introduction to american government: what is it good for? absolutely everything

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Introduction to American Government:What is it Good for? AbsolutelyEverythingMark K. McBeth a & Shea K. Robison aa Idaho State UniversityPublished online: 08 Aug 2012.

To cite this article: Mark K. McBeth & Shea K. Robison (2012) Introduction to American Government:What is it Good for? Absolutely Everything, Journal of Political Science Education, 8:3, 271-287, DOI:10.1080/15512169.2012.695978

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Introduction to American Government: Whatis it Good for? Absolutely Everything

MARK K. MCBETHSHEA K. ROBISON

Idaho State University

For those times when political science is again confronted with questions about itsusefulness, we suggest that the classroom is a central arena for our discipline toreassert its relevance to the society in which we live. In particular, given the existenceof our open and accessible political system, we argue that the introductory coursetaught as a general education requirement by nearly every political science depart-ment provides unique advantages for political science to justify itself as a relevantand necessary endeavor in comparison with most other academic disciplines. How-ever, to truly take advantage of the unique position of political science we need to ree-valuate some of our most basic assumptions about the reasons we have for teachingthese introductory classes. Incorporating the latest research in teaching methods andtheories of learning, we totally redesigned an introductory course from the ground up,basing this course around semester-long group projects geared towards enhancing theinternal efficacy of our students as a means of increasing their comprehension of thematerial. In this article, we discuss the results from our implementation of this coursedesign in the fall of 2009, demonstrating the effectiveness of the teaching model inboth increasing the political efficacy of our students while simultaneously improvingtheir knowledge of our political system. We conclude with a discussion of just howpowerful this method of teaching our introductory classes can be as a justificationfor the entire edifice of political science itself.

Keywords engaged citizens, pedagogy, political science education

Political science, like much of the social sciences, is often criticized for pursuingincreasingly narrow theoretical questions at the expense of more normative, and oftenmore relevant pursuits (Shapiro 2007). From time to time, these criticisms of irrel-evance become quite public, as in the recent efforts from Senator Tom Coburn andRepresentative Jeff Flake to cut the National Science Foundation funding of politicalscience research. While these waves of criticism can be disturbing to the insecure,when confronted honestly, they can also be beneficial for the valuable insights theyengender through frank discussions about our discipline’s strengths and weaknesses(Cohen 2009). The ideas and methods presented in this article are just such a strategicresponse to such criticisms no matter the source, as a positive assertion of a parti-cularly unique real-world relevance of political science teaching and education, butwith a warning that this relevance is not automatic or self-evident.

Address correspondence to Mark K. McBeth, Idaho State University, Department ofPolitical Science, Campus Box 8073, Pocatello, ID 83209. E-mail: [email protected]

Journal of Political Science Education, 8:271–287, 2012Copyright # 2012 Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1551-2169 print=1551-2177 onlineDOI: 10.1080/15512169.2012.695978

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Although the tempest from Coburn’s teapot has passed—for now—the constantinterdepartmental and university-wide budget battles that are a much more commonand realistic threat rage on. The predominant defensive strategy in the face of attackslike these, as exemplified by the panicky e-mails that flooded many of our inboxesduring the Coburn episode, usually involves a kneejerk recitation of the many legiti-mately noteworthy accomplishments of political scientists through the years. How-ever, in our experience, extolling the virtues and contributions from the researchside of our discipline is not necessarily the best defense in such circumstances. Forone, if the benefits of these accomplishments were so obviously evident that merelyreciting them would be enough to dispel doubt, then these attacks on our relevancewould not arise in the first place. In addition, as we can all admit in our more honestmoments, there are just not very many results from our research that are going to berelevant to people outside our disciplinary boundaries who do not possess the yearsof training it takes to truly appreciate their significance.

Fortunately, rather than relying on red-faced recitations of accomplishments tojustify our place at the table, there is a much more substantive way to move politicalscience out of its increasingly narrow and specialized domains and into relevance fora much broader audience. This perhaps somewhat surprising weapon in our arsenalis the general education requirement for introductory political science courses atmost universities and colleges across the country. Thus, we build upon existing peda-gogical literature (e.g., Van Assendelft 2008; Elder, Seligsohn, and Hofrenning 2007;A. D. Perry and Wilkenfeld 2006; Blount 2006; Hunter and Brisbin, 2003; Kirlin2002) to present an innovative method of teaching an introductory Americangovernment course.

Because of the proximity and accessibility of our political system, when it comesto the usefulness and relevance of our introductory courses, political science has asignificant advantage over practically every other discipline in academia, across both‘‘soft’’ and even ‘‘hard’’ sciences. For example, while an introductory chemistry stu-dent may learn the physical principles behind why a chemical formula produces acertain desired reaction and may even be able to perform that experiment indepen-dently outside of class, they are limited in their ability to apply their knowledge totheir real-world concerns unless they go on to gain a graduate degree. Only afterthe graduate degree will they have the tools and opportunities to apply what theyhave learned. But for students in our political science introductory courses, becauseof the presence of an open, accessible political system with which they can interactimmediately, they can actually apply the concepts and techniques they are learningin the classroom literally as they learn them. Unlike other disciplines, the laboratoryof democracy is a public and open one. This is an advantage that few other disci-plines can claim, but it is also one that we as political scientists too often fail to utilizeto our detriment. Unfortunately, this highly significant potential of our introductoryclasses at universities across the country is far too often unrecognized, unrealized, oreven sabotaged by our traditional or unexamined assumptions about teaching andlearning political science.

The Assumptions We Make (and Break)

In our experience, the truly powerful potential of Introduction to American Govern-ment courses noted above first became evident when faced with the prospect of teamteaching such a class and we began with the perhaps too obvious question of ‘‘Why

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are we going to teach what we are going to teach in our introductory class?’’ How-ever, it was our answer to this question that then suggested to us the versatile andsuccessful method for teaching the ‘‘What are we going to teach what we are goingto teach in our introductory class?’’ that is the purpose of this article.

In considering the justification of the relevance of our discipline, it occurred tous that this question of ‘‘Why do we teach what we teach in our 101 classes?’’ shouldbe foremost. Is it comprehensiveness, in which case the quantity of material coveredover the course of the semester is prioritized? Or is it usefulness, in which the prac-tical application of the material being presented is prioritized? As we discovered,each answer implies its own distinct teaching methodologies and learning goals,and the way we answer this one question of ‘‘Why?’’ can be of the upmost impor-tance for the success of our individual classes, as well as for the continued viabilityof our discipline in competition as we are for scarce resources with every other aca-demic discipline.

If the goal of our introductory classes is comprehensiveness, the theory of learn-ing implicit in this goal is instead more a theory of teaching (Barr and Tagg 1995;Leamnsom 1999), which assumes that learning is a more or less passive and indirectfunction of the quantity of material that is presented to our students. On the otherhand, if the usefulness of the material presented in class is the goal, this fundamen-tally changes both our approach towards selection and teaching of the material wechoose, as well as the justification for the learning that should occur in our introduc-tory classes. Such tradeoffs between the quantity of material presented (and studentpassivity) versus how we teach and the material we present is found in the extensiveliterature on critical thinking and political science pedagogy (e.g., Marks, 2008;Oros, 2007).

Teaching to Learn—Learning to Teach

‘‘How do students learn?’’ and ‘‘Why should my students learn this material I amteaching?’’ are two of the fundamental questions for any instructor in any disciplinein any class and a question that has garnered much attention in the political scienceeducation literature (e.g., Damron and Mott 2005). As teachers in general, until weare aware that there is a difference between our teaching and our students’ learningwe will spend too much time worried about what we are doing and not enough timeconsidering the perspective and needs of our students (Ernst and Ernst 2005). Tobegin to bridge this gap for ourselves in redesigning our introductory course, twobooks were instrumental in enhancing our own understanding about how studentslearn: Thinking About Teaching and Learning (1999) by Robert Leamnson and TheJoy of Teaching (2005) by Peter Filene. In his book, the biologist Robert Leamnsondevelops an approach to teaching based on his knowledge of both teaching and howthe brain works. Even with a lack of familiarity with neurology, good teachers willnot be surprised by the conclusions of Leamnson in regards to how students learn.Neither will they be surprised by the practical approach to college teachingexpounded by Peter Filene in his book The Joy of Teaching (2005) whose conclusionsreinforce those of Leamnson. In addition, political science education research thatemphasizes critical thinking and reflection (e.g., Blount 2006) and active learning(e.g., Oros 2007) backs up the fundamental premises of Leamnson and Filene.

Three findings from these books that are backed up in the political science peda-gogy literature that were most effective for the conception, design, and success of our

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relevancy-focused course are that (1) because students learn best through encounteringthe same concept in multiple ways, in our efforts to be comprehensive we often cover toomuchmaterial for true learning to occur, (2) most learning occurs outside the classroom,so even our best intentions at awing our students with our expertise and brilliance in theclassroom cannot equate to learning, and (3) context is everything.

Repetition is Good—We Repeat: Repetition is Good

At first glance this principle would seem to contradict our earlier admonition againstteaching and learning by rote. So to be clear, by repetition we mean a repetition ofthe same basic concepts across a number of different contexts. There is a biologicalexplanation for this principle: At a neurological level, learning is a function of thecarving of new synaptic pathways and the rewiring of existing neuronal connections.As Leamnson (1999, 12) explains it, ‘‘The ability of the brain to engage and makesense of the world is a function of connections between neurons,’’ but that ‘‘whetheror not a synaptic sequence stabilizes is determined by the frequency with which thepath is used, [as] even potentially useful neural pathways will, then, degenerate if notused.’’

As a result, learning, as the process of realizing changes in behaviors as a resultof experiences (Mazur 2006, 21), can occur only when students are asked to considera familiar subject from a new perspective or are confronted with new but contradic-tory information that must be reconciled with existing opinions and then are repeat-edly confronted with this information again in still other contexts over time. Onlythen will these new neuronal connections have been adequately forged and rein-forced, thereby contributing to a change in behavior by increasing the likelihoodor probability of these neuronal pathways being utilized again in novel circum-stances in the future (Churchland 2011, 54). Again, it is important to reiterate thatthis is not merely a metaphorical explanation of learning, but that true learning isthe result of a physical process that literally makes the brain of the learner differentthan it was before. If what we are doing as teachers is not producing these literalchanges in the brains of our students, we can rest assured they are not truly learning,and thus that, even for all our best intentions, we are not really teaching.

Thus, we realized if the students in our introductory class were to actually learn theinformation we present in order to apply that information, we would need to changethe conventional ways that introductory information is presented. In particular, thisnecessity for multiple contexts contradicts the tendency for prioritizing the quantityof information covered in introductory political science courses, as evidenced by theever-increasing length of our conventional ‘‘detailed-filled, ought-to-be-sold-by-the-pound’’ textbooks (Cushman 1993, 224). As detailed by Teten (2010, 170), a chapterin a standard American government textbook now contains on average 20–25 high-lighted terms. We felt that if we were to devote sufficient time in a 50-minute class justto address, to define, and to explain each of these ostensibly important terms from thechapter assigned for that day, there would be precious little time for any kind of inter-active discussion before having to move on to the next chapter and its own 20–25 high-lighted terms in the headlong rush to the end of the semester. In doing this, we wouldalso not have time to re-present these terms across the multiple contexts required forthe actual learning of them, much less to be able to tie these terms together acrosschapters in any kind of cohesive way outside that provided by their original presen-tation within their own discrete chapters.


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To us, teaching introductory political science in this way would inevitablybecome a bureaucratic task of checking off milestones in the downhill rush to theend of the semester. Lost in this rush would be the reflection on and comprehensionof the material; in other words, what is lost is the actual learning of the material byour students. Reservations like ours are not new, as criticisms of this ‘‘bureaucratic’’teaching is directly or indirectly implied in much of the political science literature onactive learning. For example, if critical reflection, defined as ‘‘an art to be immersedin an experience—fully attentive to the intensity and complexity of the moment—and at the same time see the larger context of the work and one’s options for effectiveaction’’ (Blount 2006, 271), is a desired outcome for teaching our classes, then thebureaucratic checklist approach to teaching, as effective as it is for transmittingmaterial, hardly allows learning to occur at all in the typical introductory courseand hence is difficult to justify if comprehension and retention are the goal.

In particular, students need to hear, to read, to see, and to apply concepts severaltimes to carve the pathways in their brain that constitute learning—a conclusion thatis backed up by a variety of sources in the political science pedagogy literature (e.g.,Bernstein 2008; Blount 2006; Hildreth 2006). We interpreted this to mean, forexample, that to truly learn why interest groups form, students have to read it, hearit, experience it, apply it and then practice it. Only then will they actually experienceanything resembling learning. Such an approach, however, obviously entails imple-menting a number of different teaching practices beyond lecturing, which can be dif-ficult within a more conventional approach to teaching an introductory class.

While political science as a field has certainly paid attention to the importance ofboth pedagogy and learning theory, emphasizing the importance of active learningand engaging students (e.g., Van Assendelft 2008; Elder, Seligsohn, and Hofrenning2007; A. D. Perry and Wilkenfeld 2006; Blount 2006; Hunter and Brisbin, 2003;Kirlin 2002), and there has been much written on the importance of mixed teachingmethods including the use of cases (Lynn 1999), simulations (e.g., Fliter 2009), andservice-learning (e.g., Jenkins 2008; Smith 2006), as Hartlaub and Lancaster (2008)demonstrate, lecturing is still the dominant mode of pedagogy in our political scienceclasses. If we are sincere about asserting our relevance as a discipline, our methods inthe classroom—which is where we believe we have the greatest opportunities for thegreatest impact—should match our aspirations. If they do not, what do our choicesreveal about our actual priorities?

The good news is there is good news if we are willing to shelve our egos andfocus more on matching our goals as teachers with the learning needs of our stu-dents. It was with these ideas in mind that we designed the course we discuss belowas a means to integrate a number of these different teaching methods within a coher-ent framework that maximizes the relevance of an introductory class.

The Proper Context for Context

Another failure, not of the traditional approach so much but of some politicalscience professors, is the belief that college students are bored and disinterested inpolitics. Robert Putnam’s (2000) influential work Bowling Alone places the majorblame on the decline of civic participation on generational change. Other studiessuch as Macedo’s (2005) Democracy at Risk clearly led to a conclusion that theyoung generation is not fulfilling their democratic citizenship responsibilities. Thisis where the work of Russell Dalton came into play for us as it contradicts such


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beliefs and, in doing so, also provided us with the impetus to reenergize our ownteaching. Dalton (2008) uses survey data to show that young people are not disin-terested in politics but rather their view of citizenship and thus how one participatesin politics is changing from a duty-based view of citizenship that emphasizes watch-dog functions like voting, to an engaged view of citizenship that emphasizes moredirect participation. Our students, like most Americans, might not have encyclopedicknowledge of facts but research shows they will become interested in participating inpolitics when given the opportunities to express and apply themselves (Longo,Drury, and Battistoni 2006), and our own experiences with this new approach haveonly affirmed the readiness of our students to become politically involved whenpresented with the proper opportunities.

This provision of context as necessary for learning, of course, is the central con-cept behind much of the theory of service-learning in political science (e.g., Hunterand Brisbin 2000). Such contextualization applies in the classroom as well; forexample, when students have multiple reasons beyond the next exam to internalizehow a bill becomes a law or how a case gets before a Supreme Court, it is more likelythey will retain that knowledge beyond that exam. Otherwise, this material becomesmerely a more or less meaningless token to be traded in for a passing grade on thenext exam. Leamnson succinctly summarizes this notion when he observes, as we allhave, how students in a class will often learn and repeat faithfully things that theywould never use or even consider plausible in a real life situation. This dynamicoccurs, in Leamnson’s words, only because school has become for them ‘‘a totallycontrived and artificial system’’ that has all the elements of a game to be played.‘‘Students,’’ continues Leamnson, ‘‘are quite prepared to play a game by any ruleswe lay down, but they do not take readily to mixing up ‘school facts’ and their realbeliefs’’ (1999, 39). The result is that we as teachers, and any knowledge we hope toimpart, become merely obstacles in this school game to be overcome unless we areable to somehow provide the context for our students to update their real beliefs withthe information we teach them.

Such an emphasis on context is central to service-learning-based pedagogy (e.g.,Van Assendelft 2008) and in political science terms, our learning goal was to increaseour students’ internal political efficacy. But following the lead of Kahne andWestheimer (2006) and Westheimer and Kahne (2004) we did not want to simplyprovide students the opportunity to participate in ‘‘feel good’’ community service.Instead, our goal was to encourage the students to deal with real political issues thatmeant ultimately dealing with power, access, justice, and other issues that might ulti-mately frustrate students but that would lead to deep learning about politics and therole of citizens.

In this way, similar to the service-learning literature (e.g., Hunter and Brisbin2000), we argue that because of the accessibility of our political system our studentswere able to truly learn the concepts we taught by experiencing, or literally living,these concepts. This recommendation for such active immersion is certainly nothingnew in the confluence of democracy and education, as it was a central pillar in thephilosophy of Dewey (1916). For example, when students are only asked to memor-ize and define the concept of free-riding, whatever learning occurs is likely to be rela-tively shallow; however, when students actually experience and are able to identifyfree-riding in the context of the material covered in class and then to correctly applythat concept to situations not covered in class, the learning that occurs is necessarilymuch ‘‘deeper’’ because of all the associative connections such thinking requires.


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This again is another example of what Leamnson (1999) refers to when he discussesthe physical process of making new connections in the brain.

This is why we are convinced that, given our accessible political system and ourstudents who live within that system, each of our introductory classes provides suchunique opportunities for effective, contextualized teaching. Huerta and Jozwiak(2008) show how just having students read the New York Times in general educationpolitical science courses significantly increases both their political knowledge andinterest, as well as their attitudes towards community involvement, providing power-ful evidence how introducing just a little context (in this case, reading a newspaper)can produce significant positive results. Now imagine the magnitude of the benefitsfrom an entire introductory course dedicated to providing context for the learning ofbasic political science concepts.

This is what we believe we have achieved. In addition, not only do we believethat the benefits of this relevancy-focused course design are replicable but also thatthe design itself is easily modifiable to meet any instructor’s individual style or needs.To the extent we are correct, it is also our belief that the end result of the widespreadadoption of this or similar methods to introductory classes around the countryshould contribute substantially to the successful justification of our discipline tocritics like Senator Coburn, but even more importantly as justification againstdoubts as to our relevance during the much more critical and more frequent budgetbattles with other departments and colleges.

The Case Study

As we present our process for conceiving and implementing this course design wepresent some of the major steps in our deliberations in the hopes that it inspiresothers to undertake similar processes. This process and our presentation of it areadmittedly more exploratory and descriptive than formulaic and prescriptive. Still,we hope that our description of our process and the statistical results of our prelimi-nary data analysis substantiate to some degree the likely benefits for others in pur-suing similar designs of their own.

To design this course, we began meeting during the summer before the fall sem-ester we were due to teach. For the first session, we began with a blank sheet of paperand a discussion of both possible topics and reasons why our prospective studentsshould learn these topics. It bears mentioning at this point that the class itself wasa general introductory course, not an Honors course or designated as an experi-mental course in any way. The students in our class were simply those students thatof their own volition signed up for the course as a regular introductory section beingoffered by the political science department at the university that satisfied a generaleducation requirement. We also recognized that most of our students would be fresh-man and sophomores and would not be political science majors. With these studentsin mind, several brainstorming sessions led to both broad goals and eventuallyspecific learning objectives.

To begin, we talked about how the relevancy of the material we would covercould best be fostered within the parameters of an introductory course and decidedthat the most direct way would be through actual student interaction with the polit-ical system. Admittedly this is not necessarily a novel idea, as in the literature onpedagogy methods in political science there are numerous references to communitybased and service-learning, defined as


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a form of experiential education that combines structured opportunitiesfor learning academic skills, reflection on the normative dimensions ofcivic life, and experiential activity that addresses community needs orassists individuals, families, and communities in need. (Hunter andBrisbin 2000, 623)

What might be novel, though, is the extent we planned to couch an entire sem-ester of introductory course material in the context of these community-based ser-vice-learning opportunities. As numerous studies have found that service-learningpromotes both personal efficacy and learning outcomes (Eyler 2000; Hunter andBrisbin 2000; Redlawsk and Wilson 2006; Sternberger, Ford, and Hale 2005), itwould be difficult to find a more fitting format for our course design given our dualintention to both more effectively implement the fact-based learning of introductorymaterial while simultaneously enhancing the relevancy of these facts so the knowl-edge of them would be retained.

When we discussed the actual form this service-learning would take in ourrelevancy-focused course we considered a number of options. For example, whatscale these projects should be (individual, group-sized, or class-sized); what thecommunity-based service opportunities should be and where they should come from(do we originate and provide them as teachers, do we network with communitygroups, etc.); what texts would best fit the design of our class; how we should assessthe students’ progress; and so on.

In keeping with our theme of building the course around these projects, whilealso considering pragmatic details like a realistic workload for us and for the stu-dents, we ultimately decided that the projects would be group-sized (around 6–7 stu-dents per group). We also decided that to augment their ownership of andresponsibility towards these projects we thought it very important that these projectsoriginate from our students and not from us, so the students themselves should beresponsible for generating their own service opportunities.

As for class materials, we decided that for all the reasons mentioned above thetraditional ‘‘coffee table’’ textbook was woefully inadequate for our purposes ofpromoting relevancy and repetition via active participation through these group pro-jects. Instead, we selected The Good Citizen: How a Younger Generation is ReshapingAmerican Politics by Russell Dalton (2008) and America the Owner’s Manual: Mak-ing Government Work for You by Senator Bob Graham and Chris Hand because oftheir explicit focus on active engagement with our political system. Finally, inregards to assessment of student learning, we decided that in addition to more con-ventional tests over the introductory material we covered in class and in the readings,these groups would also be required to turn in a detailed portfolio of their effortsthroughout the semester to engage with government and with other groups, as wellas to present to the class at the end of the semester an oral and visual summation oftheir experiences over the semester.

For these portfolios we brainstormed a rubric (see Table 1) that would demon-strate active engagement with the political system of our students in these groups.We discussed what kinds of activities our students could and should engage in asthey pushed their issue forward, and how the material covered in class could helpthem realize these goals. From this discussion, we decided to require them to, amongother things, conduct a stakeholder analysis (which we addressed in the context of adiscussion on democracy and power), to show proof of contact with at least five


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different elected officials covering each level of government (which we addressed inpart through our discussions of federalism and institutions), as well as to show proofof contact with at least five other groups concerned with their issue (which weaddressed in part through our various discussions of interest groups).

In sum, from the design stage through the actual conduct of the class, we paidclose attention to the topics we covered, screening out those for which we could find

Table 1. POLS 101 project portfolio guidelines

1) Project milestonesa) Group nameb) One sentence ‘‘sound bite’’c) Define the problem specifically to attract the widest possible coalitioni) One paragraph(1) Initiating event?

d) Stakeholder analysisi) Power versus Interest gridii) One-page written explanation(1) Who are your friends? Who are not your friends yet?(2) Who influences who?

e) Researchi) The ‘‘facts’’(1) Polling, background

ii) Who are your experts, and why?(1) Your actual experts and your ‘wish list’

2) Interaction with governmenta) Proof of contact with at least five relevant government agencies, departments,offices, or officials – at least one from each level of government

i) Transcript of contactsb) Identifying the primary agency, department, office, or official (Graham andHand 2009, 137–139)i) One- to two-page written explanation of your choices(1) Why did you choose the agency, department, office, or official you chose?(2) How are they helping you?(3) How are you helping them?

3) Interaction with other groupsa) Proof of contact with at least three other related groups, coalitions, or peoplei) Transcript of contacts

b) Identifying principal alliesi) One- to two-page written explanation of your choicesii) Strategy memo (Graham and Hand 2009, 182)

4) Reaching outa) Proof of active participation=advancing your causei) Proof of media engagement

5) Final presentationa) PowerPointb) Oral presentationc) Five-page written summation


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no justification other than that textbook publishers say they should be covered. Inthis selection process, we focused on learning and relevancy over comprehensiveness.Once our list of relevant topics was narrowed down, we spent considerable time bothbefore and during the semester discussing the best ways to connect the material withthe projects and the projects with the material. When we hit a dead end and couldnot figure out how to make a topic relevant, we always returned to the context oftheir group projects and this allowed us to either find its relevance or to removethe topic from consideration. Ultimately, we derived a syllabus that on the face ofit is not totally unlike what is seen in a traditional introductory syllabus. Thoughwe were trying to be revolutionary, we also understand that our introductory classmust still at some fundamental level be a typical introductory class in that thereare certain concepts that a student should know after leaving an introductory class.

The first couple weeks of the semester were dedicated to reading and discussingDalton’s (2008) central thesis that the definition of good citizenship is changing inlarge part because of the actions of young people. We discussed Putnam’s (2000)contrary view of young people as the problem with politics, and instead of tellingstudents what they did not know about politics we suggested to them that politicsis part of their everyday lives, and that their generation was the most qualified gen-eration in American history to deal with what Dalton (2008, 92–93) refer to as theunique ‘‘cognitive skills’’ of contemporary politics.

In the second week, our students were also assigned and completed their firstshort paper assignment that had the students interview each other outside of classtime to determine the interviewees’ citizenship type. This assignment served a dualpurpose of giving them a chance to apply Dalton’s typology in a unique circum-stance, as well as to get them interacting with each other in a context outside theclassroom in preparation for their upcoming group projects.

From the very beginning of the semester, we repeatedly emphasized the need forour students to come up with their own ideas for these group projects that ultimatelyrepresented 30% of their final grade and that, while we would discuss possible ideaswith them, we would not be supplying these opportunities for them. This representeda monumental leap of faith on our part as we were faced with the possibility of wide-spread apathy on the part of our students that would have left us without the centralpillar of our course. In fact, given the conventional and rather dour view of the polit-ical engagement of young people, this was a pivotal test of our (and Dalton’s) thesisthat young people are willing and capable of effective political action when presentedwith the appropriate opportunity.

Thus, in the third week of the semester, we held our very first ‘‘project pitch’’day as individual students in the class advertised the issues they would like to spon-sor for a possible group project. The other students could then choose what groupthey wanted to work on. Much to our relief, many more ideas than needed were pre-sented that allowed our students a considerable breadth of opportunities that theyvoted for with their feet. Some controversial topics (such as advocating the drug test-ing of welfare recipients) did not generate enough interest to warrant a group, but weended the day with a fairly diverse set of topics. These included two groups workingon parking issues at the university, two groups working on local animal-relatedissues (a ‘‘vicious dog’’ city ordinance that was at the moment a controversy inthe community and a dog park that had been simultaneously proposed by severalgroups), information awareness about bovine growth hormones, the restoration ofan Idaho river, and public lands trail use at a popular community trail.


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Once the projects and groups were in place, we were able to really take advan-tage of the teaching opportunities they provided. For example, In addition to settingthe stage for the rest of the course, this initial selection process was an invaluableresource for subsequent discussions as a living example of policy entrepreneurship,the framing of issues to attract public interest, and so on. Some of the other wayswe were able to intertwine these projects with the material being covered in thecourse were when we used Graham and Hand’s (2009) chapter ‘‘The Buck StopsWhere: Identifying Who in Government can Fix Your Problem’’ as a case studyof the preservation efforts in South Beach, Miami, as the context to discuss federal-ism, which we were then able to address again in another format through our lectureand discussion on Congress. Yet, again rather than just walking through the facts ofthe process of how an elected representative functions in office or how a bill becomesa law, we tried to get students to think about how this knowledge might apply totheir group projects. For example, how and why would policy entrepreneurs suchas themselves choose to approach a House member versus a Senator and, by exten-sion, how and why should they approach an elected representative at state or locallevels?

With our emphasis on internal political efficacy, our teaching approach focusedmore on public policy process instead of the traditional institutional approach to theintroductory course. Through the context of their projects and our policy emphasis,we were also able to expose our students to interesting (to us) and now relevant (tothem) theoretical concepts such as venue shopping (Baumgartner and Jones 1991),focusing events (Birkland 2004), policy expansion (Pralle 2006), policy entrepreneursand multiple streams theory (Kingdon 1993), issue framing (Stone 2002), and thelatest in neuroscience and political psychology (Westen et al. 2006; Westen 2007).As teachers, the ability to address such an interesting theoretical grounding in thecourse was a nice diversion from the usual rudimentary introductory treatment ofthis material, and the relevancy of this material to their projects made it much easierfor our students to grasp the higher level concepts they were being taught.

For the media and public interaction section of the course, we invited localmedia representatives to class for a panel discussion. Through this panel, as anotherexample of the repetition across multiple contexts, we discussed how different mediawould cover different aspects of the class projects that allowed the students to recon-nect to earlier lectures on psychology and framing, as well as how policyentrepreneurs use outlets like the media to expand their issues beyond its initial base.Students were also able to utilize this opportunity to pitch their ideas to the localmedia, resulting in numerous televised appearances and write-ups in the local news-paper about students promoting their projects. In addition, over the course of thesemester, our students, again acting like Dalton’s engaged citizens, of their ownvolition without prompting from us attended public meetings and met with electedofficials (one group had the city’s mayor participate in a street-crossing safety rallythat was also covered by the local NBC affiliate).

Still, some groups and individuals struggled throughout the semester. Giventhe novelty of our approach, our experiences were similar to what Hildreth(2006) describes in her work on service-learning. As Hildreth’s study found, ‘‘mostundergraduates experiences a ‘crisis’ of ‘not knowing what to do,’ which stemmedfrom the conflict between understanding what they ‘should be doing’ (the theory ofdemocratic education) and not being able to (the surprises and twists of workingwith young people)’’ (2006, 287). For example, one group had their policy


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entrepreneur leave the class at midterm and the rest of the group had to rallytogether to finish the project, which they did. Other groups had the usual internalproblems—personality conflicts and free-riders—while still other groups soon real-ized that their pet issue that had initially seemed above reproach could actuallygenerate political opponents, all of which again provided invaluable teachingmoments to discuss these important political science concepts in the context ofour students’ actual experiences.

The final two weeks of the semester were dedicated to group presentations anddelivering the group project portfolios. A couple of the group presentations demon-strated the problems typical of college freshman, including lack of preparation andsome confusion in the delivery of the presentation. However, the majority of thegroups delivered presentations that were professional, well prepared, and informa-tive and were what would have been expected from outstanding upper division polit-ical science students. These presentations were indicative again of the activeinvolvement of groups of Dalton’s engaged citizens, including demonstrations ofthe groups being covered on local television, innovative video clips, and the presen-tation of survey data collected by the group.

So What Does the Data Show?

To quantify and track the effectiveness of this course design and to measure studentlearning, we had students in our course and in other courses take pre- and postcoursesurveys (the survey is available from the authors on request). During the semester,we surveyed students in our team-taught class based around the group project, aswell as students in another introductory course taught by one of the coauthors thatsemester and that followed roughly the same format just without the group project,students in a more conventional introductory political science class, and students inan introductory psychology class.

For these surveys, in the summer before the first semester this course design wastaught, we came up with 33 questions that we felt addressed our objectives withregards to the necessary factual knowledge our students should achieve, their confi-dence in that knowledge, as well as their feelings about the relevancy of the materialand their abilities to interact effectively with the political system (i.e., their externaland internal efficacy). The responses to these questions were recorded using a 5-pointLikert scale (1¼ Strongly Disagree to 5¼ Strongly Agree with a midpoint of3¼Neither Agree or Disagree). To give us a better overall view, we also combinedthese questions into indices of knowledge confidence and internal efficacy and exter-nal efficacy.

First, as shown in Figure 1, it is clear that there are distinct differences in theknowledge and confidence in that knowledge between the three political scienceclasses and the psychology class. The questions in the knowledge confidence indexask items such as ‘‘I can identify the legislative bodies at different levels of govern-ment’’ and ‘‘I can identify different government agencies that are most likely to solvemy issues of concern,’’ so it is good to see that regardless of teaching method orcourse design, students in political science classes are registering increases in politicalknowledge compared to students not taking those classes when they all started out atroughly the same level. In addition, it is noteworthy that all the political scienceclasses registered similar gains in knowledge confidence over time across all threekinds of teaching methodologies.


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What is most important about this result for us is that while we intentionallyemployed less lecturing in favor of more participatory discussion, consciously limitedthe number of key points we addressed and prioritized enhancing the efficacy of ourstudents over merely transmitting fact-based knowledge to them, our students stillappear to have gained as much basic knowledge and confidence in that knowledgeas students in the other more traditional introductory political science classes. Atthe very least this result suggests that students in our experimental class are definitelynot losing out on the learning of facts expected from an introductory course; on theother hand, it does bear pointing out that the only statistically significant differencesregistered in changes in the knowledge confidence index were from the students inour group-project-based, relevancy-focused class, as they were the only group toshow statistically significant differences from their precourse through theirpostcourse surveys, and the only political science class to show statisticallysignificant differences from the students in the psychology class at the end of thesemester.

Even more interesting from the standpoint of our unique course design is whenwe look at the internal efficacy index (see Figure 2). Questions in this index askeditems such as ‘‘If I were to have a problem with government, I am confident thatI could actively engage the right officials and agencies to get the results I need,’’and ‘‘If I have an issue of personal concern, I am confident I can identify alliesand build coalitions with other groups that will help my cause.’’ What we see hereis a very distinct and noticeable difference between our course and all the othercourses. Even though all the political science classes began the semester at identicallevels of efficacy, the students in our class with the group project were the only onesto show an increase in their feelings of internal efficacy at the end of the semester,with these differences between our class and all the others being the only statisticallysignificant differences on this measure.

With these results, we were reassured of a couple of very important points inregards to our group-project-based, efficacy-focused course design: First, regardlessof approach, students are able to learn introductory material and to feel confidentabout their knowledge of that material; however, it does bear repeating again thatthe only statistically significant differences before and after the semester and

Figure 1. Class�Time F (7, 306)¼ 4.636, p. 000 GP After�GP Before¼ 3.216, p. 048 GPAfter�Control After¼ 3.855, p. 010. (Figure provided in color online.)


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compared to the control group were realized by the students in our group-project-based class. This suggests that at the very least this method does not result in lowerlevels of fact-based learning and, if anything, it actually promotes increased levels oflearning and confidence. In addition, it is gratifying to see that we set out with thequite specific goal to enhance the level of internal efficacy of our students and wereactually able to accomplish this goal.

Conclusion

As political science continues to debate questions about our usefulness, we have pre-sented a method for teaching an Introductory to American Government course thatanswers many of these internal and external challenges to our relevance by justifyingpolitical science as an important discipline in today’s highly political world. Asproud political scientists we believe that our discipline is rich in substantive theoreti-cal contributions to our world, but we also believe that it is incumbent upon us todemonstrate how this theory can and should guide the political actions of those out-side our disciplinary walls.

In our case, it was in actually applying some of these important political sciencetheories that we found that our often undervalued introductory students can be someof the most important consumers of all this political science knowledge and theory.In the process, we designed and taught a class that we truly wanted to teach, not aclass dictated to us by book publishers, using those political science theories thatmost captured our own imaginations. We threw out convention and actually hadfun teaching an introductory course, and as a result as our students also enjoyedthe experience and actually learned as much factual knowledge as other introductorygovernment courses while at the same time registering significant increases in theirabilities to apply that knowledge.

It was also interesting to us how our experience served as an indirect experimenton the question of whether American democracy is at risk because of the youngergeneration. Where Robert Putnam views young people as the major reason that par-ticipation in democracy has declined, Russell Dalton, on the other hand, viewsyoung people as engaged and capable of great interest in politics. If Putnam werecorrect, our class would have abysmally failed. But, luckily, our class results

Figure 2. Class�Time (F, 301)¼ 16.367, p.¼ .000. (Figure provided in color online.)


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overwhelmingly support Dalton and his findings in The Good Citizen that youngpeople can and will engage with the political process when that participation empha-sizes more active and direct engagement, from social networking to direct interactionwith decision makers. Our experiences also showed just how much our discipline asa whole could benefit from more books like Graham and Hand’s America: TheOwner’s Manual that would tremendously help other faculty design and teachcourses of their own like the one that we describe in this article.

In the end, we hope that our past and current experiences (we are now in thethird semester of teaching this course design, with equally impressive results througheach iteration) will inspire others to adopt, to modify, and to extend our effortsin their own classrooms. We strongly believe that any efforts to implementgroup-project-based, relevancy-focused introductory classes will not only be reward-ing to those faculty who make the attempt and their students but will also berewarded by providing strong justification for the continued funding of politicalscience as a whole. Now, if only Tom Coburn and Jeff Flake would have taken theirintroductory course from us.

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introduction to american government: what is it good for? absolutely everything

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