquitous nature of the resource on campus, there remains a well-documented gender gap in contributions to the site. We build on previous scholarship to explore how the use of Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool can improve female self-efficacy and bridge the gender gap prevalent in contributions to open access resources. A survey of two undergraduate political science courses suggests an assignment in which students create original content for Wikipedia increases confidence in using the platform and information-seeking behavior among both female and male students, although the advantages continue to be greater for men. Furthermore, while female students are more confident in creating content after the Wikipedia assignment, once accounting for confidence there appears to be no significant difference between male and female contributions to Wikipedia. Because the assignment does lead to slight increases in confidence for women, however, it could be considered a promising first step in increasing female contributions to the site and the confidence of female students in evaluating information, more generally. We also include assignment details and recommendations for implementation.

Implementing Quality Matters in The Political Science Online Classroom

As colleges and universities push to offer more online offerings, particularly during this current pandemic, concerns about upholding standards of excellence surface. As a result, programs like Quality Matters (QM) have flourished in an attempt to make courses not only easily accessible, but also tied to learning outcomes. This paper takes a look at the Quality Matters framework with the goal of easing new instructors into the process; it breaks down the specific review standards into easily understandable “bucket” categories, and assesses how it fits within introductory political science and international relations courses. It will also make recommendations on potential activities and assignments to help fit QM’s active learning framework, which should be helpful for new and seasoned instructors alike.

Integrative Learning and Simulating Revolution and Protest in the Middle East

AbstractThis essay explores insights from our experiences teaching undergraduates a set of paired history and political science courses on protest and revolution in the Middle East. Working in groups, students developed simulations of key moments of revolution or protest explored during the courses. The simulation assignment was designed to engage students in an active learning setting and as a shared assignment across both courses. The most interesting result of this project, from the teaching perspective, was its unanticipated ability to expose students to the contingency and emotion that scholarship has recently emphasized as critical to understanding social movements, but which so often falls out of the study of history and political science analyses of protest and revolution. In this paper we explore the simulation assignment, how student groups designed the simulations with limited guidance from instructors, how students took on the assigned roles by engaging deeply with the histories of the events, and how the engagement in the simulations complicated the analyses that formed the bedrock of our course readings. In our analysis we draw on two iterations of the paired courses and use both student qualitative assessments of the course and student reflections on the simulations that were included in group papers.

Tammany Hall and the Machine Style in Black Politics

“I seen my opportunities and I took ’em,” explained George Washington Plunkitt speaking to the journalist William L. Riordan at the dawn of the twentieth century. For many college students, William Riordan's collection of musings and reminiscences from New York State Senator Plunkitt, delivered at a shoeshine stand on Manhattan's West Side, offers a definitive introduction to the history of urban machine politics. Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics, first published in 1905, has become a ubiquitous text, frequently assigned in political science courses and excerpted in U.S. history source books. Plunkitt's reflections, while entertaining, present a transactional and opportunistic form of political practice. He famously differentiates between honest graft and dishonest graft; insists that showing up at fires to help victims is key to holding your district; declares the Irish to be natural born leaders; and derides reformers as “mornin’ glories.” He rages against the key urban reform project of the era, civil service examinations, as “the curse of the nation,” amounting to “a lot of fool questions about the number of cubic inches of water in the Atlantic and the quality of sand in the Sahara desert.” Civil service exams blocked machine politicians from distributing jobs to loyal followers, which in the case of the New York Democratic machine typically meant recently arrived Irish immigrants. As Plunkitt explains, “The Irishman is grateful. His one thought is to serve the city which gave him a home. He has this thought even before he lands in New York, for his friends here often have a good place in one of the city's departments picked out for him while he is still in the old country.” Plunkitt's characterization of the linkage between migrant arrival and municipal work points to the central role that access to city payrolls played in the economic and political history of the New York Irish. Arguably, the only other urban group that relied as heavily on city jobs for economic mobility has been African Americans.

Looking past limiting conditions: Prioritizing meaning in EAP

EAP courses by their very nature are designed to help students understand and engage with academic language. Yet what if EAP practices are too far removed from academic discourse that their relevance is compromised? For better or worse, EAP teachers in Content & Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) environments often draw on EAL grammar resources to supplement the development of their situated, content-reliant teaching resources (Harwood, 2005; Lorenzo, 2013). Unfortunately, typical form-focused grammar instruction that relies on idealized, formulaïc structures can result in EAP lessons glossing over crucial concepts in students’ authentic course readings. In this article, we recount our teaching context and the realization of the gap between traditional teaching and grammar reference texts, and the instantiations of various forms of conditional language in authentic academic texts across first year university Political Science, Psychology, Physics and Economics courses. We explore the importance of conditionals and how they are typically presented; the phenomena of grammatical and logical metaphor; and suggest pedagogical activities to facilitate students’ comprehension, application and manipulation of conditional logic in their academic work.

Pandemic Fiction Meets Political Science: A Simulation for Teaching Restorative Justice

ABSTRACTWe team teach an interdisciplinary political science and literature course titled “Violence and Reconciliation,” with case studies on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa and on debates about whether to develop a TRC in Northern Ireland. The course culminates in a two-week simulation in which students role play the experiences, strategies, and needs of victims, perpetrators, legal teams, government officials, and NGOs in the aftermath of a horrific event that has torn a society apart. We assessed the simulation through pre- and post-simulation writing exercises as well as observations of insights revealed by students during negotiations. We believe the simulation is an effective tool for helping students move from a scholarly engagement with the processes of restorative justice to employing them in response to hatred and violence. This article describes the simulation for use or adaptation in other courses.

Refurbishing the curriculum for Political Science course

Refurbishing the curriculum for Political Science course