Bridging Research and Teaching: The Responsibilities of Political Science Scholars

This section’s purpose is to facilitate discussion of their pedagogic research and responsibilities as scholars of political science. It will encourage the participants to reflect on how their experience and results of research can be used to enrich and improve teaching practices and the student learning experience and vice versa. Furthermore, it will allow participants to identify the challenges which may hinder desired practice, together with proposing ways of overcoming these barriers. We will showcase examples of good practice to the benefit of providing inspiration and encouragement to scholars across the discipline for improving existing ways of teaching and learning. It is the relevance of this section across all of the sub-fields of political science, and therefore to all scholars, that makes it a vital one to support within ECPR. Our panels will be devoted to discussing results of research into scholars’ teaching and student learning. This will enable the participants to discuss various pedagogic methods, different approaches to innovating Political Science courses and to evaluate their outcomes. Equally, the panels will allow us to address a range of important issues facing Higher Education in the 21st century, including quality assessment and internationalisation. Following our most encouraging experience of convening a similar section during the ECPR 2013 conference in Bordeaux (where we organized five well-attended panels on teaching and learning political science with vibrant and stimulating discussions) we believe we should again offer opportunity for our colleagues to discuss important issues of teaching, learning, assessment and teacher development.