Contemporary political discourse often presents controversial policy topics (e.g., public lands, climate change, and immigration) in a bimodal manner—either for or against. As a result, can our classrooms provide a space for students to learn how to construct solutions that broker various perspectives? For students to reconcile policy differences, I designed a series of debate panels across a semester. The focus of this article is to describe the details of the debate panels so they can be replicated in educational settings. Moreover, the debate panels embody active or experiential learning for students to become informed participants of US public-policy making.

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.

The study of women and US politics, as well as the role that gender plays in the broader political context, represents a significant contribution to the discipline of political science. Undergraduate courses on women/gender and politics continue to evolve as more innovative pedagogical approaches emerge. We considered the current trends and challenges related to teaching an undergraduate women/gender and politics course within political science. Through a survey of instructors, we assessed contemporary pedagogical approaches that reflect common learning outcomes, instructional resources that are available to undergraduate instructors, and challenges that instructors face in both offering and teaching this course. We found that institutions generally consider women/gender and politics courses to be tertiary parts of the curriculum and that a majority of faculty who teach these courses face pushback from students in ways that dismiss the importance of studying gender as a variable in political science.

Content analysis is the process of turning text into data, with either automated or manual techniques, and it provides a feasible and attractive option for undergraduate students to develop and utilize original data. This article presents a cohesive framework for teaching computerized content analysis in undergraduate political science courses. The article discusses examples of how we have taught the techniques in our own classrooms and provides a framework for a content-analysis research assignment. We describe coding, sources of text data available to students, software recommendations appropriate for students, and write-up issues. In the process, we also discuss various learning opportunities that arise from both the strengths and weaknesses of computerized content analysis as a methodological strategy.

This article outlines a classroom simulation of Kalyvas’s control–collaboration model of violence in civil war. Although central to conflict studies, the control–collaboration model has not been previously simulated so that it may be taught in an intuitive manner to advanced undergraduate students. The simulation presents students with strategic choices available to both armed actors and noncombatants in a contested village. The simulation captures three core elements of the control–collaboration model: (1) the joint production of violence by combatants and noncombatants; (2) the concentration of selective violence in zones of partial control; and (3) the disjuncture between a conflict’s master and local cleavages.