Continental Perspectives and the Study of Politics

1985 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 15-17
Author(s):  
Fred Dallmayr
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Science Teachers ◽  
Intellectual Style ◽  
Science Conference

Anyone attending a political science conference these days is likely to be overwhelmed by the extreme heterogeneity of viewpoints and approaches, a heterogeneity sometimes resembling a hopeless Babel of tongues. For decades there had been talk of paradigm changes and of the erosion of “mainstream” assumptions in the discipline; more recently, this ferment has been heightened by the influx of novel perspectives whose vocabulary and intellectual style bear a distinctly continental cast. Professional reaction to these perspectives has been varied: greeted by some as instant remedies they are bemoaned by others as alien intruders threatening an already fragile consensus. I perceive them as idioms in an ongoing conversation whose lines of argument are not merely whimsical and deserve the attention of political science teachers.

Using the Concept "Development" to Teach Contemporary Issues

1987 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 15-15
Author(s):  
John L. Seitz
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Science Teachers ◽  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Concept Development ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Current Events ◽  
The Third World ◽  
Science Classes ◽  
Responsible Manner

Why don't political science teachers teach their students about many of the important policy issues that political systems face today? Why is it uncommon in undergraduate political science classes to find discussions of the population explosion and famine in the Third World, and of acid rain and toxic wastes in the First and Second worlds? Why aren't our students knowledgeable about the arguments for and against nuclear power and acquainted with the problems the world faces as it moves from a reliance on oil to a reliance on renewable fuels? And why do we often ignore such awesome issues as those connected with the greenhouse effect and nuclear war? I believe that the answer to these questions is that political science teachers often don't know how to deal with these subjects in a respected, scholarly way — in a manner that will prevent the class from just becoming a forum for the discussion of current events. I believe also that we have a concept — development — which can serve as the necessary tool we need to allow us to approach these issues in a responsible manner.

University of East Africa Social Science Conference

1966 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 538-540
Author(s):  
Martin Lowenkopf
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Political Science ◽  
East Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Rural Settlement ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Science Conference ◽  
The University ◽  
Political Decisions ◽  
Economic Criteria

This conference brought together over 70 social scientists from the Kenyan, Tanzanian, and Ugandan constituent Colleges of the University of East Africa (with visitors from Zambia, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, and Rhodesia) for their annual inter-disciplinary, or rather trans-disciplinary, deliberations. Why ‘trans-disciplinary’? Because the historians discussed nationalism, politics, and church movements; political scientists discoursed on economics, rural settlement, agriculture, and education; sociologists criticised political decisions and economic criteria which hampered their investigations into resettlement programmes; and the economists, while speaking mostly about economics, were represented at virtually all panels, apparently to guard their disciplinary preserve against intrusions, presumptions and, in one case, elision with political science.

scholarly journals Gender, Diversity, and Methods in Political Science: A Theory of Selection and Survival Biases

2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (03) ◽  
pp. 811-823 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shauna L. Shames ◽  
Tess Wise
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Gender Diversity ◽  
Hard Core ◽  
Core Data ◽  
Large N ◽  
Science Conference

ABSTRACT At a recent major political science conference, Tamara (not her real name) presented an in-depth qualitative study several years in the making, only to have the panelist speaking after her begin his remarks by saying, “And now back to the hard-core data.” By this, he meant quantitative, large-n data, which his work utilized. This moment highlights a series of tensions in our field relating to gender and methodology, and their effects, which this article explores and elucidates.

Leo Strauss: The Ancient as Modern

1988 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 497-514 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Susser
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
Leo Strauss ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
Intellectual Style ◽  
Post War ◽  
American Political Science

Although his approach to politics and philosophy were relatively little known outside the United States, Leo Strauss was perhaps the most revered and the most controversial figure in post-war American political science. His followers today form what is arguably the most cohesive intellectual fraternity in the discipline. They constitute a highly influential opposition to the empirical–quantitative course taken by political science and political philosophy. This study explores Strauss's ideas highlighting the unconventional mixture of substance and style that gives them an arrestingly idiosyncratic character. Substantively, Strauss belonged to the pre-modern intellectual tradition that understood Truth as accessible and knowable through philosophical contemplation. The form of his argumentation, however, his relentless critique of modernity and the moderns, is conducted with all the cognitive weaponry provided for by the modernist intellectual style.

scholarly journals Training the Next Generation of Teaching Professors: A Comparative Study of Ph.D. Programs in Political Science

2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (03) ◽  
pp. 515-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Ishiyama ◽  
Tom Miles ◽  
Christine Balarezo
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Science Teachers ◽  
College Teaching ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Private Institutions ◽  
Graduate Course ◽  
Graduate Curricula ◽  
The University ◽  
Model Programs

AbstractIn this article, we investigate the graduate curricula of political science programs and 122 Ph.D.-granting political science programs in the United States and how they seek to prepare political science teachers. We first investigate whether the department offers a dedicated political science course at the graduate level on college teaching, and whether the presence of this class correlates with the size of the department, the size of the university, the ranking of the department, and so on. We find that whether a program offers a graduate course on teaching is inversely related to the research productivity of a department, and that departments at public institutions are more likely to offer such courses than are departments at private institutions. Second, we conduct content analysis of a sample of syllabi from departments that offer such courses to ascertain the kinds of topics that are covered. Finally, we briefly describe some model programs that seek to prepare graduate students for teaching careers that integrate graduate student teacher training throughout the Ph.D. program.

Teaching the International Dimension of American National Government

1989 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-20
Author(s):  
Basil Karp
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Science Teachers ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Undergraduate Curriculum ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Government ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
American Government ◽  
International Dimension ◽  
Teachers And Students

Despite enormous changes in the global circumstances that impinge on American government and despite a growing recognition that the undergraduate curriculum must be internationalized, relatively little has been done to incorporate a global perspective in the one place where political science teachers can reach very large numbers of undergraduate students—the introductory American national government course. The internationalization of the American economy, the developing interdependence between the United States and other countries, the growth of local-international links—these phenomena have scarcely touched the bedrock political science course.Textbooks for the introductory American government course reflect this neglect of the international dimension. They typically allude to the international factor briefly in the context of the president's powers in conducting foreign relations and discuss it more extensively in a chapter on “Foreign Policy” or “Foreign and Defense Policy.” As a practical matter, however, this chapter is usually near or at the very end of the book, which many teachers and students probably never reach. A perusal of various current textbooks confirms the conclusion made by a 1981 survey of 50 leading textbooks that very few of the books recognize the interdependence phenomenon or the importance of global circumstances. Apart from textbooks, learning packages designed for the American government course on such topics are rare.To expose students to the international dimension of American national government, the writer conducted a special project in two sections of his American national government course during the spring 1988 semester. The following instruction sheet was given to the students.

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