Introduction to American Government: What is it Good for? Absolutely Everything

Abstract

For those times when political science is again confronted with questions about its usefulness, we suggest that the classroom is a central arena for our discipline to reassert its relevance to the society in which we live. In particular, given the existence of our open and accessible political system, we argue that the introductory course taught as a general education requirement by nearly every political science department provides unique advantages for political science to justify itself as a relevant and necessary endeavor in comparison with most other academic disciplines. However, to truly take advantage of the unique position of political science we need to reevaluate some of our most basic assumptions about the reasons we have for teaching these introductory classes. Incorporating the latest research in teaching methods and theories of learning, we totally redesigned an introductory course from the ground up, basing this course around semester-long group projects geared towards enhancing the internal efficacy of our students as a means of increasing their comprehension of the material. In this article, we discuss the results from our implementation of this course design in the fall of 2009, demonstrating the effectiveness of the teaching model in both increasing the political efficacy of our students while simultaneously improving their knowledge of our political system. We conclude with a discussion of just how powerful this method of teaching our introductory classes can be as a justification for the entire edifice of political science itself.

Keywords:

• engaged citizens
• pedagogy
• political science education