I recently went to the CPSA (Canadian Political Science Association) annual conference in Ottawa to present the paper "Gamifying Political Science", which describes my experiences of using game design tools to improve the learning experiences of my students. The method shows great promise and a mounting body of evidence suggests that it is a highly effective pedagogical tool. The paper ends with a discussion on the likelihood of game design tools being adopted in political science teaching more widely and identifies a series of barriers on both individual and institutional level that gives us little reason to expect its adoption any time soon.
Some of those barriers include a lack of familiarity with pedagogical techniques or technological tools among individual professors, as well as a shortage of time which prevents instructors from learning about how to use new pedagogical approaches. On the institutional level, departments rarely invest in structures to support teaching development, since they prioritize production - i.e. research - instead.
Importantly, the paper notes that teaching is not incentivized as part of the career path (indeed, one CPSA-panelist who remarked that devoting time to become a good teacher can be 'career suicide', which is quite revealing). I discuss some of the mechanisms in the paper and would like to add a couple of reflections here. These notes are based on experiences and observations from working in this field and should be seen as points of departure for further discussion.
The first concerns the lack of career incentives for good instructors in the academic world, or at least in my field - political science. Universities are, in the public debate, often said to have two core tasks, research and teaching. However, in my experience, teaching seems to be treated as a core task in name only. For example, as a graduate student, the most prestigious research awards (there is more than one) are set at about CAD 40 000. There was only one award for teaching excellence available to us, set at CAD 1 000, so the career infrastructure is made already at that stage. Tenure is, of course, a research position. Those who are passionate about teaching are confined to sessional positions, which pay much less and have no job security. There is no way to advance from there as an instructor. Also, institutions generally have few tools for evaluating teaching quality. The only one I've seen is the student course evaluations, which have been much criticized, but no one seems to be interested in using that critique to develop better tools. An institution that doesn't pay its instructors stable and sufficient salaries and doesn't even bother to evaluate whether the activity holds a high quality should hardly claim that activity as part of its core mission. The situation calls to mind Brunsson's piece (2003) Organized hypocrisy, where he describes how it is rational for organizations to say one thing and then do another to satisfy contradictory demands.
This institutional structure is reflected on the individual level. In my experience, academics seem oddly defensive about teaching methods. Common reactions have included comments like "...but I like lecturing". That is all well and good, but instructors are entering the classroom for the undergraduate students, and to do their duty by them. Instructors should thus do what research shows is effective and efficient to facilitate student learning. I have yet to find any study showing that the lecture series is the most optimal teaching tools. On the contrary, there is a growing body of evidence showing that other techniques are more effective, but that evidence seems to have little effect on practices.
Of note, the physicist Eric Mazur famously remarked on how tenured Harvard professors, who certainly know everything about the scientific method when it comes to their research, for some reason discards that same scientific method entirely when it comes to teaching. As Donald Clark notes in his keynote address, "hardly anybody who teaches in a university believes in the application of the scientific method to teaching and learning". The situation is thus like this: the same profession that a) continuously and routinely exposes itself to critique through peer review and b) keeps emphasizing the importance of the scientific method to students, suddenly lets go of these principles entirely when it comes to how to design and deliver a course. That is quite problematic.
All is not doom and gloom, though. There are interesting initiatives out there. Quest University was literally built from scratch with the intention of providing undergraduate students with the best possible learning experience. It has small classes - max. 25 students and the very interesting block system for how courses as structured: students study one subject at a time, instead of several courses in parallel, which allows instructors more liberty in terms of how to dispose of their time. Also, no departments. Professor Helfand presents it here. The Teaching Professor network in the US is also interesting. It organizes a conference for disseminating best teaching practices.
Such initiatives are important, but more is needed to institutionalize substantive incentives for teaching excellence in the academic career track. I would argue that universities owe their undergraduates to commit to and make that change.
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