Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Friday, September 29, 2006

From the Pros

Dr. Timothy C. Lim teaches political science at California State University, Los Angeles. He's the author of Doing Comparative Politics.

His course web site can be quite useful and he's offered his Power Points to those of us who might want to use them. The ones from last year are connected to the contents of his book.

The archived pages from last year's classes are online and complete. The pages for current courses will, I presume, be incomplete for now. On the course web site you can find Dr. Lim's syllabus, online notes, class assignments, online readings, and research tips and strategies. Some of the files are .pdf files and require Acrobat Reader, and there's a link that you can use to download Reader on Dr. Lim's site if you need it.

You can also download the syllabus (a .pdf file) of Dr. Patrick O'Neil's "Introduction to Comparative Politics" course at the University of Puget Sound.

Dr. O'Neil is the author of the textbooks Essentials of Comparative Politics, Cases for Comparative Politics (with Don Share and Karl Fields), and Essential Readings in Comparative Politics (with Ron Rogowski).

I'll bet that if you look at the web pages of a college or university near you, you can find similar helpful ideas. These post-secondary courses won't match the Advance Placement curriculum, if you need that, but there will be useful ideas.

I went looking at the two colleges in Northfield. At Carleton College's web site, I found the syllabus of Dr. Julian Westerhout's "Comparative Political Regimes" course.

At St. Olaf College's web site, I learned that the course materials are only available on an internal network and require a password.

Good ideas abound. Go look for them.

1 Comments:

At 8:28 AM, Blogger Ken Wedding said...

One other thing. If you identify someone who is teaching comparative politics at a college or university neary you, introduce yourself by e-mail. Ask questions. Invite the professor to be a guest speaker.

I know that Charles Hauss, author of Comparative Politics: Domestic Responses to Global Challenges (published by Thomson Wadsworth) has visited AP classes in the District of Columbia area, and he even visited my classes in Minnesota when he was in Minneapolis for a professional conference.

 

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