This comprehensive guide captures important trends in international relations (IR) pedagogy, paying particular attention to innovations in active learning and student engagement for the contemporary International Relations IR classroom.

This book introduces intellectual and pedagogical problems in the case method of teaching international affairs. A growing international and interdisciplinary community of university and secondary schoolteachers and trainers of policy officials are introducing interactive learning methods for the classroom. This book offers lessons for them and provides new materials suitable for the classroom. Growing interest in interactive learning.

To teach political issues such as political struggle, justice, interstate conflict, etc. educators rely mostly on textbooks and lectures. However, many other forms of narrative exist that can elevate our understanding of such issues. This innovative work seeks new ways to foster learning beyond the textbook and lecture model, by using creative and new media, including graphic novels, animated films, hip-hop music, Twitter, and more. Discussing the opportunities these media offer to teach and engage students about politics, the work presents concrete ways on how to use them, along with teaching and assessment strategies, all tested in the classroom. The contributors are dedicated educators from various types of institutions whose essays span a variety of political topics and examine how non-traditional "texts" can promote critical thinking and intellectual growth among students in colleges and universities. The first of its kind to discuss a wide range of alternative texts and media, the book will be a valuable resource to anyone seeking to develop innovative curricula and engage their students in the study of politics.

This book develops an approach to both method and the socio-political implications of knowledge production that embraces our embeddedness in the world that we study. It seeks to enact the transformative potentials inherent in this relationship in how it engages readers. It presents a creative survey of some of the newest developments in critical research methods and critical pedagogy that together go beyond the aims of knowledge transfer that often structure our practices. Each contribution takes on a different shape, tone and orientation, and discusses a critical method or approach, teasing out the ways in which it can also work as a transformative practice. While the presentation of different methods is both rigorously practice-based and specific, contributors also offer reflections on the stakes of critical engagement and how it may play an important role in expanding and subverting existing regimes of intelligibility. Contributions variously address the following key questions: What makes your research method important? How can others work with it? How has research through this method and/or the way you ended up deploying it transformed you and/or your practice? How did it matter for thinking about community, (academic) collaboration, and sharing ‘knowledge’? This volume makes the case for re-politicizing the importance of research and the transformative potentials of research methods not only in ‘accessing’ the world as an object of study, but as ways of acting and being in the world. It will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, critical theory, research methods and politics in general.

This volume asks how we, as International Relations scholars, support our students, and indeed each other, to create classroom spaces that foster the critical curiosity and engagement required to understand and live in a world that feels dangerously disrupted? In an era of globalization, disruption, and pandemic, International Relations educators need to reflect upon how teaching helps constitute the discipline and position our students to contribute to the advancement of International Relations as a discipline and practice. Through exploring innovative approaches to teaching and learning, this volume ensures that International Relations keeps up with the contemporary needs of students and student learning, and takes advantage of the opportunity to advance as a discipline now and in the future. As we move through ‘pivots’ online and ‘transitions’ to remote learning in the midst of a pandemic, the need for attention to student learning is only made more prescient and urgent.

This volume on international studies pedagogy helps us think purposefully about the worlds we teach to our students and it shows us why engaging in reflective practice about how and what we teach matters. The Handbook also provides strategies to engage students in a variety of ways to reflect on and engage with the complexities of the world in which we live.