Active learning in politics and international relations

Abstract

Active learning is central to the teaching of Politics and International Relations. This symposium brings together a series of short teaching notes that seek to advance our understanding of effective, engaging teaching practices and their ability to cultivate active learning. This introduction provides a brief overview of active learning within the pedagogy of the field and introduces the four teaching notes in the symposium.

Active learning is central to the teaching of Politics and International Relations. Traditional modes of instruction are increasingly being supplemented or displaced in line with broader shifts within Higher Education. The mass move to online teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated some of these trends and forced a reconsideration of what and how we teach, and what kinds of learning we seek to encourage within our courses and programmes (Ettinger, 2022; Lantis, 2022). While readers will undoubtedly be able to easily think of various examples of classes in their own institutions that remain quite traditional in their approach, Politics and International Relations classrooms look rather different than they did in the not-too-distant past.

At the very least, active learning features prominently within disciplinary scholarship of teaching and learning. Some of the earliest learning and teaching articles in this journal promoted active learning. This included a polemic from Alan Jenkins in which he criticised traditional lectures as ‘both educationally ineffective and in part a political authoritarian act’ (Jenkins, 1995: 135). In subsequent years, Politics has published articles about various types of active learning, broadly defined. These range from the use of images in lectures to engage students (Roberts, 2017) to role-play exercises and their challenges (Pruitt, 2014; Schaap, 2005), simulations and games modelled on real (Coticchia et al., 2019) and fictional settings (Barış Gülmez, 2025), and experiential study visits to conflict zones (Ambrozy and Harris, 2016; Vogel, 2025).

Most of the classic literature on active learning is highlighted in political education bibliographies such as the International Political Education Database (IPED) ¹ and the Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics at University College London. ² Our friends over at the Journal of Political Science Education have published a considerable number of articles over an extended period on active learning. Most of the thirty most cited articles feature active learning with a particularly strong focus on simulations. ³ Keyword searches for active learning at other journals that publish pedagogical scholarship – PS: Political Science and Politics, International Studies Perspectives, and European Political Science – all demonstrate a similar pattern. Meanwhile, the main learning and teaching blog in the field, Active Learning in Political Science, makes its educational priorities and approach clear in the title. ⁴ Numerous contributions to the blog document and discuss various active learning activities, exercises, games, and simulations that have been used in a variety of Politics and IR classrooms.

The widespread use of the term active learning is, however, accompanied by ambiguity about its meaning and scope. Both within the discipline-specific and wider Higher Education literatures, it remains common to explain active learning primarily in oppositional terms. Active learning is frequently presented as a break from traditional approaches in which teaching involves students attending lectures to be instructed by a ‘sage on the stage’. The value of such an approach is usually questioned on the grounds that it entails minimal engagement from students and provides them with limited opportunities to build connections between their prior knowledge and what they are learning in class. Lectures are viewed as a passive approach to teaching based around teacher-centred modes of delivery that promote surface-level learning on the part of students. By contrast, active learning represents a more student-centred form of teaching that promotes deeper learning.

What is often lacking is an explicit definition of active learning on its own terms. Bonwell and Eison note the lack of a precise definition in general education literature and instead identify a series of general characteristics usually associated with active learning strategies. These are:

Students are involved in more than listening; Less emphasis is placed on transmitting information and more on developing students’ skills; Students are involved in higher-order thinking (analysis, synthesis, evaluation); Students are engaged in activities (e.g. reading, discussing, writing); Greater emphasis is placed on students’ exploration of their own attitudes and values. (Bonwell and Eison, 1991: 2)

Leston-Bandeira (2012) similarly highlights the lack of a standard definition, noting that numerous teaching techniques may qualify as forms of active learning. She pithily defines active learning as ‘learning by doing’ (p. 54) but also stresses that it must involve students being ‘active in the process of understanding and building knowledge’ (Leston-Bandeira, 2012). In a systematic review of how active learning is understood across the Social Sciences and STEM subjects, Doolittle et al. (2023) highlight three recurring themes. First, that it involves some kind of student-centred learning that draws on constructivist theories of education. Second, that it promotes higher-order thinking skills and encourages deeper forms of learning. Third, that it involves strategies which involve ‘doing’ through active participation and engagement. Even if a consensus definition remains elusive, these broad themes seem to capture what active learning broadly entails.

There are a further two ways in which the term ‘active learning’ can be ambiguous. First, it is usually underpinned by an assumption that it will result in more effective learning. There is a growing literature that looks to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of active learning techniques (Hendrickson, 2021; Clark and Scherpereel, 2024). However, Rosen also notes that the term ‘active learning’ itself is rather misleading. She argues that active engagement would be a better term because it ‘recenters our teaching philosophy on the process – engagement – rather than what is an uncertain outcome – learning’ (Rosen, 2024: 12).

A second source of ambiguity is that the term is used to refer to both overarching approaches to education and specific techniques. Problem-based learning (Burch, 2000; Wilkinson, 2013), inquiry-based learning (Moseley and Connolly, 2020), experiential learning (Haack, 2008), and flipped or inverted classrooms (Lambach et al., 2017) are all sometimes framed as forms of active learning, each with their own frameworks and extended literatures. In other cases, various techniques are framed as forms of active learning with many types of exercise or activity co-existing under this label. Multiple active learning techniques may be combined across a single course (Sjöstedt, 2015) and may also feature within traditional lectures to allow for some element of active learning in large-group settings (Alexander et al., 2025; Huerta, 2007).

In this symposium, we do not impose a single definition of what active learning is or take a firm stance on where or how the boundaries of active learning or engagement should be drawn. Instead, we bring together papers that responded to an open call for contributions that, ‘advance our understanding of effective, engaging teaching practices and their ability to cultivate active learning’. Our aim was to stimulate discussion and showcase the range of teaching and learning practices within our discipline. This symposium presents four short teaching notes on different forms of active learning/engagement that vary substantially in terms of scale and setting and each draw on different aspects of the active learning literature within and beyond the discipline. In doing so, they showcase the range of active learning/engagement that is currently being utilised within our field.

Mitchell (2026) shows how popular culture can be used as an aid to active learning by helping to make conflict-affected societies – in this case Northern Ireland during the Troubles – more comprehensible to students. He explains how he uses clips from Derry Girls and Blue Lights to illustrate and interrogate practices such as socialisation, ontological anxiety, collusion, and complicity. This use of popular media helps students to understand the conflict in more empathetic and humanistic terms and helps to create the conditions for developing a deeper understanding of peace-making within societies.

Roggio (2026) explores the use of experiential learning strategies in introductory and advanced public policy courses and how these can help students to develop a more embodied understanding of key concepts. In particular, she argues that improvisation and role-play can be effective for helping students to more fully inhabit the policy problems they are examining in class and embrace uncertainty as a central factor in policy processes. She also outlines how generative AI can be used to rapidly generate scenarios and materials for these kinds of active learning exercises. Not only does this help to overcome some of the time and resource constraints that instructors can face with when devising classroom activities, but it can also enable instructors themselves to embrace uncertainty and improvise in the ways they expect of students – helping to develop more collaborative relationships with their students.

El Hegazi and Ambrozy (2026) reexamine the Africa Study Visit module at the University of Bradford, which has previously been presented in this journal (Ambrozy and Harris, 2016). This module involves study visits to post-conflict zones as a form of experiential learning. The authors offer an evaluation of this module and its impacts over time. They highlight how the experiential aspects of learning have become more embedded over successive study visits and that such visits retain their power to be transformative for learners. Nonetheless, they also highlight some of the ethical challenges and potential limitations of such visits as well as the question of whether they are sustainable in such a febrile and contentious global political context.

Finally, Timperley and Schick (2026) offer a critical examination of active learning itself. They argue in favour of ‘spacious learning’ as an expanded and adapted form of active learning that takes a step back from the emphasis on learning as cognition, doing and producing. Instead, they centre learning as a process of being, slowness and care, and highlight the relational aspects of active learning pedagogies. They also include practical advice for how to cultivate and sustain spacious learning within the classroom through a series of everyday teaching and learning practices.