Chad Raymond

The Use of a Middle East Crisis Simulation in an International Relations Course

In November 2006, undergraduate students in a Model United Nations Club (MUN) conducted an exercise intended to simulate a series of crises in the Middle East. In the exercise, a total of 66 undergraduate students role-played cabinet-level officials in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, and were required to make foreign policy decisions based on knowledge acquired in the classroom and on information delivered as the exercise unfolded.

Missing the Trees for the Forest?: Learning Environments Versus Learning Techniques in Simulations

Institutions of higher learning are increasingly asked to defend curricular and pedagogical outcomes. Faculty must demonstrate that simulations are productive tools for learning, but a review of the literature shows that the evidence of their effectiveness is inconclusive, despite their popularity in the classroom. Simulations may in fact help students learn, but the pedagogical benefits of simulations may be being attributed too generally to the learning environments that they supposedly produce, rather than the specific learning modalities that occur within them. The article concludes with a recommendation that educators choose particular learning techniques first and then build simulations around these techniques, rather than the reverse.

Editors’ Introduction to the Thematic Issue: Bringing Interactive Simulations into the Political Science Classroom

Over the last 20 years the nature of undergraduate education has changed dramatically, at least in part in response to shifting student demographics. At the same time, college and university professors are being held to tougher standards of accountability by students, administrators, accreditation agencies, and legislatures. Students are increasingly focused on acquiring marketable skills and are less interested in learning disciplinary content. Administrators and accreditation agencies require evidence that learning outcomes are being achieved and learning objectives are being met. Yet, curricula often still emphasize the delivery of an undergraduate education as an academic apprenticeship in which students develop the same scholarly abilities used by their instructors. In political science departments, undergraduate curricula are often designed primarily around faculty expertise and interest rather than around a critical evaluation of the knowledge and skills that are essential to the discipline and to the student. The ability to build skills and knowledge that can serve a wider population is one area where simulations can serve to help us teach more effectively, especially when students are bombarded by a variety of different concerns and exist in a world that has so many more opportunities to be distracted than even their older siblings faced when they were in college 5 years ago. Simulations were first employed in political science as a means of understanding complex social processes that did not lend themselves to experimental testing, and their use soon expanded in scope to include the teaching of political science itself. In contrast to traditional pedagogical approaches that many of us encountered in college or in graduate school, simulations rely upon

War, peace and everything in between: simulations in international relations

Have you ever had a student get so passionate about a theoretical argument in a class that they appeared to be willing to take the argument outside? All three of us have seen this kind of passion in our students when they have participated in classroom International Relations (IR) simulations. There is something rewarding about watching a student spell out in painful detail how he doesn’t want to lie but – having read Machiavelli or Morgenthau and being surrounded by a ‘million other countries who are all looking to conquer me’ when playing the game Diplomacy – he understands that lying is the smart thing to do and regular morality can be chucked out the window. That sense of having accomplished something significant as a teacher only increases when other students in the classroom, including those that had been lied to, nod in agreement and point out how events in the game directly demonstrate aspects of various IR theories (Asal 2005).

None of Our Business: A Lack of Curricular Internationalization on the Middle East at Small to Midsize Colleges and Universities in New England.

ABSTRACT Cross-cultural competencies are now specified as critical outcomes in U.S. higher education. Yet an analysis of accredited business programs in New England revealed that students frequently were not required to take courses about the Middle East. The study findings indicate that, for a region of economic and political importance to the United States, a gap exists between the curricular internationalization signaled by accreditation and how accreditors assess this internationalization.

Using Experimental Research to Test Instructional Effectiveness: A Case Study.

ABSTRACT Cross-cultural competence is now regarded as a critical student learning outcome by many U.S. higher educational institutions. It requires in part that students be able to empathize with people whose ethno-cultural, economic, political, and/or geographic backgrounds are different from their own—a quality that we are labeling global empathy. Yet colleges and universities frequently find it difficult to develop global empathy among their students. We conducted an experiment to investigate whether different instructional techniques—traditional lecture, video news reports, and an online game—or undergraduate students’ academic majors are associated with variations in indicators of global empathy. Statistically significant variations in survey data were found only among students majoring in psychology and in responses to two survey questions. Two behavioral measures did not reveal any statistically significant variation. A larger sample, longer exposure to treatment condition, or other changes to the experimental design might elucidate stronger evidence that instructional method or undergraduate academic major affects the development of global empathy, but this type of research may not be feasible at colleges and universities where enrollments are small and faculty lack necessary resources.

Civic Engagement--A Problem in Search of a Solution?.

ABSTRACT This article discusses the use of community partnerships to produce civic engagement. In two undergraduate courses during the Fall 2016 semester, students created products that met the stated needs of local nonprofit organizations. Students indicated a positive reaction to their experiences in qualitative assessment instruments, and the community partners were appreciative of students’ output. Given the semester-long timeframe of the projects, it is unknown whether they will lead to greater civic engagement on the part of students or the communities in which the projects took place.

Review of Teaching Politics and International Relations

Academics are terrible writers and this reviewer is no exception; however, the editors of Teaching Politics and International Relations should be commended for its clear and concise wording. Contributions discuss the need for more research on the study of politics to determine what should be taught, specific teaching, assessment, and mentoring techniques and the pedagogical rationales for employing them. Because of a shift from a state-financed to a consumer-financed model of higher education, British universities have been faced with the task of educating greater numbers of students who are less academically prepared while simultaneously being subjected to tighter budgets and heightened accountability standards. Conversely, disciplinary standards and curricula still focus on delivering an undergraduate education as an academic apprenticeship in which students develop the scholarly abilities used by subject specialists. As several authors point out, this status quo has become unsustainable. According to Wyman, Lees-Marshment, and Herbert, students increasingly want to:

2011 APSA Teaching and Learning Conference Track Summaries

In a weekend of pedagogical fury, members of the Simulations and Role Play II track queried their peers to refine their ideas, presented data on the effectiveness of simulations as pedagogical tools, and shared methods of using simulations in the classroom. Paper presentations and discussions examined simulations from a variety of paradigmatic perspectives, including the use of simulations as summative assessment instruments, the role of competition in generating targeted learning outcomes, and the difficulty in balancing pedagogical objectives with design constraints.