One of the more interesting and under researched questions concerning university teaching deals with the impact courses have on students’ cognitive knowledge and attitudes. While considerable attention has been devoted to “how to” increase cognitive knowledge, there have not been many attempts to study such changes in regularly taught courses. In similar fashion, there have been a variety of attempts to study attitudinal changes, but these attempts have often been unassociated with specific teaching methodology or course design. For instance, the political socialization literature has dealt with attitude formation and attitude change in college age youth, but there was little concern for the impact a specific course might have on those attitudes.

Every teacher, walking into a classroom, is confronted with the existential question of “what, specifically, am I to accomplish with this particular group of students, in this particular period of time, within the constraints and possibilities of a university learning context?” Dimly, the awareness grows that this particular 50-minute class every Monday, Wednesday, Friday over the next fifteen weeks may constitute the “political education” for a group of entry level participants in our democratic political system. What is it that these students need to learn, what skills are most appropriate for them to acquire, what bases for political action, if any, is it possible for them to develop in a university course?

It is a paradox that the level of government which is closest to us is the level that we know the least about. Local government is overseen and managed often literally by neighbors, but what the neighbors do and how they do it remain unknown quantities to most people. It might well be the responsibility of the school system to place more emphasis on local government in its curriculum. The tasks of local government, while affecting us severely (where we live?), are often not excessively complicated.

One such important task that can be studied in the classroom is zoning. Zoning is the dividing of the local jurisdiction into areas designated for particular uses; other uses are prohibited. For instance, some parts of the city or county may be designated for residential use, other parts for business, and still other zones for manufacturing.

Focus Many courses on comparative communism traditionally make mention of artistic and political dissidents, but exclusive reliance on political science source materials often fails to demonstrate the variety of thought patterns within communist societies. A multi-disciplinary course which specifically draws attention to various “political dreams” can enable students to become more aware of the richness of thought patterns within communist societies.

A January term in which students took part in one course for four weeks provided an ideal setting for teaching such a course. Through daily reading assignments and discussions class members discovered four main categories of dissident political dreams. First, a number of writers challenged the system of one-party control by advocating an effective separation of powers among governmental institutions such as the legislature and the courts.

While the resort to terror is as old as recorded history, the start of the age of modern terrorism may be exemplified by the horrors of the Munich Massacre in 1972. During that tragedy a small dedicated group of terrorists were able through the mass media to seize the world's headlines and spread a message of fear and intimidation to a global audience. The revolution in communications coupled with the introduction of commercial jet aircraft enabled the modern practitioners of terrorism to strike at targets of opportunity on an international basis. This capacity was not shared by even the most committed terrorist of the past.

Within the discipline of political science, terrorism until the 70's was largely studied under the areas of war and revolution along with the growing field of comparative political violence, international terrorism was not studied as an individual subject until Munich, when the countless skyjackings, bombings and assassinations served to underscore that contemporary terrorism had indeed become “A New Mode of Conflict.“

For a number of years the Cal Poly Political Science Department has team taught a course with ROTC staff in National Strategies. This juniorlevel course is taken by both military science and political science students. Because of the diversity in their academic backgrounds, students taking this class need a written exercise that will give each participant experience in preparing the kinds of position papers that are required in government and the military. This exercise has been devised to provide students with such an experience. We believe that this Crisis Response exercise can be used in almost any international affairs class where there is a desire to emphasize clear, precise analysis in an area studies setting.

The conventional introductory course rests upon the pedagogical assumption that the teacher's function is to transmit information (or knowledge) and that the student's function is to receive it. According to this transmitter-receiver model of the educational process, teaching begins with a “knower” who “transmits” what he knows to a “learner.” In higher education, certain euphemisms are employed to soften and furnish a color of legitimacy to this model: the teacher is a “scholar,” and “authority,” in his field; he possesses an “expert knowledge” which the student has come to school to “learn“; the student is the “learner.” The teacher's role, accordingly, is the active one of transmitting information and the student's role, accordingly, is the passive one of receiving and recording (or memorizing) this information.

It's an evening network news show. The camera zooms in on Ted Kennedy speaking to an enthusiastic crowd in San Diego, while the voiceover sonorously ends a brief report with, “Can the Senator get the voters to forget about Chappaquidick?” It is a 30-second news item. Question: have we just seen a piece of nonfiction film or a mini-documentary? The Kennedy staffers will be outraged; others will insist that the coverage merely told it like it is. Yet those same staffers will be pleased several months later when the networks cover the Senator's speech to the Democratic convention by showing wildly cheering partisans, while the cameras pass over the many delegates who are either sitting on their hands or just chatting with each other. Others will claim that the coverage of the speech was visually distorted. They may all be right, but they may not be

The purpose of this note is to provide some guidance in advising prelaw students who wish to specialize in international law. Two broad difficulties occur for most of us who are advising students. The first is a lack of awareness of the programs available in schools other than the most prestigious ones. The second difficulty ties into the first one since many of our advisees have little chance of getting into the nationally well-known schools. There is little problem when one is advising a'student who has a L.S.A.T. of 700+ and G.P.A. of 3.5 or better. The task is harder when the advisee has a cornbination of around 600/3.0, even though this is a good student who can get into most law schools in the country.