Teaching Comparative

Starting a new course?

My favorite opening activity for a comparative course has long been one form or another of pretest. Nearly all of my students appeared in class blithely naive about political systems beyond the borders of the USA. (Some of them were blithely naive about the political system in the USA.)

My favorite pretest asked students to provide the official name of the countries we were going to study, the names of the head of state and head of government (those two questions always caused consternation and learning), and then to rank the countries in a number of geographic, economic, and demographic categories. The conclusion was to ask students to hypothesize what relevance those statistics have for politics and government.

For the ranking questions, I enjoyed displaying the questions and having the class as a whole publicly try to construct the rankings. I thought the exercise was valuable enough that I made it the first teaching plan in the book of lesson plans for AP Comparative that I wrote for The Center for Learning.

Rebecca Small wrote from Virginia that she added another dimension to the plan.

She set her students to work looking up the data to complete the rankings of the countries, and then she asked them to take the first steps in a comparative analysis.

She asked them to choose two sets of data that they thought were related to one another and look at the rankings for the countries in those sets of data. Then came the analytical questions.

She asked them if they thought the two sets of rankings were correlations or causations? And of course she asked students to explain their reasoning.

In other words if the UK ranked first in both per capita GDP and population density (to choose one possible pair of rankings), did those rankings display correlation or causation? And why or why not?

I suggested that she might want to follow up with a further venture into comparative thinking.

The 7th teaching plan in the Center for Learning book (p. 29) asks students to identify independent variables, dependent variables, and constants in a hypothetical comparison of political and economic changes in Russia and China. The lesson then asks students to describe evidence that would support and what evidence would contradict the hypothesis described.

Finally, the last question, which is really more for discussion than anything else, asks students to identify ways this political science comparison is more and/or less scientific than an experiment in a chemistry or physics lab. Discussions I had with students on that topic were almost always interesting. (Of course, students often wanted to know what the "right answer" was and I had no "right answer.")

Rebecca Small said the lessons went well. If you have questions, add them here as comments.

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Labels: pedagogy

posted by Ken Wedding @ 8:45 PM