Jamie Longazel is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Research Fellow at the Human Rights Center at the University of Dayton. 

I teach a unit on legal education in my Law & Society course. Among other lessons, I use it as an opportunity to introduce students to feminist legal theory.

We read a chapter from Becoming Gentlemen by Lani Guinier, Michelle Fine, and Jane Balin, a chapter from What Works for Women at Work by Joan Williams and Rachel Dempsey, and a provocative essay about sexism and public bathrooms.

Students always told me the unit reminds them of the 2001 film Legally Blonde starring Reese Witherspoon, and insisted that I show it in class.

Over and again, I dismissed their pleas, even without having seen the film. How could it not be problematic?
In time, I gave in. I promised I would at least watch the movie. And if it turned out to be appropriate, I would consider showing it the following year.

The first thirty minutes or so confirmed my suspicions: It was pure garbage, nothing but stereotypes.
Just when I was about to give up on it, however, there was a shift. I stood corrected. It may suffer from inaccuracies, but we could definitely use it to start a conversation about feminist legal theory.

To my students’ delight, I have shown the film in class each of the last two years. I use it to set up an in-class debate around the question, “Is Legally Blonde a feminist film?”

I’m not about to launch into a full analysis here; after all, I wouldn’t want my future students to stumble upon this post and use it to give their side an advantage in the debate. Instead, let me simply note a few highlights from this year’s debate.

Those who argued ‘yes, Legally Blonde is a feminist film’ said…

• The film challenges the idea that feminism is ‘anti-feminine.’ All women are included – even Reese Witherspoon’s character, Elle Woods, who studies fashion and wears exuberant amounts of pink. Feminism is about being yourself.
  
• The film depicts women, as our student judge so wonderfully summarized, “unlearning the patriarchy.” For example, while Elle’s ex-boyfriend Warner pitted Elle and his new girlfriend, Vivian, against one another, in time the two became friends after realizing their shared interests as women.   
• Rather than being saved by a man, Elle’s female law professor picks Elle up when she is down after bumping into her at the salon.

Those who argued ‘no, Legally Blonde is not a feminist film’ said…

• This is upper class, white feminism. Women from backgrounds different from Elle’s would not be able to pull off what she did.
  
• The ‘be who you are’ message aside, stereotypes remained rampant – especially, for example, among Elle’s sorority sisters, who received almost no character development. 
• Over and again, the objectification of Elle is what placed her in the prominent positions that led to her success, sending a subtle message that she is not competent otherwise.

As you can see, students on both sides come up with some solid arguments. What I like most about the exercise is that the ambiguity makes for a good debate. I also appreciate how my law school-bound students relish the opportunity to make a case in front of a crowd, particularly the women, who, not surprisingly, tend to be much more engaged in this activity.

This year, the “yes team” won the debate. Although next year, it just may go the other way.  

Matthew Canfield is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at New York University, writing his dissertation on food sovereignty and global governance.

If mainstream pundits and scholars weren’t already frightened of Donald Trump, that surely changed during the second presidential debate when he threatened to jail Hillary Clinton. Trump’s off-hand threat to Clinton—“because you’d be in jail”—drew criticism from commentators and scholars across the political spectrum for his clear disregard for the principles of rule of law.  
 
Of course, this was neither the first, nor the only time that he revealed his attitude towards legal principles and conventions. From his unconstitutional calls to round up and deport millions of Muslims, to his rejection of the exoneration of the Central Park 5, to his refusal to abide by the rulings of the National Labor Relations Board, Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he holds the same instrumental view of law that he holds for basic facts.
 
Trump’s legal ideology reflects a worldview that reduces everything down to deal-making. Indeed, with over 3,500 legal actions, Trump is America’s most litigious president. Like a socio-legal scholar, Trump understands that law is an arena where “the haves come out ahead,” using lawsuits to bully his critics and workers. His crude legal ideology could easily be described by the Soviet legal theorist Evgeny Pashukanis’ critique that the Western “concept of justice is drawn from the exchange relationship, and expresses nothing outside of it.”
 
Yet Trump not only exploits law for his own gain, he has also claimed to speak on behalf of it. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Trump howled “I am the law and order candidate!” against a brooding dark backdrop festooned with American flags. By painting an apocalyptic portrait in which, “The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life,” he drew on the specter of violence and racial anxiety to claim his own authority.
 
Trump’s mimicry of Nixon’s law-and-order rhetoric along with his less-than-subtle racism reflects a world in which some populations—people of color, women, and queers—are more subject to punitive legal measures than others.
 
As we confront the looming horizon of his presidency, how must we address this contradiction? What does this election teach us about law? And, how can we prepare ourselves and our students for the Age of Trump?
 
These questions have been at the top of my mind as I have reflected on the way I teach my undergraduate “Law & Society” course. Trump’s victory came amid a module on law and social change, in which we were examining what historian Carol Anderson has recently termed “White Rage” in response to the Brown decision. While this election appeared to be an echo of the past—a re-entrenchment of white heteropatriarchy in the face of popular uprisings by people of color and legal victories by the LGBT movement—the reduction of this counter-mobilization to racial or sexual antipathy fails to account for the larger political shifts that we are not only seeing domestically, but also globally. 

Anxieties of Power and Racial Populism
 
Seen from a global perspective, Donald Trump’s election, like the Brexit referendum, reflects a rising tide of right-wing political movements that are exploiting popular concerns over declining economic power and long-standing racial anxiety to launch their parties to power. The similarities and shared symbols between these two major votes is instructive.
 
In Britain, Nigel Farage, the former head of the UK Independence Party, stoked the fears of distressed working class Brits about immigrants that, he claimed, were taking over their jobs. Like Trump’s election, the Brexit vote was won by a coalition of white working class voters. Moreover, like Trump’s mantra to “Make America Great Again,” Farage called on Brits make Brexit their “Independence Day” and “take back control.” A giddy photo of Farage and Trump set amidst the gleaming gilded elevator of Trump Tower days after the US election, confirmed Trump’s hope that the US election would be “Brexit times 10.”
 
Both Brexit and Trump—as well as the growing political strength of right-wing nationalist parties in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Brazil—serve as a reminder of the enduring ties between race, national sovereignty, and economic power. Indeed, as post-colonial scholars have demonstrated, sovereignty is often articulated within a grammar of racial difference that serves to secure access to economic resources. In settler colonial states, such as the United States, continued articulations of racial difference are asserted within a global political economic context of declining economic strength.
 
Today, as the economic center of global capitalism pivots away from its former transatlantic axis and domestic economic inequality grows, those workers who once embraced a more egalitarian redistributive economic vision during times of prosperity are now left clinging to the symbolic wages that W.E.B. DuBois referred to as the “psychological wage of whiteness.” (It is no wonder that White Nationalists are now enjoying mainstream popular attention as they celebrate the rise of Trump.) For as economic inequality widens, Trump offered a voice for his white working class supporters’ affective and symbolic sentiments of superiority.
 
As socio-legal scholars, we know that these forms of power—racial, economic, and political—are facilitated by law. Indeed, as critical race theorists such as Ian Lopez have demonstrated, race is a socio-legal construction that has been constituted physically, symbolically, and materially through the violence of law.  Global trade agreements, campaign finance laws, voter suppression, and mass incarceration are critical sites of law that were crucial in constructing neoliberalism. In an Age of Trump, Brexit, and other movements of right-wing populism, these sites will remain essential in constructing new racialized regimes of power.
 
In short, Trump’s election reminds us that we cannot teach Law & Society solely within a domestic context. To do so reproduces a narrative of American exceptionalism that conceals the relationship between race, power, and global political-economic formations. Perhaps more importantly, however, it prevents our students from understanding the global coalitions of solidarity that are increasingly important within a context of global interdependence and governance.

In New Orleans last June, as part of the Law and Society Association's annual meeting, the Consortium sponsored three professional development panels meant to serve people at teaching-centered institutions, within undergraduate studies programs everywhere, and who are graduate students and faculty interested in pedagogy and student research.   As part of the program, we sponsored a Teaching Café, featuring ideas from faculty at a range of institutions who use moot courts, mock trials, legislative lobbying, citizen-police training, and so much more to engage students in an immersive undergraduate legal studies education.
 
A second panel focused on the relationship between legal studies and the law school environment, from the perspective of undergraduate faculty.  In conversation with audience members, the panelists noted the diversity of student expectations for undergraduate legal studies: many want to go to law school, some into the field of criminal justice, and some go directly into the workforce.  Still others hope to pursue doctoral education in a field related to “law and society.”  Given this varied set of expectations from our undergraduates, as well as our institutional relationships (to law schools and offices of admissions, for example), and our own intellectual commitments, how can we best serve our students in learning about the connections between law, society, and culture?
 
CULJP also sponsored a panel on landing a law and society job at a teaching-centered institution.  This panel was exceptionally well-attended, with nearly fifty attendees interested in thinking about the job search process.  Our panelists, from both teaching-centered and research-oriented institutions, represented a range of professional identities – from newly hired faculty to department chairs and deans. Those who attended the panel asked a variety of questions that ranged from how to prepare a teaching statement for a job in an interdisciplinary department, to how to present oneself in a cover letter, to the benefits and drawbacks of applying for jobs not specifically listed as law and society but that have the potential to allow scholars to continue to do law and society work within specific disciplines.
 
Were you an attendee or panelist at one of these professional development events at Law and Society 2016?  If so, what did you find most useful?  What did you learn?  Answer in comments to keep the dialogue alive – and look for more opportunities like this to connect, in Mexico City 2017!

Joanna Grisinger is an Associate Professor of Instruction at the Center for Legal Studies at Northwestern University and a CULJP board member.

I know I’m not the only one thinking about how to use (the now-Tony-award-winning) “Hamilton” in my classroom next year, so I wanted to share some resources I’ve been gathering about the musical. 

First, how to listen? The show is sung-through, so the cast album allows one to listen to (if not see) the complete show. The cast album is streaming on Spotify and Amazon Prime, and is available for purchase on iTunes and Amazon. The 2016 book Hamilton: The Revolution (the “Hamiltome”) contains lyrics and essays about the development of the musical; Lin-Manuel Miranda has provided additional lyrical annotations at genius.com. A lengthy 2015 New Yorker profile of Miranda  provides some background about the creation of the musical, and Miranda’s 2009 performance of the first song at the White House offers a hint of the success to come.  

Source materials for the musical include Joanne Freeman's Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (Yale University Press, 2002), Joanne Freeman, ed., Alexander Hamilton: Writings (Library of America, 2001), and Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton (Penguin, 2004).

The Gilder Lehrman Institute has put together a wealth of essays, primary sources, and teaching materials on Alexander Hamilton. In addition, a huge number of primary sources on the American Revolution and the Constitution are available through Yale's Project Avalon, including the full text of the Federalist Papers. Another great source is the Founders' Constitution ("the Oxford English Dictionary of American constitutional history"), which is fully available online.

Historian Lyra D. Monteiro (Rutgers-Newark) has a critical essay for The Public Historian on “Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton" (Feb. 2016). Prof. Monteiro's essay elicited thoughtful responses from Jason Allen (New Jersey Council for the Humanities), David Dean (Carleton University), Ellen Noonan (American Social History Project, CUNY), and 
Annette Gordon-Reed (Harvard Law School). Monteiro's own response is here.

Discussion of the politics and historical accuracy can also be found in the Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History, the New York Times and Slate, while an article in Vox argues that “Hamilton is fanfic, and its historical critics are totally missing the point.”

For coverage in podcast form: Backstory with the American History Guys has posted a podcast entitled "Hamilton: A History." The National Constitution Center has posted a podcast entitled "Hamilton, the Man and the Musical," with guests Annette Gordon-Reed (Harvard Law School) and Michael Klarman (Harvard Law School).  

Finally, Richard Primus (University of Michigan Law School) asks, “Will Lin-Manuel Miranda Transform the Supreme Court?” As he suggests, “Within the foreseeable future, a jurisprudence of original meanings may fuel the most progressive constitutional decision making since the days of Chief Justice Earl Warren. Just you wait.”

Updated: 

• R.E. Fulton at Nursing Clio has written on "Hamilton as a Model for Women’s History."
• The New York Times on "The Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton" at institutions across New York City; the article contains lots of useful links. 

Clare Keefe Coleman, Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law, published "Teaching the Torture Memos: 'Making Decision Under Conditions of Uncertainty'" in the Journal of Legal Education (62 J. Legal Educ. 81 (2012)); it may be of interest to anyone looking to teach these sources in an undergraduate course.

Renee Cramer is associate professor and chair of Law, Politics, and Society at Drake University; she is also President of the Consortium of Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs.

As I noted last month, students who hold marginalized social identities may find the social justice teaching tool, “The Line,” to be alienating and isolating.  But the impulse behind the activity is good – and it is important that we help our students see and understand privilege – whether or not they hold it.  I was fortunate to participate in a version of this exercise, which I will call a “Continuum of Identities and Experiences,” and brought the exercise back to two of my classrooms.   In all three of my experiences with it – as a participant, and as a facilitator – I found it to be incredibly powerful.
 
I have taught this exercise as part of my Critical Race and Feminist Theory course, and I alert students the week before the exercise that we will be exploring privilege, power, and personal experiences on a particular class session.  I do the exercise after at least six weeks of course work, and in the context of a caring and compassionate community of learners.   It is also done in the context of a class, and a set of relationships, where students have ready access to information they might need, in order to support their emotional engagement with the material (phone numbers for campus counseling, peer mentors, rape crisis lines, AA and NA meetings, etc.).
 
We began by reading a poem, “Please Call Me By My True Names,” by Buddhist monk and poet Thich Nhat Hahn.    Each of us read a line or two, then passed to another.  After the poem, we sat in silence for just a few moments – then I reminded students that our class conversations are confidential, and asked students to come and join me at the center of the room.    I told them that at any time that they don’t want to place themselves on the continuum, they can come back to the center, and that I will join them there.
 
I then explained: “We will be arranging ourselves on a continuum of experience – lets start with an easy one: Will the oldest person in the room, go stand at the chalkboard end of the room, and the youngest stand at the far wall?  Everyone else, just arrange yourself in order, along the continuum.”  I then walk to the chalkboard end of the room – in my forties, I’m usually (but not always) the oldest.  I also tell students that they are free to talk during this exercise if they want to arrange themselves according to month of birth within a given year, for instance.
 
What tends to happen, right away, is that a whole clump of students who are 19 and 20 stand near the far wall, and I am lonely near the chalk board.  I say that anyone who wants to talk about where they are on the continuum is welcome to – perhaps there is a returning/non-traditional student in the room, who offers a few words about what it is like to be ten years older than most of the students – or a 17 year old who has brought so many credits from high school that she has junior standing already.  Someone almost always mentions how they never noticed that they were all the same age … it was something they took for granted until the exercise pointed it out.  Anyone who wants to briefly speak, can. 

I then ask them a series of questions that will enable them to place themselves on a continuum of experience, and offer the same opportunity to reflect.  The questions can be done in any order, can be omitted or tailored to suit your group, and ask students to place themselves on a continuum of –

• How literate were your grandparents (Very to Not at all)?
• Where were you in terms of birth order in your family (oldest to youngest)?
• How much money did you have, growing up (lots and lots to none at all)?
• How far from your home did you travel to be at this university?
• How comfortable do you feel at this university, in terms of your social identities?
• How conventional is your sex life?
• How much violence have you experienced in your life?
• How many animals did you have as pets growing up?
• How close are you to “white” in terms of your racial identity?
• How many ethnicities contribute to your identity?
• How many hours a week do you work, for pay, while going to school?
• How many dependents do you have responsibility for, while going to school?
• How far from the United States were  you born?
• How many languages were spoken in your home?
• How often are you the only person of your own race, in a given situation (work, school, church)?
• How close to bullying have you been (as a bully, or as someone who has been bullied)?
• How closely do you identify with conventional gender norms?

You can see that some of these questions will elicit stronger responses than others  - but you may be surprised at which ones bring up the most for your students.  When I did the activity, the “birth order” question hit me really hard: I am an only child of my mom and dad, the middle child of 6 step-siblings in two different families, and the oldest of the diad of my younger step-sister and me, in the home I grew up in.  I couldn’t figure out where to stand – so I sat in the middle.  I cried.  I was happy to be joined by the wonderful Rhonda Magee, who was also a participant in the workshop.
 
When I took students through the exercise, they had a lot of fun with sexual identity questions, and we found the responses to “how often are you the only person of your own race…” interesting.  Certainly, the African American students in the room had this feeling often; they were surprised to hear from one or two white students who attended majority-minority high schools, who spent much of their younger years feeling isolated.   The question about family finances also hit home for many students, in ways that disrupted racial stereotypes as well as geographic stereotypes – our rural students come from small towns, but might be well-off farm kids, for instance.
 
The question about proximity to violence was, honestly, horrible.  On the one hand, it was beautiful to see so many students recognize in each other the common bond they shared at having been subject to intimate partner violence, parental violence, gun violence … on the other, it was disheartening and, frankly, terrifying, to have at least half of the room identify themselves as having been “very close” to violence in their short lives. 
 
We spent an hour with the exercise (not doing every question, certainly!), and I ended with the one about pets as a way to help students wrap up their feelings and have a lighter conversation.  We then just sat for a few minutes in a circle, and I thanked them for their good will and participation.  I reminded them that we weren’t sharing what we heard outside of this room, I invited them to use the resources we have on campus and in our city if the exercise had brought up any difficult-to-process emotions, and I asked them to reflect on what the exercise showed them about privilege.  I then gave them two to three minutes to write their responses to that last prompt down, and we used those notes during the next class period, as well as specific readings on privilege and being an ally, to jumpstart our conversation.
 
In all, students responded extremely well to the exercise – though I have to stress that several of them had intense emotional reactions that required care during facilitation and in our subsequent relationship.   I believe that we need to educate “the whole student,” and that helping students see where they hold privilege, where they have trauma in common with others, where they might find solidarity, and where they might be allies and advocates is an important task  - not only of emancipatory education in general, but of interdisciplinary legal studies, in particular. ​

The Journal of Legal Education hosted a 2014 symposium on teaching "The Wire" in the law school classroom; these articles might also be of interest to anyone looking to bring the tv show into the undergraduate classroom. A link to the articles is here:

• Roger A. Fairfax, "​Teaching The Wire: Integrating Capstone Policy Content into the Criminal Law Curriculum"
• Andrea L. Dennis, "Teaching The Wire: Crime, Evidence and Kids"
• Brian R. Gallini, "HBO's The Wire and Criminal Procedure: A Match Made in Heaven"
• Adam M. Gershowitz, "The Wire as a Gap-Filling Class on Criminal Law and Procedure"
• Kristin Henning, "Teaching Fiction?: The Wire as a Pedagological Tool in the Examination of Punishment Theory"
• Josephine Ross, "Teaching Scholarship Through a Seminar on The Wire"

Renee Cramer is associate professor and chair of Law, Politics, and Society at Drake University; she is also President of the Consortium of Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs.

Maybe you’ve seen the video circulating social media lately, highlighting “The Line” as an important teaching tool on privilege and social identity? Those of us who teach issues relating to social justice are likely familiar with it, and may have used an exercise similar to it in our classes. I’ve talked about this exercise quite a bit, with friends and colleagues who have done it, or have used it – and while we all have agreed that it is a valuable tool, I’ve been attentive to those voices that say things like:

• “When I was all by myself off that line it only highlighted how isolated I am, how unique my experiences are.”
•  “It felt alienating to be all alone out there in the middle of the room, like: hey!  I’m a queer black activist who’s parents didn’t make a lot of money.” 
• “It made me wish I could be like everyone else.”

In other words, the exercise has the valuable impact of teaching privileged students about their privilege – but perhaps at the expense of those students in class who don’t hold much privilege themselves.

A few years ago, I had the chance to participate in a different form of this exercise – one I found nourishing  - while also emotionally challenging.  I was at a conference hosted by the Association for Contemplative Practice in Higher Education, in a session facilitated by Doreen Maller, a therapist, professor, and social justice activist.  The exercise was fundamentally similar to The Line, with a key difference:  we didn’t step behind or in front of a line – we all stood on a continuum of experience, and moved freely about the room, finding our space within community, not separate from it.

Since returning from the 2012 conference of the ACHE, I have used this exercise twice in my “Critical Race and Feminist Theory” classrooms – and have found it to be incredibly powerful for students, as well as useful to getting at some of the issues relating to standpoint epistemology, intersectionality, and anti-essentialism that I hope students will understand from their reading.  

In my next blog post, I will describe the exercise, and student responses to it!

The 112th APSA Annual Meeting will be in Philadelphia September 1 – 4, 2016. The theme will be “Great Transformations: Political Science and the Big Questions of Our Time.” The deadline for proposals is January 8, 2016. 

Indivual divisions have their own calls for papers; calls from the division of Teaching and Learning in Political Science and Political Science Education (below) may be of particular interest to CULJP blog readers. 
All divisions listed at: http://community.apsanet.org/annualmeeting/call/divisions#DIV26​ 

DIVISION 9: TEACHING AND LEARNING IN POLITICAL SCIENCE
Division Chair: Mitchell Brown, Auburn University
The discipline of political science has changed tremendously over time, from the substance of our research, to the methods used to produce it, to the deliver of this to students in the classroom. In addition, the classroom itself has been transformed over time, including the characteristics of both learners and teachers, methods of instruction, and the medium of instruction. Consistent with this year’s conference theme, we encourage paper and panel proposals that address these issues, exploring how the transformations in the discipline have changed education in the discipline. Other issues to consider could include:

COURSE-SPECIFIC STRATEGIES AND PEDAGOGICAL TOOLS.  What innovations, simulations, role-play exercises, blended or on-line learning approaches, or class activities have developed that enhance teaching and learning? 

INFORMATION LITERACY AND DATA ANALYSIS. How has the wide-spread availability of material, some based in fact and some fabricated, changed the demands on what and how we teach as well as the classroom experience? What techniques best facilitate the information literacy of our students?  What skills do our students, both undergraduate and graduate, need to have to be successful after graduation? How are these skills best developed?

ASSESSMENT. How has the transformation of the discipline changed teaching and learning with respect to assessment of our efforts? Which assessment approaches and tools are most useful, and which are only burdensome? What impact has the increased focus on assessment had on our students, courses or departments?

Per the mission of this section and as the questions above suggest, we encourage a wide range of topics for papers and panels, including but not limited to innovations in curriculum and program design, classroom teaching, instructional technology, experiential learning, online courses, graduate training, undergraduate research, advising and mentoring, administration, and assessment.  Priority will be placed on proposals that have a systematic evidence base where appropriate. The Teaching and Learning section is strongly committed to honoring the diversity of institutions with which ASPA members are associated, and we welcome submissions from political scientists at community colleges and two-year institutions, as well as from four-year colleges and universities.


DIVISION 10: POLITICAL SCIENCE EDUCATION
Division Chair: Patrick McKinlay, Morningside College
Political Science Education encourages the development and delivery of innovative pedagogies that provide political science students dynamic learning experiences that inspire civic engagement, curiosity regarding political change, and the acquisition of skills and knowledge to understand change and develop strategies to respond to change.  The theme for the 2016 Annual Meeting is Great Transformations:  Political Science and the Big Questions of Our Time, a focus central to the mission of political science education and to learning itself.  Great Transformations include the extraordinary shifts that often capture most political science inquiry: revolutions, regime change, conflict and peace, the emergence of new political actors, the dawning of political ideals.  Big Questions are often examined by political scientists to trace more incremental developments that exhibit significant but more long-term changes that transform the political environment including climate change, rising inequalities, or shifts in prevailing social values.

Transformation obviously lies at the heart of political science education in so far as the educational experience is itself potentially transformational.   What new questions and patterns are changing the topics we teach, the methods of inquiry we adopt, the media we utilize to engage students in these profound questions? What new pedagogies are being deployed to introduce students, at all levels, to the Big Questions facing them as citizens and future leaders?  How is our assessment of student learning attending to changes in our student profile, their preparation for higher education, shifts toward vocational applications, and implications of their education for post-graduate personal and professional success?  As the Annual Meeting theme encourages papers focused on Great Transformation and Big Questions, we encourage similar themes for the section that highlight research on transformation in the delivery and practice of political science education.  How is the classroom and lecture being transformed by changes in technology that augment student learning?  How do new pedagogical practices including simulations, cross-disciplinary and inter-institutional interactions, and others changes in educational practice provide students opportunities for developing skills for effective citizenship and political analysis?  How might students be encouraged to develop their own big questions and research designs?  What pedagogies provide new avenues for accessibility to political inquiry, including new experiments in internships, externships, and off-campus learning?  How is our political science curricula evolving to address the many transformations not only in the political environment, but in higher educational generally through interdisciplinary, inter-institutional, and public-private collaborations?  How do the various political science sub-disciplines re-imagine their pedagogy to best engage their students in grasping the transformative forces changing the political realm?

We encourage proposals on a wide array of political science education initiatives and research, including innovative approaches to disseminating using diverse formats.  Another transformation encouraged by the theme is for sections to experiment with how to best utilize the Annual Meeting for extraordinary exchange and mutual learning through an openness to diverse formats for proposals.  Indeed, political science education has a long history of utilizing a broad range of program formats.  While individuals may propose traditional papers and panels, the Association is also interested in other settings including Mini-conferences that are extended time-blocs focused on some theme, Research Cafés, Sequential Paper presentations where scholars can receive feedback from an exclusive discussant, Roundtables, Author(s) Meet Critics sessions, Short Courses (perhaps not limited to Wednesday), and Poster Presentations with Discussants. 
Per the mission of this section and as the questions above suggest, we encourage a wide range of topics for papers and (theme) panels, including but not limited to innovations in curriculum and program design, classroom teaching, instructional technology, experiential learning, online courses, graduate training, undergraduate research, advising and mentoring, administration, and assessment. 

The Political Science Education section is strongly committed to honoring the diversity of institutions with which ASPA members are associated, and we welcome submissions from political scientists at community colleges and two-year institutions, as well as from four-year colleges and universities.

*Mary Nell Trautner is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, and a CULJP board member.

Meet Alex.

This past spring, I taught a Social Problems course for the first time (this is a 200-level Sociology course). Well, actually, I taught half of the course--my colleague Robert Adelman taught the other half, and we each taught our halves in Buffalo and on our campus in Singapore, switching locales halfway through the semester (our university runs a bachelor’s degree program in Singapore, so we regularly send faculty over to teach). It was a fun course to share--we each were able to teach topics and problems that we knew something about and found interesting.

One of the social problems I chose to cover in my half of the course was mass incarceration. Students already knew a lot about imprisonment and were fairly unimpressed with my slides full of statistics and graphs. So, I tried to spend a good amount of time talking about effects of incarceration, not just on the person in--or formerly in--prison (for example, employment, college admissions, and voting), but also on neighborhoods, and especially, the effects of incarceration on loved ones.

We didn’t have time to read the excellent new book Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality by Sara Wakefield and Christopher Wildeman, but we did have time to consider the effects of parental incarceration on children by watching a segment of Sesame Street*. Meet Alex, one of the newest muppet characters:

Students in both Singapore and the U.S. had very strong reactions to Sesame Street’s incorporation of a character with incarcerated parents. Everyone recognized that Sesame Street was trying to normalize the experience (shared by over 2.7 million children in the U.S.), but students were divided as to whether that normalization was a Very Good or Very Bad Idea. Some students felt that there was value in kids feeling shameful and ostracized because they had a parent in prison -- these students argued that those negative feelings would have a powerful deterrent effect later in life. Others, however, argued that kids should be held blameless for their parents’ actions and should be able to feel “normal” and comfortable, that they shouldn’t have to hide anything or feel ashamed. In both classrooms, we moved on to have a great discussion about the ripple effects of incarceration and the purpose of punishment. This discussion seemed particularly poignant in Singapore, where students don’t typically question government or police practices, including capital punishment and other forms of retributive justice.

In all, a video clip less than 3 minutes long spurred a great deal of discussion (even in Singapore, where students are notoriously quiet) where we covered a lot of terrain. If you’re looking for a new angle on mass incarceration, I highly recommend!

* I learned about Alex through Chris Uggen’s excellent Public Criminology blog.