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         Mark Sachleben
         Deborah Ward, Columbia University

The participants in the second track on internationalizing the curriculum spent the weekend discussing what they considered to be an important task facing the discipline: how to bring internationalization to political science, their departments, and their students. The track began with a discussion of why internationalization was important to APSA and the discipline at large.  Deborah Ward provided the history to date of activities undertaken by APSA, the Teaching and Learning Committee, and the Task Force on Internationalization to address internationalization.  APSA’s inquiry into this topic was born out of a larger interest by the American Council of Education and various foundations in the internationalization of undergraduate education within specific disciplines.  In response to data that students are graduating from U.S. colleges and universities with minimal knowledge about politics and societies outside of the United States, various disciplinary associations were tasked with looking into this phenomenon in more detail within their own disciplines. A taskforce was established by APSA leadership in 2005 to examine the current state of internationalization in the discipline.  A report and general findings were presented at a panel at the 2006 Annual Meeting and plenary panels on internationalization were held at the 2007 and 2008 annual meetings.  The 2007 plenary was titled “Is American Political Science Too Parochial” and the 2008 plenary was titled "Global Challenges to Categories in American Political Science: Should the Discipline Eliminate the Subfield of American Politics?"

After framing the context, there was a discussion of what internationalization meant to the different track participants, obstacles ahead, and next steps. The track heard six papers: two papers addressed how to measure internationalization, while four papers examined methods of internationalization. This note summarizes the discussion of the track and the conclusions reached by its participants. Our discussions were greatly enhanced by the substantial contributions of the track discussants, especially Mark Sachleben, Marek Payerhin, Denita Acker, and Dianne Long. 

Christopher Saladino presented his research project on students’ high school preparation for courses on international politics. By conducting a survey each semester of his students, he has been able to point to shortcomings in their preparation for college in the field of international relations. Professor Saladino has used his research to advocate a change in the curriculum in high schools in Virginia to include more international relations and has used the argument that increased international awareness would be better for democracy. Professor Saladino reports some interest in changing the curriculums in a few districts, but his research also points to a potential obstacle: there are many stakeholders whose interests must be addressed in attempting to achieve internationalization.

Similarly, Daniel Friedman reported on his preliminary study on how much an Introduction to International Politics facilitated the internationalization of incoming freshmen. Professor Friedman reported that many students had significant international experiences coming into the course, a point political science, as a discipline, can build upon. Preliminarily, he found some internationalization did occur as a result of the course. Nevertheless, the survey wrestled with the concepts of how to measure “internationalization” and how to translate what we think are good strategies into demonstrable outcomes.

Professors Saladino and Freidman’s work set the stage for broader discussion about how internationalization in political science can be achieved. Four other papers examined strategies for the internationalization of specific courses. Bidisha Biswas worked toward overcoming selective perception bias acquired from prior knowledge among students. They found through their classroom experiences that students would engage in cognitive dissonance when presented with new information. In fact, the authors presented evidence that students would have their existing stereotypes reinforced when presented with films and readings that the instructors had intended to challenge their assumptions. One of the professors’ remedies was to have students keep a news portfolio in which there were to collect opposing points of views of a given topic.

Nancy Wright offered a course proposal in which the leadership skills of pre-20th century female leaders from Africa were considered. Professor Wright noted that this set of leaders represented dual marginality; two groups (women and Africans) who have traditionally been ignored by political science and Western academics. The course is intended to examine traditional topics of interest to political scientists, such as leadership, with a new set of cases.

Howard Lehman also focused on leadership in his building of an International Leadership Academy. Professor Lehman detailed his first experiment of the course and subsequently how the course evolved and grew. The course is designed to become institutionalized into an ongoing seminar. It employed non-political science readings on leadership in addition to discipline-specific titles and a number of guest speakers from the community to bolster the ideas of what constituted good leadership. Based upon business models, the course also required students to pair with a mentor in the community to observe leadership on a personal basis and develop an international service project.  Professor Lehman’s work on the topic will be published shortly in PS.

William Volke presented the latest work from the Carnegie Council to help develop materials to engage students and academics in the process of understanding international politics better. Among the new materials are audio links, podcasts and YouTube videos of speeches and presentations of varying lengths to encourage students to think more critically about issues facing the international community. The object of the new programs is to have students be more interactive; therefore, the new material allows students to respond with videos of their own. The hope, as expressed by Dr. Volke, is to develop a dialogue among many people to discuss issues and problems confronting the world today.

In addition to hearing and discussing the participants’ research, the track was charged with having a dialogue about how the discipline might be internationalized. We were reminded that internationalizing the discipline and internationalizing the classroom were two different tasks. Nevertheless, it led to a more fundamental question about what the process of internationalization constituted.  The track wrestled with the idea of the meaning and definition of internationalization. When discussing internationalizing the curriculum, the members of the track devised a series of statements which argued that any project to internationalize the curriculum, or the classroom, must include: meaningful engagements with another culture; encouraging critical thinking that breaks down provincial or parochial thinking; allowing students to walk in the shoes, sandals or boots of another; and, bridging interests in things international with the needs of the community.

Furthermore, internationalization is an on-going process, not a checklist. Thus, we cannot say that because a student has completed some task, or had a specific course, that they have become internationalized. Moreover, we need more than proficiency in a foreign language, or completing a study abroad opportunity. Although these are valuable experiences, language skills do not require knowledge of politics or culture; a program in which students take classes in a foreign country, but spend the bulk of their time with other students from their home country is less than optimal. The track concluded that internationalizing a person includes a set of knowledge, values, empathy and behavior. Our problem, as a discipline, remains how we are to assess the process of internationalization. We recognize that the goal of internationalization is ultimately not to have to talk about or debate the merits of internationalization; however, there probably needs to be some intermediate goals to assist in this objective. There is the recognition that the answers to internationalization might be different depending on campus needs.

The challenge of internationalizing the discipline reminds us that no important improvement in teaching, learning, and research can happen without the larger intellectual discussion of the content of political science.  As a discipline, internationalization requires us to think more broadly than we have in the past.  This means the inclusion of knowledge across national cases. Thus, we cannot exclusively privilege American or Western cases. Institutions must be willing to engage and hire faculty that have international experience. Without a program of internationalization, the discipline runs the risk of parochialism in its study, methods, and prescriptions.