Teaching

I taught for three years at a women’s degree college in India where most of my students were the first in their families to attend university, and where many were studying political theory in their second or third language. A lecture pitched at the middle of that room reached almost no one. The students who already understood were bored, and the students who did not understand had no way to signal it. Everything I believe about teaching came from working out what to do about that.

The first thing I changed was who did the talking. I built my courses around small groups working through a primary text and reporting back, and around formal debates in which students argued positions they had been assigned rather than positions they held. Assigning positions mattered more than I expected. Students who would not venture an opinion of their own would defend an assigned one forcefully, because the risk of being wrong belonged to the position rather than to them.

The second thing I changed was assessment. I had inherited end-of-term examinations that rewarded accurate reproduction of lecture notes, which meant a student could pass without having thought about anything. I replaced them with short analytical papers on primary sources and structured argument assignments in which a student had to state a claim and answer the strongest objection to it. When an assignment produced uniformly weak work, I treated that as evidence about the assignment rather than about the students, and rewrote it.

Underlying both changes is a distinction I have come to rely on, between what a student does not yet know and what a student cannot do. Unfamiliarity with an academic register, or with a canon, or with the conventions of written argument, is easily mistaken for incapacity, and students internalise that mistake quickly. Much of my course design is an attempt not to make it: assignments scaffolded in stages so that difficulty is visible early, feedback that names the specific thing to fix rather than issuing a verdict, and reading responses that let students who hesitate to speak aloud demonstrate that they have engaged.

I teach political science comparatively, and I think that is worth something to students in the United States. Having taught American constitutional design alongside parliamentary and federal systems elsewhere, I have found that students understand their own institutions better once they can see that the arrangements were chosen rather than inevitable. Separation of powers looks different when set beside a system that fuses executive and legislature. Teaching from outside a single national frame is not an add-on to my subject; it is how I understand it.

What I want from a course is not that students adopt my views, and I try hard not to make my own positions the object of the exercise. I want them to be able to construct an argument they could defend to someone who disagrees with them: to distinguish a claim from an assertion, locate evidence, and take an opposing argument seriously enough to answer it. That skill outlasts the content of any syllabus I have taught.