Popular culture as pedagogy in the political theory classroom: reflections from higher education
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Popular culture as pedagogy in the political theory classroom: reflections from higher education Natalie Jester1
© European Consortium for Political Research 2020
Abstract Political theory, with its abstract reasoning and unfamiliar vocabulary, is a subject that students are often apprehensive about. Whilst popular culture has been employed extensively in the teaching of other areas of political science, such as international relations, I seek to draw attention to its comparative under-use in political theory and argue that it is a highly effective teaching tool for this subject. I use the autoethnographic method to make my case, drawing on my years-long experience in the university classroom, and take this position for three key reasons: the familiar nature of popular culture allows students to more easily acclimate to the political theory classroom, it renders abstract political theory concrete, and provides a useful arena in which to better test the logic of political theory arguments, enhancing student criticality. Keywords Political theory · Popular culture · Teaching
Introduction In 2020, the world is rife with uncertainty and worry: global pandemics, climate change, violence against people of colour and rising nationalism are perhaps some of the biggest issues of the day, impacting many countries across the world. Political theory provides us with the conceptual tools to make practical decisions about these issues and thus “the teaching of political theory [can be seen] as a radical and essential civic enterprise” (McWilliams 2015, 193). The teaching of political theory is, therefore, a public good because it helps us understand how the world is and how the Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1057/s4130 4-020-00287-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Natalie Jester [email protected] 1
School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, 11 Priory Rd, Bristol BS8 1TU, UK Vol.:(0123456789)
N. Jester
world should be (Editorial 2014), which is perhaps more important than ever before. A wide range of techniques have been employed in the teaching of political theory including metaphor (Best 1984), designing Tumblr output (Kohen 2014), utopian writing (Haddad 2005), simulation (Glasgow 2015), virtual learning environments (Collins et al. 2006), and problematising and teaching outside of the canon (Parrish 2007; Ramgotra 2015). There are many reasons to undertake research on our teaching and learning within politics and international relations including the improvement of our own practice and the wider spread of theories and techniques. Indeed, European Political Science published a symposium on this subject in 2008 (Hale 2008). Despite this, “publishing high-quality research on learning and teaching remains a rather low priority for many research active university staff” (Editorial 2014, 2). In the spirit of contributing to this burgeoning research agenda, employing the
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