Gallery Walk Seminar: Visualizing the Future of Political Ideologies

Abstract

This article shows how a gallery walk exercise can be used to encourage broad participation and higher-level thinking among undergraduate students of political science. Asked to visualize the future of different political ideologies, the students work together in groups to create posters that they then present for each other during a vernissage-like event that includes a Q&A session. This seminar format enables an iterative, adaptive, and reflective approach to learning that stimulates higher-level skills such as synthesis and evaluation. As such, the gallery walk exercise can be seen as a useful complement to more traditional didactic learning activities aimed at the lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy (e.g., knowledge and comprehension). Based on written course evaluations, the students seem to appreciate not only the novelty of the gallery walk seminar format but also how it prompted them to see the different ideologies in a new light and that it significantly deepened their understanding of the subject matter.

Keywords:

• Peer learning
• participation
• classroom climate

Note

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Jonathan Symons as well as three anonymous referees for valuable comments.

Notes

1 This research was carried out according to the ethical guidelines of Umeå University, Sweden. All students were fully informed that the gallery walk seminar would form the basis of a pedagogical article. The students whose artwork is included have given their explicit consent to this. The students were informed that not consenting would not negatively affect their grade. No personal data were stored in relation to this research.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Karl Staaff Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Rasmus Karlsson

Rasmus Karlsson is an Associate Professor in political science at Umeå University.

He has published widely on climate mitigation policy, development ethics, and global affairs.