Signature Pedagogies and International Relations Theory

Posted by Edward Grey on September 9th, 2021

When incorporating different pedagogies within the International Relations classroom, one of the primary concerns is who the students are and what professional roles are our key teachings preparing them from. The first thing that comes to mind is these students have a bright future as politicians, public servants, and diplomats. While this is certainly not wrong, as a professor of Political science, I aim to ensure my students are well-versed with International Relations theories to better perform their role of being a responsible citizen.

Signature pedagogies primarily refer to teaching methods that organize fundamental teaching methods and transferring skills to future practitioners. It aims to equip them with the knowledge needed to act and perform with integrity throughout their professional career. Simply put, signature pedagogies are not only concerned with the content being taught but how the knowledge is being imparted. All discipline-specific signature pedagogies have three primary characteristics.

• The Surface Structure—this entails the concrete acts of learning and teaching.
• The Deep Structure—deeply rooted assumptions of imparting a particular canon of knowledge in the best way possible.
• The Implicit Structure—this involves beliefs and moral values about professional dispositions and attitudes.

Furthermore, signature pedagogies also comprise a set of common features. These pedagogies demarcate and embody routinized and persuasive teaching frameworks. They enable the student to focus on complex subject matters, which, over time, develop into habits of mind around several cognitive, psychomotor, and affective learning.

Thoughtfulness

Using an ‘I am a realist’ approach to destabilize thoughtlessness is often more successful as an approach as students seem it fits the need for easy characterization of theories or an abstract subject. Once they are distinguished from one another, it’s easier to make informed choices between them as per some absolute basis.

It also enables them to conflate their individual choice of perception with always being right in some way. As a result, most students develop a sense of complacency by understanding that knowable and discrete theories, surety by knowing that easier choices can be made, and detachment that sometimes choices can be made independently of how we assess ourselves.

Incommensurability and Hypocrisy

This phenomenon is introduced almost immediately to all students when they assess theoretical disciplines during the initial classes. They are taught to discuss several theories\' demise and origins and introduce them to several political, personal, and institutional contexts in which new knowledge may be created or demanded. Apart from teaching students ways to adjudicate between different theories, it also humanizes an otherwise fairly abstract discipline.

Students of IRT need to understand that if incommensurability is one factor that leads to progress in some sort of thoughtfulness, another critical factor that drives the process forward involves revealing the hypocrisy of ourselves and others. This step is far more confronting, delicate, and personal than the incommensurability of theories.

Hypocrisy and incommensurability aim to collectively decenter and destabilize by removing convenience certainties about choosing the correct answer, progressing, or ways to engage with the world around us. As educators, our role shouldn\'t be to tell students what to think, especially concerning something as groundless and theories. However, we do focus on shaping up how they think, how they think about that thinking process, and how their double thinking method impacts their presence in the embodied world.

As a researcher and professor that deals with IRT, I believe we must encounter, perceive, and respond to the vulnerability of our thinking process, the world in which we think, the objects we think about, and more. My end goal is to create well-informed citizens who see the world with humility and empathy but also hope in their own agency. In my experience, we have enough people in the world who know they\'re right, teaching them to learn they might be wrong and yet helping them be brave enough and caring enough to act despite this overwhelmingly uncomfortable realization is the end goal.

Find out more about Ted Hopf International Relations Theory here.