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Abstract
For an introductory-level course (Politics and Government) mostly composed of nonpolitical science majors, I use a combination of nontraditional texts, including novels and films, along with primary documents. This article briefly justifies the value of nontraditional texts for exploring politics and government. It then sketches out the nontraditional texts used in the course and how they relate to politics and government. I also describe some methods I use in combining nontraditional texts with primary documents to highlight and explore important concepts and present-day political problems relevant for an introductory-level politics and government class. I close with a brief discussion of two problems I have encountered in employing such an approach.
[Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of the Journal of Political Science Education for the following free supplemental resource(s): Tables 1 and 2, containing examples of relevant nontraditional texts and the political issues associated with them.]
Acknowledgments
I would like to give special thanks to the anonymous reviewers and to members of my department who read and commented on an early version of the paper, including Stephanie Slocum–Schaffer, Max Guirguis, and Joseph Robbins. Shiera Malik also gave me a number of helpful comments on the final draft.
Notes
The goal and scope of this article is not focused on engaging or debating the various approaches used to study the relationship between politics and popular culture. My citation of these texts is simply to demonstrate that over the past decade or so an increasing number of texts have explicitly analyzed or addressed the pedagogical value of the relationship between politics and popular culture.
In an anonymous survey that I deliver at the end of each semester for each section of Politics and Government, I found that 68% of all students surveyed answer “more” to the question: “Compared to the assigned readings in your other classes this semester, are you more likely or less likely to read the assigned fiction for this class?”
In her official observation of my Tuesday-Thursday Spring 2011 Politics and Government class, the Chair of the Department of Political Science, Dr. Stephanie Slocum-Schaffer, wrote: The students “were almost universally attentive and involved throughout the class period …. [T]here was active participation by a nice variety of students.”
Robert Farley (Citation2010a, Citation2010b) at the University of Kentucky's Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce, for instance, uses simulations of zombies and vampires to teach about the difficulty of operating an organization in a context of asymmetry and limited information.
In the student evaluations that tenure-track faculty are required to deliver by the university each semester, one student during the Spring 2012 semester concurred: “I really liked the fact that we read novels rather than a dry textbook. It helped put the material into perspective.” Two students in two separate sections of Politics and Government during the Spring 2011 semester made similar points. One wrote: “Get's students involved and thinking. Uses books and movies to make class interesting.” The second said: “All the readings were excellent and I felt more valuable than [a] traditional textbook.”
I was introduced to Peter Elbow's “The Believing Game: Methodological Believing” through Barbara Fisher's (Citation2011) Blog U post, “In the Teeth of the Evidence.”
The survey was administered across four semesters to 10 sections of Politics and Government. The population size for the survey was 350. The sample size was 283. The statistic about nonmajors was generated with the question: “What is your major?” The statistic about peer recommendation was generated with the survey question: “Would you recommend this class to a friend?”
As I noted above, not everyone works from the assumption that fiction mirrors factual political processes, and, furthermore, such an assumption is problematic insofar as it only partially captures the dynamic between politics and popular culture.
Debate is often characterized as a useful teaching method for getting students involved in class and getting them thinking about concepts (Omelicheva Citation2007; Oros Citation2007). Springboarding from some fictional scenario into a debate about some factual political issue is one way to make that more interactive classroom take shape.
At the end of each semester, I conduct a survey of student attitudes towards the fiction used in class. I always observe students’ responses to the fiction shown in class. Both the surveys and the observations are data that I gather for research purposes.