“What’s Positive About Positive Rights?” Students’ Everyday Understandings and the Challenges of Teaching Political Science

ABSTRACT

A review of research into teaching and learning in political science education concludes that this literature emphasizes student outcomes and “show and tell” descriptions of pedagogical interventions (Craig 2014). The present study instead aims to open the “black box” of conceptual learning in political science, illustrating the ambiguous role that everyday understandings of core concepts may play in the learning process. Starting from the conceptual change literature, we present findings on how everyday understandings influence learning regarding the concepts of “positive rights” and “anarchy,” resulting in various learning difficulties. The results suggest that teaching needs to explore and explain differences in meaning between scientific and everyday understandings.

KEYWORDS:

• Conceptual change
• conceptual understanding
• everyday knowledge
• learning processes

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their valuable comments.

Notes

We stay very close to the original wording of the transcripts in our translations and presentation, but in choosing whether to translate literally or to capture the meaning, we have chosen the latter.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council (2011-5991).

Notes on contributors

Linda Ekström

Linda Ekström has a PhD in political science and during her postdoc period in the Department of Humanities and Social Science Education at Stockholm University, Ekström worked with questions on teaching and learning in political science. Ekström is currently employed as a researcher at Luleå University of Technology.

Cecilia Lundholm

Cecilia Lundholm is Professor in Educational Science with a specialization in teaching and learning in the social sciences at the Department of Humanities and Social Science Education, Stockholm University. Lundholm’s research interests focuses on learning and instruction in geography, environmental and social science studies.