Teaching Politics to Small Groups
Year: 2012
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: The pedagogical topic of teaching Politics to small groups may perhaps be regarded as a non-issue given the increase in applications to study Politics at university. According to Professor Wyn Grant, 2741 students took up a Politics and International Studies place in 2000 and by 2005, this had increased to 4366. Grant highlights that in ‘2007 there were 23,000 Politics undergraduates and 9625 postgraduates, many of them from outside the UK’ (Grant, 2010, p. 164). Figures from UCAS, cited by Professor John Benyon, highlight that acceptances to study Politics were up by 90 per cent in 2009 (from 2000) (Benyon, 2010, p. 18). Having said this, even though applications and actual places are up, for a variety of reasons – some say it is the Obama Effect, coalition politics and/or the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan (Davies, 2009, p. 6), others cite an increasing politicization facilitated by a focus upon issues such as the increase in tuition fees – and Politics tutors are faced with increasing numbers of students, for the majority of Political Scientists/Politics tutors there will remain an optimum class size. As Bogaard et al. (2005, p. 16) state, ‘Teaching in small groups is a common and highly valued practice in the Social Sciences and Humanities’. They proceed to highlight the general ‘conviction that small group teaching is a particularly useful device to encourage critical learning and understanding of complex issues’ (Bogaard et al., 2005, p. 16). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Source: Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks
Author: Jacqueline Briggs
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1590941308