Graduate Education

Moderator: Dr. Janice Newton, York University (Canada)

This panel explores the pedagogical approaches and programmatic structures most effective in the development of graduate students and graduate, masters and doctoral programs. Examples include analyses of program structures, discussions of effectiveness of comprehensive examinations, preparation of teaching assistants, or the function of subfield reading lists in the curriculum.

Session A: Using Evidence in Graduate Education
Session C: Teaching Strategies for Graduate Students
Session E: Lessons from PA and Policy Education
Session F: Cross-National Views
Session G: Graduate Education and National Policy

Track Summary
By Dr. Janice Newton, York University (Toronto, Canada)
How well do we prepare our graduate students for careers in teaching and research?¹ We discussed at length the kinds of skills that are necessary to build a successful career in political science, reflected on how to teach those skills in graduate courses, and how to integrate them into the graduate curriculum. How can we make explicit our assumptions about the skills needed for a career in political science, and correspondingly develop graduate courses and curriculum that teach those skills? Below I summarize of some of the important themes we discussed that were generated by the papers and presentations

Teach Both Process and Product:
We often focus on the content of graduate courses while ignoring the process of how students learn in graduate studies. Yet process is important. We reflected on how the Paulo Friere’s pedagogical principles and the tenets of good governance could be applied to our graduate teaching practices, making our teaching practices more transparent, participatory, and responsive. This was important in fostering the kind of development we considered appropriate for professional careers in Political Science.

Teach Students as Researchers:

Develop Research Skills: How can we explicitly develop students’ ability to do research? Building this into course design is crucial, especially if done in collaboration with research librarians. It is also important to consider how this developed as a part of the overall graduate curriculum.

Develop Judgment: How can we teach our graduate students to judge what is authoritative in their research? In some research areas, like foreign policy, scholarship might be dominated by publications authored by public servants or political appointees. How can we teach our graduate students to assess the scholarly integrity or bias of sources? How can we build this into a graduate curriculum?

Generate Useful Research Questions: How do we teach our students to generate research questions? We discussed examples of graduate programs that were designed to develop this skill in students.

Develop Original Ideas: We discussed the need for graduate students to develop their ability to generate new ideas and take ownership of their work. How can faculty support them in this?

Develop Writing Skills for Real Audiences: How can we teach our graduates to develop writing skills they will need in their future careers, such as journal articles, policy documents, etc.? How could we build this into a graduate curriculum or course?

Explore Interdisciplinarity: How can we encourage our students to use interdisciplinarity to enhance their understanding of issues?

Teach Future Teachers:
Gabriela Pleschova’s paper provided an overview of initiatives in Europe for training political science graduates in teaching. Some places seemed more advanced than North American counterparts. The discussion that ensued clearly pointed to the need for more rigorous training of graduate students for teaching, but also highlighted the constraints posed by a graduate faculty who by in large were not themselves trained and possibly indifferent to this issue. Nonetheless, in our discussions we recognized the crucial importance of graduate programs offering training in teaching specific to our discipline.

Recruitment and Retention:
The issue of who we recruit and retain in graduate studies is also critical. One paper addressed the challenges that foreign graduate students face in surviving graduate studies in the United States. Foreign students can be an incredible asset to a graduate program, yet their needs and concerns are often not well-understood, resulting in financial and emotional hardship. Some useful strategies for redressing these problems were discussed. The graduate student’s perspective was useful in our discussions and perhaps could be explicitly solicited in future. Recruitment and retention of other categories of graduate students should also concern us. Why have black Ph.D. enrolments dropped in our discipline, especially when their enrolment in other graduate programs is on the rise?² Why is there an equally troubling attrition rate for women in moving up the ranks from undergraduate to graduate and from assistant to full professor? Future teaching conferences could welcome students’ perspectives on these issues as well as successful practices in graduate programs to redress the issues.³

Curriculum Mapping:
Many of the issues we discussed above at the course level also needed to be thought through at the level of the overall curriculum. The U.S. military provided one impressive example of curriculum mapping. We would welcome other examples of curriculum mapping that demonstrate how the above issues are addressed across a Political Science graduate curriculum.

Conclusion:
This was the first time that graduate education was the focus of a track in the Teaching and Learning Conference. As our discussion developed over the conference, we noted that we generated more questions than answers. Many of the issues we raised were general concerns about graduate education not necessarily unique to political science graduate programs. Our hope is that this track will be offered in future conferences to allow us to develop multiple teaching strategies that address those general issues but also target the needs of our discipline more specifically.

Using Evidence in Graduate Education
Leroy LaFleur, George Mason University, Integrating Information Literacy into the Political and Policy Science Curriculum
Peter J. Balint, George Mason University, Good Governance in Research Methods Course Management

Teaching Strategies for Graduate Students
Rekha Datta, Monmouth University, Podcast, Upload, Download: The “Hybrid Model” in Teaching Graduate Courses in the 21st Century
Melissa J. Buehler and Lura U. Schneider, Purdue University, Teaching Confidence: Do Political Science Graduate Students Have the Necessary Tools?
Mary H. Durfee, Michigan Technological University, A Cultural Change in Graduate Education: The NSF IGERT Program

Lessons from PA and Policy Education
A. Damien Yaghi, Kennesaw State University, The Petra Project: Creative Pedagogy in Teaching HRM in the Master of Public Administration
David E. McNabb, Pacific Lutheran University, Teaching the Public Administration Strategy Course Online

Cross-National Views
Anika Cornelia Leithner, California Polytechnic State University, and Delia Alexandru, University of Colorado, Boulder, The 'Dispossessed'? Foreign Students in American Graduate Schools
Gabriela Pleschova, Comenius University, Training for First-Time University Teachers of Political Science in Europe
Leticia Pinheiro, Pontificia Universidade Católica - Rio de Janeiro, How much Foreign Policy Teaching could be Foreign Policy Making?

Graduate Education and National Policy
David Swindell, University of North Carolina-Charlotte, Preparing Policy Graduate Students for Public Service and Academia
James S. Robbins, National Defense University, The Opportunities and Challenges of National Security Education in the DOD
Amit Gupta, Air War College, The Challenges of Graduate Education in a Professional Military Education Setting

¹ This question is posed by Julie Dolan, Martha E. Kropf and Karen O’Connor in “The future of Our Discipline: The Status of Doctoral Students in Political Science,” PS: Political Science and Politics, 30 (Dec. 1997): 751-756.

² Maurice Woodard, “Black Political Scientists: Where Are the New PhDs?” PS 18 (Winter 1985): 80-88; “Departments of Academic Caste: Blacks are Less Than Marginal in the Academic Ranks of Political Science,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 18 (Winter 1997-98): 52; and “African Americans Continue to Flock to Graduate School,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 37 (Autumn 2002): 69-70.

³ One example of this is found in Carlos E. Juárez’s article: “Recruiting Minority Students for Academic Careers: The Role of Graduate Student and Faculty Mentors,” PS: Political Science and Politics 24 (Sept. 1991): 539-540.