Abstract
We are witnessing ‘disruption’ within higher education and the field of International Relations (IR) via two central forces: increasing pressure on universities to change the way they fundamentally function; and international events that shape our everyday lives—ranging from natural disasters, cross-border migration, and violent conflict to #Brexit, rising power diplomacy (e.g., BRICS), and Trump—which are upending conventional approaches and understandings. Despite robust discussions of IR pedagogy in scholarly work, we have seen little attempt to question the position of teaching as it relates to the advancement of the discipline. To fill this gap—and disrupting the orthodoxy—our chapter interrogates the place and position of teaching so as to reinforce its importance in IR. To that end, our chapter elucidates three ways in which educators can reposition the role of pedagogy within the discipline and their institutions: (1) how teaching IR plays an important part in constituting international affairs now and in the future; (2) how teaching IR is one of the main mechanisms through which we are most impactful as scholars; and (3) how we as educators approach learning—and the student experience—influences how the IR discipline evolves and progresses.
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Notes
- 1.
The authors would like to thank Raynold W. Alorse for his research assistance as well as Queen’s University for a Teaching and Learning Enhancement Grant that funded a workshop entitled, Re-thinking Pedagogy in International Relations in an Era of Globalization and Disruption, which was hosted by the Centre for International and Defence Policy (CIDP) and the Department of Political Studies, in January 2016.
- 2.
In the interests of consistency, we employ the term ‘professor’ to denote ‘lecturer’, ‘instructor’, or ‘educator’.
- 3.
This latter ‘penalty’ is particularly painful for professors who are members of the contingent faculty.
- 4.
Notably, however, many remote conferencing platforms and technologies either provide a free version of their software or do not charge a fee if their software is used for non-commercial purposes.
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Hornsby, D.J., Andrew Grant, J. (2021). Teaching as a Form of Disrupting International Relations. In: Smith, H.A., Hornsby, D.J. (eds) Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption. Political Pedagogies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56421-6_2
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