Innovative Social Sciences Teaching and Learning: Facilitating Students' Personal Growth and Career Success 3031414519, 9783031414510

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Innovative Social Sciences Teaching and Learning Facilitating Students’ Personal Growth and Career Success Katharina Rietig

Innovative Social Sciences Teaching and Learning

Katharina Rietig

Innovative Social Sciences Teaching and Learning Facilitating Students’ Personal Growth and Career Success

Katharina Rietig School of Geography, Politics and Sociology Newcastle University Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-41451-0    ISBN 978-3-031-41452-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41452-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Alex Linch shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Artificial Intelligence and Shifting Roles for Social Sciences Graduates   1 The Changing World of Work   4 Changing Expectations of and Requirements for Graduates   6 Who Is This Book For?   9 Chapter Overview  10 References  13 Part I The Big Picture of Learning Theories and Course Design  17 2 Learning  Theory: The Power of Yet and Dreaming Big 19 What Is Learning?  20 How Do We Learn? Insights from Social Psychology and Organizational Studies  22 The Linear Cognitive Learning Process  22 Experiential Learning  23 Single- and Double-Loop and Deutero Learning  25 The Complete Cycle of Choice  27 Non-learning: Defensive Avoidance, Unlearning, and Muddling Through  28 The Learning in Governance Framework  29 v

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The Growth Mindset, Grit, Perseverance, and Try: Attributes of Policy Entrepreneurs as Agents of Change  32 The Personal Growth Mindset: Framework for Analysis  36 Conclusion  38 References  39 3 Constructive  Alignment in Course and Degree Design 43 The Personal Growth Mindset and Constructive Alignment  44 Constructive Alignment in Degree Programs  46 Constructive Alignment Within Courses  49 Conclusion  66 References  67 Part II Teaching Activities to Develop a Growth Mindset in Students  71 4 Lectures 73 Lectures, Lecturers, and the Personal Growth Mindset  74 In-person Lectures, Online Lectures, and Blended Approaches  76 Preparing the Lecture  83 Delivering the Lecture  86 Conclusion  88 References  89 5 Seminars 91 The Growth Mindset and Seminar Design  92 Face-to-Face Seminars Versus Online Seminars, and Hybrid Approaches  93 Seminar Preparation  96 Running the Seminar  97 Seminar Activities  99 Student Presentations  99 Answering Sample Exam Questions 100 Working Through Math Problems and Quantitative Methods Training 102 Discussing Questions and Case Studies 103 Debates 105 Conclusion 107 References 107

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6 Study Groups109 How Can Study Groups Help Develop/Embed a Growth Mindset? 110 Study Group Examples and Typology 112 Study Group 1: The Friendship and Peer Group 112 Study Group 2: The Social Club 113 Study Group 3: The Student-Led Exam Prep Course 114 Study Group 4: The Incentivized Group 115 Study Group 5: The Never Have-Beens 117 Integrating Study Groups into the Course 117 Advantages of Study Groups 120 Addressing Challenges 122 Conclusion 123 References 124 7 Simulations127 Benefits and Challenges of Simulations 129 Planning, Preparation, Running the Simulation, and Reflection 131 Negotiation Venue 131 Country/Role Assignments 132 Position Paper 132 Training and ‘Working Up’ to Larger MUNs 133 During the Simulation 134 Element of Reflection 135 The Simulation Itself 135 MUNs and Other Simulations in 1–2-Hour Seminars 135 Half-Day up to 2 Day MUNs as Part of a Course 137 MUNs as Week-Long Championship in Diplomacy and Debating 142 Conclusion 143 References 144 8 Supervising Dissertations147 Developing a Supervisor-Supervisee Relationship 148 Identifying the Research Question: Or Seeing the Trees in the Forest 150 Typical Dissertation Structure 152 Addressing Common Challenges Faced by Students 155 Procrastination and Writer’s Block 155

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Getting Lost in the Woods During the Literature Review 157 Data Availability and Analysis 159 Too Exhausted for a Clear, Concise Discussion Section 161 Confusing a Dissertation with an Essay or Including Too Much Personal Opinion 163 Conclusion 164 References 164 9 Conclusion167 Constructively Aligning Degrees and Courses with the Personal Growth Framework 168 Mainstreaming Major Societal Challenges 171 The Personal Growth Framework and the World of Work 172 References 173 References175 Index189

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5

Cognitive learning process. Source: Adapted by author from Swann, 1999: 266 Simple model of individual learning/the learning cycle. Source: Kim, 1993: 40 based on Argyris, 1976 Kolb’s experiential learning cycle. Kolb & Kolb, 2005 Complete cycle of choice. Source: March & Olsen, 1975: 150 Personal growth mindset framework

23 24 25 28 37

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This book offers novel insights into how students can develop a personal growth mindset during their degree programs that allows them to view new challenges as opportunity to grow personally, reflect on the new knowledge and experience, and subsequently improve their skills to critically examine and evaluate information on a journey of personal growth. It provides a novel framework that allows university teachers to constructively align learning objectives and assessments with crucial transferable skill development and fostering a mindset for personal growth among students with a focus on continuously improving and reflecting on feedback. The objective is to empower academics to develop and deliver courses and degree programs that are ‘fit for purpose’ by equipping social science students with the skills and mindsets that will benefit them throughout their careers in ever-changing and newly emerging jobs.

Artificial Intelligence and Shifting Roles for Social Sciences Graduates Studying Social Sciences at university or small liberal arts colleges offers the unique opportunity to deeply engage with literature, world-changing ideas, new concepts, and to critically evaluate what these mean in any given social, economic, and political context. These three to four years in student’s lives are also a formative phase before entering the workplace © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Rietig, Innovative Social Sciences Teaching and Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41452-7_1

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and starting their careers. For many, these years mark the transition into adulthood and discovering one’s purpose in life (Heckhausen et al., 2019). It also means a considerable financial investment either through tuition fees in most countries or at least through the years of income forgone compared to vocational training. At the same time, most students are concerned about their employability prospects. This means that students are increasingly asking how what they learn in their degree programs will be relevant for achieving their career and professional aspirations. At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) applications in the form of large language models and machine learning such as ChatGPT, the Google chatbot Bard, Microsoft’s Windows 11 Copilot, and others enter education in formal and informal ways through facilitating time-consuming tasks. This means that students are getting increasingly familiar with the opportunities offered by virtual personal assistants and that educational providers need to both address the associated ethical challenges such as plagiarism, as well as explore ways of embedding AI applications into educational practice (Popenci, 2022). At the same time, it requires strengthening and maintaining a focus on student’s cognitive and social development, and in particular their ability to adapt to the fast-paced technological changes that continue to emerge over the next decades. Education providers are adapting and integrating into teaching practices such technologies, which also increasingly include virtual reality applications (for more details, see, e.g., Araya & Marber, 2023; Viegas & Correia, 2022). They are thus reacting to the increasing importance of technology in the classroom (see Jaafar & Pedersen, 2021; Khadimally, 2022; Wang et al., 2021). While integrating such new and emerging technologies into teaching is important and increasingly happening across higher education providers as well as secondary schools, this book takes a long-term perspective by focusing on the mindset that students need to develop to keep up with future technological developments that we can currently only glimpse the early beginnings of. Most of the integration of AI technologies into teaching and learning practices of the early 2020s will be outdated in the 2030s much like computers, tablets, and digital learning resources have replaced pen, paper, and print books in the 2000s and 2010s. This book is less about the means and tools, i.e., the technologies and their uses themselves, than about innovative approaches to allow students keep up with whatever changes in technologies and the workplace

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they encounter during their careers. This is why the mindset that students develop during their studies is crucial. If they were to take away only one attitude and related skill from their education, then it should be having learned how to learn and how to deal with new challenges in a way that allows them to live fulfilled lives no matter what the technological, economic, and social framework conditions they find themselves in. Consequently, the question is how can Social Sciences degree programs in, e.g., Business, Communication Sciences, Environmental Studies, Economics, Geography, Law, Political Science, or Sociology prepare students for the changing world of work, especially the rise of artificial intelligence applications in white-collar jobs? This is highly relevant given the increasing professionalization of degree programs that react to the calls for including internships, simulations, research projects, and other skill-­ development into their elective and/or core curriculum to improve employability (Szymaniak, 2022). Social sciences departments across North America, the United Kingdom, Europe, Asia, and beyond are revising their curriculums to react to challenges such as declining enrolment and to integrate best practices, including developing teamwork skills through capstone projects (Bayer et al., 2022). My central argument is that although these experience-based curriculum revisions are important, they need to be combined with encouraging a personal growth mindset in students that prepares them not only for current careers, but for the future of work. Student’s career destinations are undergoing fundamental and rapid changes, which make it even more important to equip students with a mindset that makes them highly adaptive to new technologies, opportunities, and increased awareness of cross-­ cutting challenges such as on sustainability, equality, diversity, and inclusion (Queshi et al., 2020; Vos et al., 2016). Most students will enter jobs and careers that do not yet exist. This means that they require the skills for self-directed learning and teamwork (Bayer et  al., 2022) to be creative, confidently deal with challenges and changing environments, as well as develop a mindset that focuses on continued growth and personal development. This chapter examines the fundamental changes to white-collar jobs brought on and expected by AI applications and assesses how a personal growth mindset, perseverance, and not giving up in the face of challenges (Dweck, 2017) can equip students to rise to future challenges in their professional careers. It concludes that degree programs need to

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constructively align their teaching and learning offerings to support students in developing a mindset and skill set aimed at being able to better adapt to future challenges and engage in lifelong learning. This is particularly important for the increasing group of first-generation students who depend on their experience at university within the curriculum, extracurricular activities and accessing the hidden curriculum (Gable, 2021) to develop the growth mindset and skills to succeed once they graduate.

The Changing World of Work The world of work that graduates enter is constantly changing. In most subject disciplines, some of the jobs and career paths graduates will eventually pursue have not yet existed when they started their studies (Cameron, 2017). Who has heard of a social media manager, artificial intelligence specialist, or big data analyst in 2005 (Reese, 2018)? Or a web developer in 1990? At the same time, what happened to the typist pools of secretaries that occupied most open plan office floors in the 1970s and 1980s? Or the stock market exchange traders of Wall Street? Where did all the bank staff go when bank branches closed or consolidated with the rise of online banking? As new jobs, and with them career pathways, emerge, others encounter diminishing opportunities and fundamental changes (Sumantran et al., 2017; Zuboff, 2019), including the emergence of automation and algorithms in management either through augmented approaches or even AI applications taking over direct management and decision-making functions as ‘boss’ (Aloisi & DeStefano, 2022). This is not only restricted to the gig economy (Moore & Woodcock, 2021) or autocratic regimes (Zeng, 2022) but increasingly mainstreamed in sectors such as banking, insurance, and finance across the global north and global south (Nir, 2023). Earlier, industrial revolutions, automation advances, and waves of outsourcing to countries with lower wages were focused on blue-collar jobs, but increasingly typical entry positions for graduates of Social Sciences degree programs are also affected. The rise of narrow artificial intelligence means that also typical office-based white-collar jobs with career pathways and professional accreditations are changing rapidly (Moore & Woodcock, 2021). This impacts on the key sectors and employers where Social Science graduates will work, ranging from non-profit and civil society organizations such as NGOs to the government sector/civil service and small/medium sized as well as multinational companies within the private sector as the largest employer.

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The increased level of automation will result in large numbers of jobs disappearing in highly qualified areas such as law, public relations, and government administration in addition to lower qualified areas such as logistics or driving of vehicles (Vaidhyanathan, 2011, 2018). At the same time, decarbonization of industries also means job losses in carbon intensive and fossil fuel extraction sectors, including office administration. Studies that analyzed what percentage of jobs could be automated on the basis of the tasks performed by these jobs and any computerization bottlenecks (Davenport, 2018) found that by 2033, 47% of jobs in the US were likely to be automated and that 35% of jobs in the UK could be automated within 10–20 years. Other studies argued that the actual level of automation potential is likely closer to 5–10% as jobs also contain other tasks that cannot be automated. However, it is important to keep in mind that any estimates cannot foresee future developments and impacts such as Covid-19 measures or the arrival and mainstreaming of large language models. Covid-19 measures, including a shift toward home office, remote working, and video conferencing solutions (Yarberry & Sims, 2021) have accelerated this trend. It is being solidified by a culture shift among many companies and employees who expect hybrid working and fewer days at the office to become the norm, not the exception. There are two likely outcomes: large-scale automation and marginal automation/augmentation of human employees by artificial intelligence and vice versa (Davenport, 2018). The level of large-scale automation is expected to be around 5–10% due to associated high costs. Whether a job becomes automated also depends on benefits beyond replacing labor costs, the availability and scarcity of skilled labor, considerations around regulation/legal frameworks, and level of social acceptance. Augmentation of human workers and artificial intelligence applications is more likely as few jobs contain sufficiently high shares of tasks that could be fully automated. Experience from earlier technological advances suggests that the new technologies supplement existing jobs (Broussard, 2018). As some tasks get automated, new tasks and entirely new jobs are likely to emerge, amounting to a net-increase overall (Dougherty & Wilson, 2018). Automating certain tasks results in increased demand for addressing new follow-on problems or new tasks (Ross, 2017) such as training cognitive technologies in capabilities like empathy, sustaining the performance of cognitive systems over time with regard to ethical compliance and task performance, and explaining the processes and results of recommendations made with artificial intelligence-involvement to senior

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decision-makers (Davenport, 2018). This implies a shift in employment and a high need for investment in education, both the ‘classic’ route of entering higher education after secondary school and an increasing importance of life-long learning that allows for the updating of existing skills and learning of new skills to keep pace with the ever-evolving technological capabilities. Consequently, technological developments such as artificial intelligence and related societal shifts impact on graduate’s jobs and careers, with new opportunities and increased convenience (Moring, 2022; Nir, 2023), as well as new challenges such as ingrained inequalities, surveillance, and loss of autonomy (Chun & Barnett, 2021; Verdegem, 2021). Knowledge of facts gets increasingly outdated as new scientific findings emerge and new technological developments take hold. This includes supporting technologies such as the widespread uptake of communication applications like Slack and Microsoft Teams, virtual personal assistants and video conferencing software such as Zoom. However, it also impacts upon ‘know-­ how’ and the time intensity of finding information. Gone are the days of pouring over library catalogues on index cards, ordering books, or searching for journal articles on dusty shelves. Today’s students can write entire dissertations based on a much wider range and higher quality of academic sources without ever setting foot into the library building—an Internet connection anywhere in the world suffices.

Changing Expectations of and Requirements for Graduates All these developments mean that knowing facts, which are increasingly outdated and replaced by new scientific findings, becomes less important in many disciplines than embedding the ability to find, synthesize, analyze, and especially to critically evaluate new knowledge as well as determine its relevance to one’s current needs. Skills such as information literacy, i.e., the ability to find and synthesize, are crucial for research and writing, yet only 8.8% of university teachers consider their arriving Social Science students as having sufficient information literacy to succeed (Thornton & Atkinson, 2022). There is also a whole array of skills and tasks that will be increasingly needed as much of the ‘groundwork’ of finding information and analyzing data gets automated similar to the secretarial and typist pools before the arrival of the photocopier and personal computer. By the

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2020s, personal electronic assistants, like Apple’s SIRI, Google’s Echo, and Amazon’s Alexa, among others, facilitate and replace tasks that were once carried out by personal assistants and office support staff. All these technological developments free up time for other tasks and activities. Many of these new tasks and activities will be in the area of creativity and innovation (Bessen, 2015) with regard to generating new ideas, identifying new opportunities for offering services and products, research and development of such new services and products, and in particular social networking and interpersonal communication skills, which is mirrored by employer’s expectations communicated in job advertisements (Rios et al., 2020). As more information and data become available in pre-analyzed or synthesized form thanks to big data, it will be ever more important to be able to identify the relevant information and especially critically evaluate it for its implications and set it into the relevant context. Social Science graduates will need to be able to identify new opportunities, convincingly present their ideas to colleagues and stakeholders, collaborate, use critical thinking skills as well as work in an international context and within virtual teams to implement these ideas to ultimately solve problems and address key societal and economic challenges (Rios et al., 2020). In many professions, there is a ‘hidden curriculum’ of, in the case of academia, networking, grant writing, and publication skills that new entrants need to be aware of and familiar with if they are to succeed in their careers (Windsor & Kronsted, 2022). Being aware of and mastering professions’ hidden curricula is an important skill students need to develop independently of their existing social capital, especially in the interest of equality, diversity, and inclusion (Papa, 2020). Graduates also need to be able to differentiate between knowledge based on scientific research and ‘post-truth’ fake news (Chinn et al., 2021). Furthermore, they are likely to change employers or even careers several times during their working life, which further increases the importance of adaptability and flexibility, as well as motivation (Latham & Pinder, 2005). All these skills and abilities that will determine success could be summarized within a mindset for personal growth. Especially Social Science graduates with no set professional career pathway such as accountants or lawyers contribute their soft skills, adaptability, and creativity for problem solving as key characteristics in their jobs. Specializations and internships/ work placements are a crucial step (Lester & Costley, 2010; Szymaniak, 2022) with potential to widen participation and close achievement gaps

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between ethnic minority students/students of color and white students (Moores et  al., 2017; Tate, 2020). So ideally, their time at university allows students to develop such skills and more importantly a mindset for personal growth that helps them to seek out new knowledge and skills, use their creativity, and to deal with the changing world of work. Drawing on research in social and cognitive psychology, this book’s central argument is that student’s mindsets play a crucial role at determining how they develop the key attributes of successful graduates that have the necessary skills to succeed in their later careers and achieve their professional goals. Students with a fixed mindset believe that abilities are born, they are either smart or they are not. They focus on current performance and not ‘looking bad’, resulting in behavior that discounts effort and avoids challenges, getting discouraged by mistakes and defensive when receiving feedback. In short, students shy away from opportunities to grow personally and professionally. However, university teachers can change student’s mindsets with our teaching and course design by constructively aligning the course content with opportunities to develop a ‘growth mindset’ (Dweck, 2017). This book demonstrates how the personal growth mindset can be integrated into the undergraduate and master’s degree curriculum. It examines how teaching activities such as lectures and seminars can be modified and aligned with assessments to allow for feedback loops and encourage students to approach their performance as ‘not yet’, leading to reflection on how they can further improve. This means praising students for the process they engage in. Instead of rewarding right answers, a growth mindset-focused course rewards the learning process. Focusing feedback on ‘not yet’ creates greater confidence and persistence as well as encourages students to improve. Pushing students out of their comfort zone to work hard helps to increase academic performance and enables students to grow with the challenges they will encounter in their later careers (Dweck, 2017). This book contributes to the education literature with a theoretical framework on learning based on reflection on input resulting in factual, experiential, and constructivist learning that allows to conceptualize learning and teaching strategies aimed at developing a growth mindset among students. It also contributes to academics’ understanding how they can have a positive impact on their student’s employability, problem-solving, public speaking, and advanced research skills, in addition to fact-based degree program-specific knowledge.

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Who Is This Book For? This book is particularly useful for three groups. First, scholars in the fields of education, psychology, public policy, and management studies who are interested in how individuals learn in educational settings and in the wider workplace, e.g., in policymaking or large bureaucracies, and how their learning influences decision-making. Second, this book has a very high relevance for the wider academic audience of scholars who teach as part of their academic appointment. It speaks to mid-career and senior scholars who reflect on their teaching practices with regard to the relevance and usefulness of their teaching methods and who are open to innovative approaches that equip students with the skills to succeed in any professional career of the twenty-first century that requires life-long learning, creativity, resourcefulness, and perseverance. It is primarily written with early career scholars (PhD candidates, postdocs, teaching fellows/lecturers on the teaching and scholarship track, as well as lecturers/assistant professors on the research and teaching career track) in mind who are in their early years of teaching and actively developing their teaching philosophy and practice. Third, this book is aimed at academics and teaching professionals who are involved in designing and delivering professional development programs for teaching in higher education. These programs are offered by all UK universities and increasingly across continental Europe, the United States, and Asia. They are optional for PhD candidates, postdocs, and teaching fellows, but their successful completion tends to be mandatory for lecturers/ assistant professors to pass their probation phase/tenure review to be appointed on a permanent research and teaching contract. One common criticism of these teaching certificate programs across UK post-1992, research intensive and Russell Group universities (or the equivalent of Small Liberal Arts Colleges, R2 and R1 universities in the United States) is that they are little more than ‘box ticking’ exercises that require ‘jumping through hoops’. This book hopes to contribute to reading lists of teaching certificate programs as it allows teachers, mentors, and participants, including those from professional services career paths involved in delivering training programs, to make use of the unique opportunity for early career academics to genuinely reflect on their teaching, how it can be better aligned with the skill development and personal growth of their students, and thus go beyond the communication of facts toward student-focused learning that includes experiential learning and a growth mindset.

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Chapter Overview Part I: ‘The Big Picture of Learning Theories and Course Design’. The first part introduces a theoretical framework for conceptualizing and analyzing learning in higher education. This ‘Personal Growth Framework’ draws on latest advances in psychology, education, management studies, and public policy. Chapter 2 introduces this framework following a review of the related literatures. Chapter 3 addresses the central research question how learning theories can support teaching and learning in higher education settings with regard to designing degree programs in the social sciences and constructively aligning learning activities with assessments and professional skill development. Chapter 2. ‘Learning Theory: The Power of Yet and Dreaming Big’. This chapter offers an introduction to and overview of central learning theories from the fields of education, psychology, public policy, and management studies, and reflects on their applicability in higher education settings. For example, it draws on ‘classic’ approaches such as Bloom’s Taxonomy of lower and higher level cognition, single- and double-loop learning based on Argyris and Schön, as well as the further development into Kolb’s Learning Cycle. It discusses recent advancements from the field of psychology into social sciences teaching in higher education, especially with regard to moving from fixed mindsets to growth mindsets and ‘the power of yet’, developed by Professor Carol Dweck (Stanford University), and the related concept of ‘grit’ with a focus on perseverance and policy entrepreneurial drive put forward by Professor Andrea Duckworth (University of Pennsylvania). Drawing on my own research on learning theories, in particular the ‘Learning in Governance Framework’ (Rietig, 2021), this chapter makes a novel contribution by presenting the ‘Personal Growth Framework’ (PGF) that helps to constructively align career-relevant skill development with teaching and learning activities. Chapter 3. ‘Constructive Alignment in Course and Degree Design’. Chapter 3 links the previous chapter on learning theories and the theoretical framework with teaching practice in higher education. It starts with the big picture of degree program development at both the undergraduate and master’s levels. It examines constructive alignment of learning objectives with developing skills for a successful career, including in jobs that do not yet exist. It then zooms in on course-specific learning objectives and links the learning theories, in particular the Personal Growth Framework, with the constructive alignment of teaching and learning activities. It first explains what constructive alignment means and why it is important in

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higher education, i.e., how close and obvious links between the learning objectives, teaching/learning activities, and assessment (Biggs, 1996) can increase and maintain student motivation and strengthen the development of a growth mindset and skills. The third section provides an example of a course that integrated elements supporting a personal growth framework within the UK educational context. Part II: ‘Teaching Activities to Develop a Growth Mindset Among Students’. The second part of the book examines distinct approaches, techniques, and learning activities. It addresses the question to what extent and how these activities can help to develop a growth mindset both within the ‘traditional’ face-to-face setting in the lecture hall, seminar room, and supervision meetings, as well as in synchronous and asynchronous online/ distance teaching through Teams, Zoom, or similar platforms that allow communicating independently of the teacher’s/student’s location and/or at the student’s individual pace. Chapter 4. ‘Lectures’. Chapter 4 reflects on how a lecture can be set up and delivered to keep students engaged. It discusses advantages and challenges with regard to delivering the lecture in-person/face-to-face or online. It examines planning the lecture, taking into account pre-existing knowledge of the students, and discusses activities during the lecture such as integrating polls and small group discussions in break-out groups with subsequent reporting back to the larger group. Chapter 5. ‘Seminars’. Chapter 5 examines how seminars can be constructively aligned with the learning objectives and developing a personal growth mindset. It examines different aims of a seminar and reflects on seminar preparation as well as the actual running of the seminar. This includes the opening of the seminar by presenting the structure and activities, guiding the seminar discussion as moderator, posing and discussing reading-related questions and seminar activities that are focused on student-­centered activities. These include student presentations (individually or by a study group), mini-debates, and answering previous year’s sample exam questions through small group discussions/group work. The final five minutes of the seminar are focused on summarizing key points and reinforcing ‘takeaways’ by linking them to the learning objectives. It also offers scope for asking students for feedback, especially if the seminar included new activities. The chapter also provides insights into integrating the personal growth framework in teaching and learning settings that require problem solving such as quantitative methods and math exercises/ problem sets and computer-based experiments.

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Chapter 6. ‘Study Groups’. Chapter 6 examines the advantages and challenges of integrating study groups into courses. This can happen voluntarily by encouraging students to form study groups and offering advice on how this can be done most effectively. Alternatively, study groups can be included into the assessment by, for example, offering a small percentage of the course mark for completed group assignments such as summaries of the core readings/literature and answering related questions in a study group meeting, including a subsequent report that summarizes the discussion. The chapter outlines advantages and discusses challenges around study groups. The chapter then proceeds to reflecting on how these challenges could be addressed. Chapter 7. ‘Simulations’ are role-playing exercises where students take on the roles of diplomats, government representatives, managers, consultants, lawyers, judges, civil society actors, and others in an experiential learning-focused exercise that seeks to reconstruct professional settings as realistically as possible. The purpose of these simulations is to allow students to develop relevant skills such as debating, public speaking, working in teams, targeted research, thinking on ‘their feet’ and through experience, gain a deeper appreciation for the dynamics of, e.g., international negotiations, stakeholder dialogues, management board decision-making, and law trials. This chapter first explores the benefits and challenges of simulations and why they can be a useful learning tool in the curriculum. It offers insights into the conceptual and practical considerations of running simulations on the small and larger scale within a course. Small-scale simulations could be part of 1-hour seminars or stand-alone workshops over 2–5 hours and offer a good first insight for students, but require careful planning and chairing by the teacher. Large-scale simulations can be an advanced version in the form of external conferences such as the Harvard World Model United Nations (WorldMUN) or the National Model United Nations (NMUN) conference. A central element of this experiential learning approach is to provide students with feedback cycles in which they can reflect on their experience and draw lessons for their next participation in a simulation and for transferring their acquired skills to similar professional settings that require negotiation acumen, debating skills, public speaking, research skills, and the ability to develop solutions to specific and complex problems. Chapter 8. ‘Supervising Dissertations’. Dissertation supervision at the undergraduate, master’s, and PhD levels includes a close mentoring relationship between the student and supervisor. Developing the research

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project and providing feedback in several rounds is at the core of this relationship, with broad scope for supporting students in developing their personal growth mindset and fostering a positive experience. To achieve this, Chap. 8 discusses central elements and steps in the research supervision process. It opens with setting the ground rules and developing a professional supervisor-supervisee relationship, focusing on the level of guidance, and treating students similar despite differences in the supervisor’s topic expertise. The chapter proceeds to explore the key steps in the supervision process such as finding and specifying/narrowing down the topic, identifying the research question and contribution, discussing the research strategy and methods, the literature review, identifying and selecting theoretical frameworks and theories, and subsequently proceeding to the case study/empirical part of the dissertation. It reflects on different approaches and strategies around collecting primary data through interviews, field work, and participant observation, complying with risk assessment and research ethics in the process, and then proceeds to the analysis of quantitative/qualitative data. It closes with key considerations around writing the central discussion section/chapter that links the theoretical framework/theory to the empirical findings and discusses how these sit with the broader academic literature on the topic, before moving to the conclusion chapter that summarizes the contribution and offers broader implications for theory and policy/practice. Chapter 9. ‘Conclusion’. The conclusion chapter draws together the central findings and take-aways on the personal growth mindset and how courses/modules and degree programs can be constructively aligned to support students in their personal development journey and improving their career skills. It closes with an outlook into the 2020s and 2030s, which are likely to see a continuing trend toward blended (online/face to face) teaching approaches and life-long learning as societies and with them career pathways change given the uptake of new technologies and the rise of automation in highly skilled white-collar jobs.

References Aloisi, A., & DeStefano, V. (2022). Your Boss Is an Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence, Platform Work and Labour. Bloomsbury Publishing. Araya, D., & Marber, P. (2023). Augmented Education in the Global Age: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Learning and Work. Taylor & Francis Group.

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Bayer, R., Turper, S., & Woods, J. (2022). Teamwork within a Senior Capstone Course: Implementation and Assessment. PS: Political Science & Politics, 55(4), 828–833. Bessen, J. (2015). Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth. Yale University Press. Biggs, J. (1996). Enhancing Teaching through Constructive Alignment. Higher Education, 32(3), 347–364. Broussard, M. (2018). Artificial Unintelligence. How Computers Misunderstand the World. Cambridge, M.A.: MIT Press. Cameron, N. (2017). Will Robots Take your Job? A Plea for Consensus. Polity Press. Chinn, C. A., Barzilai, S., & Duncan, R. G. (2021). Education for a “post-truth” world: New directions for research and practice. Educational Researcher 50(1), 51–60. Chun, W.  H. K., & Barnett, A. (2021). Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition. MIT Press. Davenport, T. (2018). The AI Advantage. How to Put the Artificial Intelligence Revolution to Work. MIT Press. Dougherty, P., & Wilson, H. (2018). Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI. Harvard Business Review Press. Dweck, C. (2017). Mindset. Changing the Way You Think to Fulfil Your Potential. Random House. Gable, R. (2021). The Hidden Curriculum: First Generation Students at Legacy Universities. Princeton University Press. Heckhausen, J., Wrosch, C., and Schulz, R. (2019). Agency and Motivation in Adulthood and Old Age. Annual Review of Psychology, 70, 191–217. Jaafar, I., & Pedersen, J. (2021). Emerging Realities and the Future of Technology in the Classroom. IGI Global. Khadimally, S. (2022). Applications of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Education. IGI Global. Latham, G. P., & Pinder, C. C. (2005). Work motivation theory and research at the dawn of the twenty-first century.Annual Review of Psychology, 56 485–516. Lester, S., & Costley, C. (2010). Work-Based Learning at Higher Education Level: Value, Practice and Critique. Studies in Higher Education, 35(5), 561–575. Moore, P., & Woodcock, J. (2021). Augmented Exploitation: Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Work. Pluto Press. Moores, E., Birdi, G. K., & Higson, H. E. (2017). Placement Work Experience may Mitigate Lower Achievement Levels of Black and Asian vs. White Students at University. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1518. Moring, A. (2022). AI on the Job: Guide to Successful Human-Machine Collaboration. Springer. Nir, K. (2023). Fourth Revolution and the Bottom Four Billion: Making Technologies Work for the Poor. Michigan University Press.

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Papa, R. (Ed.). (2020). Handbook on Promoting Social Justice in Education. Springer. Popenci, S. (2022). Artificial Intelligence and Learning Futures: Critical Narratives of Technology and Imagination in Higher Education. Taylor & Francis Group. Queshi, S., Malkani, R., & Rose, R. (2020). Achieving Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education for All. In R.  Papa (Ed.), Handbook on Promoting Social Justice in Education (pp. 3–32). Springer. Reese, B. (2018). The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity. Atria Books. Rietig, K. (2021). Learning in Governance: Climate Policy Integration in the European Union. MIT Press. Rios, J. A., Ling, G., Pugh, R., Becker, D., & Bacall, A. (2020). Identifying critical 21st-century skills for workplace success: A content analysis of job advertisements. Educational Researcher, 49(2), 80–89. Ross, J. (2017). The Fundamental Flaw in AI Implementation. MIT Sloan Management Review. Retrieved July 14, 2017, from https://sloanreview.mit. edu/article/the-­fundamental-­flaw-­in-­ai-­implementation/ Sumantran, V., Fine, C., & Gonsalvez, D. (2017). Faster, Smarter, Greener: The Future of the Car and Urban Mobility. MIT Press. Szymaniak, A. (2022). Preparing Political Science Students for Today’s Labor Market: Lessons from Poland. PS: Political Science & Politics, 55(3), 594–596. Tate, S. A. (2020). The Student of Color Attainment Gap in Higher Education and the Institutional Culture of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion. In R. Papa (Ed.), Handbook on Promoting Social Justice in Education. Springer. Thornton, S., & Atkinson, D. (2022). Everywhere and Nowhere: Information Literacy in the Political Science Classroom. PS: Political Science & Politics, 55(3), 597–604. Vaidhyanathan, S. (2011). The Googilization of Everything. University of California Press. Vaidhyanathan, S. (2018). Antisocial Media: How Faceboon Disconnects Us and Untermines Democracy. Oxford University Press. Verdegem, P. (2021). AI for Everyone? Critical Perspectives. Westminster University Press. Viegas, V., & Correia, A. (2022). Methodologies and Use Cases on Extended Reality for Training and Education. IGI Global. Vos, M., Çelik, G., & de Vries, S. (2016). Making Cultural Differences Matter? Diversity Perspectives in Higher Education. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, 35(4), 254–266. Wang, W., Wang, G., Ding, X., & Zhang, B. (2021). Artificial Intelligence in Education and Teaching Assessment. Springer.

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PART I

The Big Picture of Learning Theories and Course Design

CHAPTER 2

Learning Theory: The Power of Yet and Dreaming Big

As we have seen in Chap. 1, the world of work is changing, and with it the professional development needs of students. This means that degree programs in the social sciences need to carefully re-evaluate how they support students in gaining the knowledge and building the skills that they will need to succeed in an ever-changing and increasingly globally competitive work environment. This raises a number of questions that will be addressed in this chapter: What mindset influences success in degree programs besides socioeconomic and other factors beyond the student’s control? What do learning theories tell us how humans learn? How can we help our students develop the kind of personal growth mindset that helps them to succeed? Drawing on research in social and cognitive psychology, my central argument is that student’s mindsets play a crucial role at determining how they develop the key attributes of successful graduates that have the necessary skills to succeed in their later careers and achieve their professional goals. This chapter introduces key concepts how we humans learn. In this overview of central learning theories, I draw from the fields of education, psychology, public policy, and management studies and reflect on their applicability in higher education settings. For example, I draw on ‘classic’ approaches such as Bloom’s Taxonomy of lower and higher level cognition, single- and double-loop learning based on Argyris and Schön, as well as the further development into Kolb’s Learning Cycle. Following the insight into these ‘classics’ from the 1970s and 1980s that are still the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Rietig, Innovative Social Sciences Teaching and Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41452-7_2

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cornerstone of teaching practice in many areas of higher education, I discuss recent advancements from the field of psychology for social sciences teaching in higher education. Two approaches stand out in particular, but due to their novelty have not yet entered the mainstream of teacher education: moving from fixed mindsets to growth mindsets and ‘the power of yet’, developed by Professor Carol Dweck, and the related concept of ‘grit’ with a focus on perseverance and policy entrepreneurial drive put forward by Professor Andrea Duckworth. Drawing on my own research on learning theories, in particular the ‘Learning in Governance Framework’ (Rietig, 2021) that includes the importance of policy entrepreneurs ‘teaching’ others to affect change, this chapter makes a novel contribution by presenting the ‘Personal Growth Framework’ (PGF) that allows to constructively align career-relevant skill development with teaching and learning activities.

What Is Learning? The term ‘learning’ carries different meanings and connotations. My interdisciplinary approach combines educational, social/cognitive psychology, management, and political science perspectives. We can differentiate between learning among individual students, individual academics, and academics within the organizational setting of a higher education institution, which governs decisions on learning outcomes, course design, and degree program design. Learning is frequently defined as the acquisition of skills and knowledge (or action and thought); it thereby carries the components of skill as ‘know-how’ or the physical ability to act, and of knowledge as ‘know-why’ or the ability to communicate an understanding of an experience (Kim, 1993: 38). Learning can further be seen as acting upon experiences and correcting errors. Argyris established a widely accepted definition explaining learning as the detection and correction of errors, and error as any feature of knowledge or of knowing that makes action ineffective. Error is a mismatch: a condition of learning, and matching a second condition of learning. The detection and correction of error produces learning and the lack of either or both inhibits learning (Argyris, 1976: 365).

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The first definition provided by Kim (1993) provides conceptual traces toward action and understanding and the second definition by Argyris (1976) emphasizes experience and correction of errors. As there are many different kinds of learning in the distinctive disciplines and sub-areas, each discipline provides a more or less slightly different definition and understanding of what learning is, depending on the context of analysis. A review of these different definitions of learning (e.g., see definitions provided by Argyris & Schön, 1978; Kim, 1993; May, 1992; Zito & Schout, 2009) identified elements common to most learning conceptualizations. The following definition consolidates the nuanced understandings of the learning literature and provides an overall conceptual basis to the analysis. I define learning as a (1) reflection and judgment based on an input, experience or detection of error, which leads the individual to select a different view on (2) how things happen, i.e., the acquisition of knowledge or learning facts and (3) what course of action to take, i.e., the reflection on individual or collective experience or advise from others on such previous experiences (Rietig & Perkins, 2018: 491).

The judgment leads to change within the individual (i.e., the individual selected a different view and acts upon it differently than before) and/or within the organization (Rietig, 2021). Learning does not only refer to the student as an active participant in the learning process—it also refers to the teacher, i.e., the academic teaching a course, and thus delivering the lecture, running the seminar, marking the assessment, and influencing student’s learning through other activities. This requires reflection on the part of the teacher if the learning activities devised are fit for purpose, i.e., to meet the learning objectives. As years go by, it is also important to re-evaluate if learning objectives within courses and subsequently their content and learning activities are still reflecting the scientific field’s state of the art in terms of knowledge, methodological approaches and professional practices. This means that academics in charge of courses (i.e., the module leaders or course managers, depending on the terminology used), do not only need to update their reading lists, they also need to reflect on what changes to the learning activities could be beneficial. Subsequently, the teachers also need to continuously reflect on the course and engage in learning how they can further improve it in the light of advances within the scientific field,

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teaching pedagogy, and wider societal shifts. Further key actors are the academic who convenes the degree program as well as the academics on the board of studies (usually all members of the department) who oversee the strategic development of the degree program with its different course offerings. This is also the level where changes to degree programs and individual courses, as well as new courses, need to be justified and approved. Overall, we can differentiate between the level of the individual learner (individual level), the student, and the organizational level where a group of academics makes decisions ranging from the strategic direction of a degree program to the detailed learning and assessment activities within individual courses.

How Do We Learn? Insights from Social Psychology and Organizational Studies The objective in this chapter is to move beyond individual learning theories toward a consolidated model that draws on the strengths of different learning theories and approaches, but that overall sits within the Humanist model of self-actualization where individuals can become the best version of themselves through an enabling environment and continuous personal development. The aim is to draw on the underpinning elements of relevant 20th and 21st century learning theories to arrive at a consolidated model that is fit for the learning and teaching environment of the twenty-­ first century, including the rapid changes to framework conditions through technological and social advances. We can differentiate between cognitive approaches, experiential learning, and learning that occurs on the organizational level when degree programs and individual courses are designed, carried out, and evaluated. The Linear Cognitive Learning Process The psychological-philosophical perspective based on Karl Popper’s theory of learning (Popper, 1979; cited after Swann, 1999; Fig. 2.1) understands learning as an individual process of devising a solution to a problem: Attempts are undertaken to solve the initial problem, what leads to a new set of problems or an outcome. The learning individual develops a trial solution to solve the initial problem that initiates the learning process.

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Fig. 2.1  Cognitive learning process. Source: Adapted by author from Swann, 1999: 266

Any trial solution can be either successful to solve the problem or pose further challenges, leading to a process of error elimination that finally presents a new problem or outcome. The main elements of what happens when learning occurs are change in the learner, activity, creativity, trial and error, and attempts to solve a problem (Swann, 1999). The learning literature in education is especially concerned with how students learn and how they use, store, and retrieve knowledge either through memorizing in the form of declarative learning (Stark et  al., 1998) or through procedural learning (Shin, 2008) as forms of surface learning, or if they use deeper-­ level knowledge (Hay, 2007) and incorporate reflections on learning in learning cycles (Kolb, 1984; Kolb & Fry, 1975; Kolb & Kolb, 2005). Experiential Learning One central concern of the learning literature is to determine how humans learn. As outlined in the definition of learning above, learning can be understood as a process of drawing conclusions from experiences such as errors made in the past, reflection and adoption of a different course of action (Argyris, 1976), thereby generating knowledge or skills. Argyris describes this model of learning from experience as ‘discovery-invention-­ production-generalization’ (Argyris & Schön, 1978: 140) process. It has been taken up and modified several times by subsequent authors to match their respective analytical focus of the learning environment. At the core of these individual experiential learning cycles is the observation that an individual lives through an experience, observes the consequences (which might be the detection of an error), assesses the situation by reflecting on the observations made during the experience, thereby cognitively designs abstract concepts or theoretical explanations and implements them via testing (see Kim, 1993: 39). Kolb referred to it as ‘observations and reflections [leading to the] formation of abstract concepts and generalizations

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Fig. 2.2  Simple model of individual learning/ the learning cycle. Source: Kim, 1993: 40 based on Argyris, 1976

[leading to] testing implications of concepts in new situations [leading to] concrete experience’ (1984: 21, cited after Kim, 1993: 38). Figure  2.2 visualizes his simple model of individual learning, which is based on Argyris’ (1976) experiential learning cycle and to date one of the central models of conceptualizing learning in higher education. The education literature emphasizes from a constructivist point of view the importance of experiential learning and how this can be integrated into the classroom experience (Kember & Gow, 1994; Kolb, 1984; Kolb & Kolb, 2005). The constructivist, student-centered teaching approach that emphasizes experiential learning stands in contrast to the traditional teacher-centered transmission model of linear information transfer. It understands learning as a process and as a relearning of facts and skills, which is best facilitated when the student’s beliefs and underlying assumptions about a topic are made explicit during the discussion and topic-based debate in the classroom. Thus, learning occurs when new concepts are being integrated with previous knowledge (Kolb & Kolb, 2005),  thus putting a strong emphasis on previous knowledge and expertise. Experiential learning does not limit the learning experience to a cognitive process, but understands learning as a process that involves ‘the integrated functioning of the total person—thinking, feeling, perceiving, and behaving’ (Kolb & Kolb, 2005: 194). David Kolb has made a considerable impact on the discipline of Education with his Kolb Learning Cycle that describes the process of experiential learning, which is very similar to Argyris’ learning cycle in Organizational Learning and the associated single- and double-loop learning variations (Argyris, 1976). Following a specific experience, the individual makes reflective observations and forms an abstract conceptualization, which is tested via active experimentation as described in Fig. 2.3 (Kolb, 1984; Kolb & Kolb, 2005).

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Fig. 2.3  Kolb’s experiential learning cycle. Kolb & Kolb, 2005

Single- and Double-Loop and Deutero Learning Much of the contemporary educational literature used in higher education teacher training and professional development programs refers to singleand double-loop learning and a learning experience that is based on Kolb’s educational learning cycle. This can be traced back to the seminal work by Argyris and Schön (1978), who developed these theories in the context of learning that happens within organizations. The method of learning is through the actions and experiences of the individuals within the organization (Argyris & Schön, 1978: 9). This is relevant as departments and universities are also organizations that guide individual student’s learning by devising the relevant degree programs that include individual courses with specific learning objectives, which in turn are approved through boards of studies or similar committees that comprise the academics involved in delivering the degree program. Argyris and Schön developed their ‘Theory of Action’ (Argyris & Schön, 1974) to understand how individuals may learn to improve their effectiveness and competence by both taking action and learning from the experience through reflection. This deliberate action has a cognitive basis reflecting strategies, norms, and assumptions of the individual’s world and constitutes a theory-in-use, the way an individual acts in a given situation. This is not necessarily the same as the ‘theory-in-action’, which refers to a behavior the individual communicates as principled course of action (Argyris and Schön, 1974: 6f.; 1978: 10f.). Within an organization, individuals construct their own but incomplete image of the overall ‘theory-­ in-­use’, which is constantly being modified and makes learning ‘an active process of organizing which is, at root, a cognitive enterprise’ (Argyris &

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Schön, 1978: 16), leading Single-Loop-Learning:

to

what

Argyris

and

Schön

call

Members of the organization respond to changes in the internal and external environments of the organization by detecting errors which they then correct so as to maintain the central features of organizational theory-in-use. These are learning episodes which function to preserve a certain kind of constancy. (…) There is a single feedback loop which connects detected outcomes of action to organizational strategies and assumptions which are modified so as to keep organizational performance within the range set by organizational norms. The norms themselves (…) remain unchanged (Argyris & Schön, 1978: 18f.).

Central elements of single-loop learning are unchanged norms and the objective of error elimination by developing new strategies to solve the problem; however, for individual learning (e.g., among academics) to become organizational learning (e.g., within the department or group of academics involved in delivering the degree program), the evaluations need to be transferred to organizational memory (Argyris & Schön, 1978): Organizational learning occurs when individuals, acting from their images and maps, detect a match or mismatch of outcome to expectation which confirms or disconfirms organizational theory-in-use. In the case of disconfirmation, individuals move from error detection to error correction. (…) From this it follows (…) that individual learning is a necessary but insufficient condition for organizational learning (Argyris & Schön, 1978: 19f.).

While the single-loop learning process or error detection and correction rather depicts individual or—in the case of organizational learning—a non-individual/social perspective of cognitive learning, Argyris and Schön introduce ‘double-loop learning’ as constructivist element. This becomes especially relevant when the correction of errors cannot be achieved through simply raising the effectiveness as achieved by single-loop learning, but when the norms defining effective performance need to be reconsidered and altered (Argyris & Schön, 1978, 21f.). In sum, double-loop learning refers To those sorts of organizational inquiry which resolve incompatible organizational norms by setting new priorities and weighting of norms, or by

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restructuring the norms themselves together with associated strategies and assumptions (Argyris & Schön, 1978: 24).

A third level of learning is ‘deutero-learning’ (Argyris & Schön, 1978: 26). This occurs when individuals reflect on the experienced contexts for learning or failure to learn, thereby evaluating current strategies and coming up with new strategies for learning. As this learning process is being encoded in previously introduced individual images, it can also be reflected in the learning practice of an organization. This concept of deutero-­ learning is particularly relevant for learning among academics in higher education settings who reflect on how they can revise their courses and degree programs to offer their students the best possible learning experience. The Complete Cycle of Choice March and Olsen improved the understanding of how individual and organizational learning work together in their ‘complete cycle of choice’ (March & Olsen, 1975: 149), which describes a circular and reinforcing relationship between the individual, its organization, the environment, and how individuals perceive the world. Their learning theory is situated within the realm of experiential learning, i.e., learning from experience (Herriott et al., 1985). Individuals act or participate in a situation that requires a choice. Their behavior in these decision-making situations is being influenced by their cognitions and preferences (element 1, March & Olsen, 1975: 149). How this and other individuals behave and participate influences the choices of the organization they are affiliated with, thereby leading to a set of organizational outcomes or policies (2). In a third step, these organizational choices stimulate responses or actions from the environment the organization is situated in or related to, which can be of spatial, political, or societal character (3). These reactions of the environment affect individuals, which may have a relation to individuals within the organization. Their individual cognitions and preferences, the way in which they understand the world they are living in, can be altered as a consequence (4). The learning cycle closes when these preferences of individuals change how they act or make decisions (see Fig. 2.4, March & Olsen, 1975: 150).

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Fig. 2.4  Complete cycle of choice. Source: March & Olsen, 1975: 150

Non-learning: Defensive Avoidance, Unlearning, and Muddling Through Before learning within the process of solving a problem can occur as outlined by Swann (1999), the individual (i.e., the student, the academic involved in delivering the degree program) needs to actively decide to address the problem and develop a trial solution. Therefore, this section examines non-learning as the opposite case of learning. A small body of literature based mainly in psychology and education (Hedberg, 1981; Huber, 1991; Hughes & Tight, 1995; Janis, 1972; Janis & Mann, 1977; Klein, 1989; Lindblom, 1959, 1979; Nystrom & Starbuck, 1984) is concerned with the concept of non-learning among decision makers, which is also sometimes referred to as unlearning (Hedberg, 1981; Huber, 1991), incremental changes (Janis & Mann, 1977), reactive governing or simply ‘muddling through’ (Lindblom, 1959, 1979), yet it appears to have a relatively small uptake among more widely accepted theories of decision-­ making and learning. Unlearning was introduced by Hedberg (1981) and picked up by Nystrom and Starbuck (1984). It is defined as ‘a process through which learners discard knowledge’ (Hedberg, 1981: 18; cited after Huber, 1991: 104) that is considered to be obsolete and may thereby be not only

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unconscious, but also intentional (Huber, 1991: 104). Yet the term unlearning suggests that the individual has previously acquired the necessary knowledge but chooses to ignore it or has lost the capability to make use of it, e.g.., because the expert in the field left the organization or because the individual forgot that s/he dealt with a similar issue in another context, although s/he could easily transfer the knowledge to the new situation. There is the possibility that individuals may consciously or unconsciously avoid addressing the problem by defensive avoidance (Janis & Mann, 1977; Rietig & Perkins, 2018). This form of psychological defense interferes with information processing and is frequently connected to unconscious sources of unresolved conflict regarding a decision (Janis & Mann, 1977: 98). Individuals, when confronted with a problem that requires a resolution, are usually faced with two options: either they address the problem by designing a trial solution and thereby enter a learning cycle as discussed above, or they enter a state of defensive avoidance. This state can have personal consequences of a positive or negative nature. Options of defensive action are procrastination, buck passing, and bolstering (Janis & Mann, 1977: 107). Individuals can engage in buck passing, i.e., delegating the decision to somebody else or a committee of other academics to avoid liabilities for a wrong or unpopular but adequate decision or to procrastinate over the decision and hope that temporal circumstances or further developments take the decision off their shoulders (Janis & Mann, 1977). An alternative option of unclear decision-making is bolstering. In this case, individuals reach an ill-considered decision that is based on a shared rationalizations as well as a collective sense of being protected against threats of failure, also referred to as ‘groupthink’ (Janis, 1972). The education literature on secondary, tertiary, and adult education also picked up the concept of non-learning as barriers to learning, especially when students show resistance or even defensive reactions to learning, there is ambivalence, mislearning, or the intended learning does not occur for other reasons (Illeris, 2007). The Learning in Governance Framework My research on learning in decision-making processes developed a novel theoretical framework, the Learning in Governance Framework (for details, see Rietig, 2021), which breaks down learning into its fundamental underpinning elements and has an equally high relevance for learning

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in educational settings as in government organizations. The central assumption is that learning cannot occur if the individual has not consciously taken note of new information or a new experience and subsequently actively reflected on how this new information/experience relates to previously existing knowledge and/or experiences (Rietig, 2021). Such reflection is the pre-requisite for any individual to enter a learning process. If the reflection has not occurred, the individual did not engage in learning, but instead in some form of non-learning, which can include muddling through, following orders, or buck passing (Rietig, 2021; Rietig & Perkins, 2018). We can differentiate between three basic archetypes of learning that consolidate the various overlapping classifications of learning that emerged from the learning literature: following a reflection on knowledge, factual learning occurs, if an individual reflects on previous experience, experiential learning occurs, and if the individual subsequently also changed underlying beliefs, they engaged in constructivist learning. Individuals frequently engage in factual learning when they receive new information or when they rearrange previous knowledge once they find themselves in a different context. They reflect on the input while they are cognitively processing the new information and increasing their existing knowledge (Argyris & Schön, 1978). In an educational context, individuals, for example, learn about key theories, methodologies, facts, and technical details of the subject. The information sources for factual learning are usually scientific studies published in peer-reviewed journals or books. Factual learning can also result from verbal or written accounts of other individual’s experiences (Rietig, 2019). Factual learning is the most frequent and dominant aspect of learning in higher education settings, and subsequently highlighted by learning theories in education such as Bloom’s taxonomy that focuses on different ways of engaging with facts such as remembering, understanding, analyzing, and evaluating. Experiential learning is an equally important aspect for learning in higher educational settings not only in professional training programs (e.g., medicine/dentistry, nursing, accounting, law) but also in the social sciences. It occurs once individuals reflect on their previous experience in similar situations, draw conclusions on their or other’s behavior, and transfer this experience to the current situation to devise a strategy of how to negotiate, present information, or form coalitions (Rietig, 2019). It refers to ‘how’ actors behave based on their previous experience and reflection, on which tactics and strategies worked in similar past situations

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and which strategies resulted in unsuccessful or unsatisfactory outcomes. Experiential learning is the most frequent form of learning observed in the literature related to learning in government and other organizations and has been awarded different labels, including political learning (May, 1992), policy-oriented learning (Sabatier, 1987), learning-by-doing, and single-/double-loop learning that detects and corrects behavioral errors (Argyris & Schön, 1978; Dunlop, 2009; Dunlop & Radaelli, 2016; Gerlak & Heikkila, 2011; Haas & Haas, 1995; Hall, 1993) as well as learning how to better engage in lip-service to manipulate negotiation partners (Koch & Lindenthal, 2011). As a consequence of factual and/or experiential learning, actors can change their underlying beliefs about how they see an issue, for example, on nuclear weapons or environmental protection (Haas & Haas, 1995), which means that they engage in constructivist learning. Beliefs refer to how a person views the world. They include a normative understanding of how the world ‘ought’ to be. Students can form new beliefs and values as a result of reflection on new knowledge and/or experiences. This aspect of learning has been described as transformative learning in the education literature (e.g., see Mezirow, 2006) and been linked to the relevance of identity and social dimensions (Illeris, 2003, 2014). We can identify four types of belief changes (Rietig, 2021). First, deep beliefs refer to fundamental normative understandings of the world and can be regarded as a ‘moral compass’, e.g., beliefs associated with the political ‘right’ and ‘left’ spectrum, about the fundamental value of the environment, and the importance of economic development. These deep beliefs are very stable and rarely change (Sabatier, 1987, 1988, 2007). They guide actors’ normative understanding. Deeper beliefs about the importance of something are also stable and formed at any stage, e.g., they can relate to the belief that the environment needs to be protected, climate change needs to be addressed, or poverty and social injustices be alleviated (Rietig, 2021). Policy design beliefs can change over time as new developments emerge, they refer to broader aspects of potential ways of addressing the problem at hand such as specific policies to address climate change or alleviate poverty. Policy detail beliefs are the most flexible and frequently change as a result of new information/experiences and reflection as they relate to specific details of a policy/solution to a problem such as the percentage of greenhouse gas emission reductions, a target year by which an objective shall be achieved or the technology to be used

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(Rietig, 2021). Table  2.1 summarizes the Learning in Governance Framework (Rietig, 2019; Rietig, 2021; Rietig & Perkins, 2018: 493). The Growth Mindset, Grit, Perseverance, and Try: Attributes of Policy Entrepreneurs as Agents of Change The education and especially social psychology literature identified a number of personal attributes that allow individuals to persevere in the face of educational, professional, and other life challenges, which in turn impact  on motivation, as well as ultimately on goals (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002). Individuals who possess such perseverance (Duckworth, 2016) and entrepreneurial drive can also choose to act as agents of change by taking on policy entrepreneurial roles in their line of work (Mintrom, 2013). Individuals possess a number of attributes that determine their ability to translate learning, which happened as a cognitive Table 2.1  Criteria for identifying learning in the policy process. Source: Rietig & Perkins, 2018: 493; Rietig, 2019; Rietig, 2021 Factual learning Individual level

Individual actors have acquired (e.g., from studies) and reflected on new information; increased knowledge and expertise deployed by actors in their task environment

Experiential learning

Active engagement with particular issue through direct experience and reflecting on successes and failures to enhance actors’ existing political or bureaucratic practices and competencies Organizational New knowledge is Critical reflection on level acquired by and existing practices and transmitted through performances within an organization; context of existing reflection, organizational goals; incorporation, and the accompanying use of knowledge in development and/or organizational refinement of new activities and/or to organizational inform organizational processes, strategies, positions and behaviors

Constructivist learning Changed personal norms, values, or policy beliefs; underpins new and/or reinforced personal commitments and actions

Change in beliefs and values over time; institutionalization of normative beliefs, the reframing of organizational goals, and discontinuous organizational action

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process internally, into action. This action can, in the short term, include individual’s performance in any assessment related to higher education, as well as long-term action with regard to the ability to influence decision-making processes as a result of learning that occurred at any earlier point in time. One such attribute is a growth mindset, which can be developed by individuals and facilitated with the support of educators. Individuals, e.g., students, with a fixed mindset believe that skills are born, they are either smart or they are not (Dweck, 2017). They are often considered as ‘gifted students’, which means that there is a high risk of failure and loss of face if their performance does not match the expectation of being perfect and impressing others by ‘being smart’ (Worrell et al., 2019). They focus on current performance and not ‘looking bad’, resulting in behavior that discounts effort and avoids challenges, getting discouraged by mistakes, and defensive when receiving developmental feedback. This is frequently reinforced by teachers when they praise students for being smart, and not for their efforts (Rattan, Good, & Dweck 2012). In short, students shy away from opportunities to grow personally and professionally. However, university educators can change students’ mindsets through learning activities and course design that constructively align (Biggs, 1996) the course content with opportunities to develop a ‘growth mindset’. Students with a growth mindset believe that skills are built, allowing them to learn, dream big, and achieve their goals (Yeager & Dweck, 2012). Such students look at effort as a useful part of their learning process, embrace challenges, and frame them as an opportunity to become better at, e.g., writing essays, critical analysis, using theories, and researching concepts. They see mistakes as ‘not yet there’, i.e., as motivation to try again and embrace learning opportunities as well as appreciating feedback to improve further (Dweck, 2017; Yeager & Dweck, 2012). Especially active, student-centered teaching and learning activities help to foster such a growth mindset. These include, for example, student research projects (Ing et al., 2021), simulations, peer teaching, and projects (Hosman & Jacobs, 2018), which have shown to also result in better learning outcomes (Berdahl et al. 2021; Ing et al., 2021). Further central aspects, which are related to the growth mindset (Dweck, 2017; Yeager & Dweck, 2012), are ‘grit’ and perseverance (Duckworth, 2016). It is an individual’s determination to engage in experiential learning through trying a challenging activity, and subsequently reflecting on the more or less successful outcome to improve one’s

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performance at the next opportunity. It requires willpower of the individual learner (Miller et  al., 2012). Grit and perseverance (Duckworth, 2016) or ‘The Try’ (Owen, 2013) refers to the determination to continue trying to improve through experiential learning, followed by reflection and a new experiential learning cycle (see the fundamentals developed by March and Olsen (1975) and Kolb (1984)). This means praising students for the process they engage in and allowing them to make errors so that a learning experience can emerge from error correction (Metcalfe, 2017). Instead of rewarding right answers, a growth mindset-focused course rewards the learning process. Focusing feedback on ‘not yet’ creates greater confidence and persistence as well as encourages students to improve. Pushing students out of their comfort zone to work hard helps to increase academic performance and enables students to grow with the emerging challenges they will encounter in their later career (Yeager & Dweck, 2012) in a field that may not even exist yet and that cannot be foreseen at the time of their degree. The growth mindset, however, enables students to thrive in any of these future career contexts because they learned how to learn and acquire new skills, persevere in the face of challenges, and identify changes as opportunities for personal and professional growth. While grit/perseverance (Duckworth, 2016), try (Owen, 2013), and the growth mindset (Dweck, 2017) refer to individual determination to continue improving performance in the face of adversity and challenge, policy entrepreneurial behavior (Mintrom, 2013; Theys & Rietig, 2020) refers to individual’s actions in society as a result of developing personal attributes based on such a growth mindset and determination to continue to improve. After they engaged in experiential learning and subsequently constructivist learning in the form of changing beliefs, individuals can choose to apply their learning and act as policy entrepreneurs to affect external change and potentially teach others about their previous lesson drawing (Rose, 1991, 1993, 2005). Policy entrepreneurs are crucial agents that can facilitate or hinder learning. They are very dedicated individuals in central decisionmaking positions, often in central leadership roles (Braun, 2009; Mintrom, 2013; Mintrom & Norman, 2009). Frequently, they have learned from their own or other’s failures by reflecting on the errors and devising strategies how they can take better control of the decision-making process via various policy entrepreneurial strategies (Rietig, 2019). They can achieve effective policy change by aligning a policy idea with the political preferences and demands of the target population and thus increase the attractiveness of policy change (Kingdon, 1995). Individuals

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can become policy entrepreneurs by developing new ideas and presenting proposals in their professional setting that seek to integrate such new ideas into practices on behalf of their team or organization. Going beyond their job description, policy entrepreneurs actively promote their proposals and convince other actors of the proposal’s importance by repeating arguments, emphasizing facts and positive outcomes of e.g., impact assessments or scientific studies, and using their personal leadership abilities such as charisma, persuasiveness, and expertise (Braun, 2009; Kingdon, 1995; Mintrom, 2013; Roberts & King, 1991). Policy entrepreneurs are ‘advocates who are willing to invest their resources—time, reputation, money—to promote a position in return for anticipated future gain in the form of material, purposive, or solidary benefits’ (Kingdon, 1995: 179). They engage in a number of activities crucial for arriving at a decision or outcome, both at the agenda setting stage and in the decision-making process. This includes advocating new ideas and mobilizing public opinion, defining and reframing problems, developing proposals and specifying policy alternatives and particularly brokering these ideas among the different actors (Roberts & King, 1991). Who becomes a policy entrepreneur depends more on individual dedication (i.e., a growth mindset, grit and perseverance, or try) and capabilities (i.e., expertise, skills) than on formal status or roles in decision-making (Rietig, 2014). There are two ways how learning can be transferred into a decision-­ making process/outcome such as the design of a degree program—either policy entrepreneurs, who have learned in the past, use conventional bargaining strategies and negotiation tactics to push their proposal through the decision-making process (i.e., power asymmetries), or they act as teachers (Bomberg, 2007) and facilitators as learning entrepreneurs by choosing to engage with other actors, explaining why, and convincing them that their proposal is in the common interest. The advantage of the ‘teaching’ and learning entrepreneurial approach is that it may result in self-reinforcing dynamics when the negotiation partners reflect on the input by the policy entrepreneurial teachers/learning entrepreneurs and subsequently change their beliefs. This may enable the learners to become teachers and thus agents of change in subsequent decision-making processes. Policy entrepreneurs are the central linkage between learning of individuals and adoption of a common position within an organization or government. Individual policy entrepreneurs can persuade and convince other actors inside and outside their organizations of the importance to support their proposal by raising awareness of the

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underlying problems and educating about the causes, benefits, and challenges of the issue based on available scientific knowledge and experience (Rietig & Perkins, 2018). Policy entrepreneurs are frequently individuals in central decision-making positions with the ability to influence change anywhere within an organization and beyond, e.g., in policymaking or wider society. They can use their personal acumen to steer organizational decision-making (Mintrom & Norman, 2009) and thus arrive at a decision underpinning the organization’s position that is aligned with their underlying beliefs and world views. Thus, policy entrepreneurs are crucial to transfer learning processes into organizational and wider societal decision-­making processes and outcomes. By presenting their proposals and highlighting the benefits as well as critically evaluating the challenges, policy entrepreneurs can act as teachers and facilitate policy transfer and policy diffusion across organizations and beyond. They can go a step further and set up or join existing partnerships that facilitate learning from other areas, jurisdictions, or subjects to avoid ‘re-inventing the wheel’, instead avoiding the ‘beginner-mistakes’ and implementing revised action plans that are adapted to the local framework conditions. The Personal Growth Mindset: Framework for Analysis The social psychology, education, organizational studies, and public policy literatures identified the central factors that determine how individuals learn, the importance of reflection on input, and the conducive attitudes for learning to not only benefit the learner but allow the learner to have a positive impact on their environment, including at the organizational level, which can in turn impact upon the learning environment. This leads to the Personal Growth Framework (Fig. 2.5): The individual engages in multiple learning cycles of factual learning and experiential learning (Rietig, 2021) through reflecting on input in terms of new knowledge/facts or experiences derived from learning activities. Factual learning occurs when engaging in ‘traditional’ educational activities such as reading textbooks and peer-reviewed journal articles as well as attending lectures. Experiential learning-based learning activities can include subject-specific training in the form of, e.g., quantitative data analysis, simulations/role play exercises of political decision-making or trials in a court of law, or presentations based on individual/group research assignments and subsequently leading a class discussion. If individuals reflect in an additional learning cycle on their factual and/or experiential

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Fig. 2.5  Personal growth mindset framework

learning and compare the new information to their previously existing deep beliefs, deeper beliefs, policy beliefs, and secondary beliefs (Rietig, 2021), and subsequently form new beliefs or change/adapt existing beliefs, they engage in constructivist learning. This constructivist learning can result in normative views on societal, economic, technological, and political developments and compel the individual to become an active agent of change by acting as a policy entrepreneur (Rietig, 2021). Such reflections on new information require a certain level of effort, they do not happen automatically. The motivation to engage in reflection is intrinsic to the individual but is nurtured by the learning environment, which needs to provide time and space to reflect on new inputs as well as to engage in learning activities. One central element of this is an atmosphere of encouragement and learning from initial successes and failures through supportive feedback, thus allowing for individuals to move from pre-existing fixed mindsets to growth mindsets that are focused on trying again for continual improvement (Dweck, 2017; Owen, 2013). This requires a high level of perseverance and emotional resilience to overcome challenges instead of giving up on them (Duckworth, 2016).

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Following the development of this personal growth mindset, individuals can become policy entrepreneurs with the skills and attributes to affect change within their working environment and thus potentially on the organizational level if they are successful in shaping their organization’s position on a certain issue or internal policies. For such learning on the organizational level to occur, colleagues within the organization need to reflect on the policy entrepreneur’s input in the form of providing new information (factual learning) or involving them in new experiences (experiential learning), and potentially change their underlying beliefs. Learning on the organizational level occurs once the organization has changed its position on an issue or policy based on the input (Rietig, 2021). This organizational level can either be the individual’s place of work after embarking on a career, but it also refers to the higher education institution within which the academics work when teaching a course. These can reflect on the coherence of their teaching with regard to fostering an environment that allows individuals to develop a personal growth mindset and subsequently adapt the learning environment and framework conditions offered through the learning objectives within courses and overall degree programs as well as the related learning activities.

Conclusion In this chapter, I presented the framework for personal growth, which links the individual’s learning based on facts and experience to their ability to develop into policy entrepreneurs, who are in a position to affect change in organizations, both within the higher education sector and beyond in civil society, government, and the private sector. The different aspects of learning can be triggered and emerge through different dimensions of interaction. The most obvious and dominant form is through in-person interactions between the learner and the person facilitating the learning. This is the dominant form in primary and secondary education. As a person matures, the role of guided self-study and self-­ guided study increases through reading textbooks and primary research such as journal articles and monographs. Since the emergence of the internet and related digital technologies, the importance of all kinds of digital media has increased to a dominant position. This includes text-based resources such as blogs, online learning platform-based material, and the classical print formats in digitized form, but also video and podcast/audio-­ book-­based content and other, new emerging forms such as virtual reality. Especially free/open access formats of such online learning have gained

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popularity in the form of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and the revival of distance learning programs (Downes, 2020) that can be taken either as a free MOOC or through a series of courses, resulting in a tuition fee-based distance learning undergraduate or master’s degree or certificate from an established university. These online courses and programs place a high degree of freedom and responsibility on the side of the student with a maximum of agency in their own learning (Downes, 2016). The remainder of section I explores how the personal growth mindset relates to the design of degree programs and subject-specific courses that are constructively aligned in their learning objectives and teaching/assessment activities. Following this strategic review of fostering a conducive learning environment on the organizational level within a subject area in higher education (e.g., a political science or geography department), the second section of this book zooms into the different learning activities such as lectures, seminars, dissertation supervision, and assessment strategies. It evaluates how these could be constructively aligned to allow graduates to develop and further strengthen their personal growth mindset as well as equip them to act as policy entrepreneurs throughout a successful career in their chosen field.

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Sabatier, P. (1988). An Advocacy Coalition Framework of Policy Change and the Role of Policy-Oriented Learning Therein. Policy Sciences, 21, 129–168. Sabatier, P. (2007). Theories of the Policy Process. Westview Press. Shin, J. (2008). The Procedural Learning of Action Order is Independent of Temporal Learning. Psychological Research, 72, 376–386. Stark, R., Renkl, A., Gruber, H., & Mandl, H. (1998). Indeed, Sometimes Knowledge Does Not Help: A Replication Study. Instructional Science, 26, 391–407. Swann, J. (1999). What Happens When Learning Takes Place? Interchange, 30(3), 257–282. Theys, S., & Rietig, K. (2020). Pathways of Influence for Small States: Why Bhutan Succeeds in Influencing Global Sustainability Governance. International Affairs, 96(6), 1603–1622. Zito, A., & Schout, A. (2009). Learning Theory Reconsidered: EU Integration Theories and Learning. Journal of European Public Policy, 16(8), 1103–1123. Argyris, C. and Schön, D. (1974). Theory in practice: Increasing professional effectiveness. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Eccles, J.  S. and Wigfield, A. (2002). Motivational Beliefs, Values, and Goals. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 109-132. Worrell, F.C., Subotnik, R.F., Paula Olszewski-Kubilius,P. and Dixson, D.D. (2019). Gifted Students. Annual Review of Psychology 70, 551-576. Ing, M., Burnette III, J. M., Azzam, T., & Wessler, S. R. (2021). Participation in a course-based undergraduate research experience results in higher grades in the companion lecture course. Educational Researcher, 50(4), 205-214. Hosman, L., & Jacobs, G. (2018). From active learning to taking action: incorporating political context into project-based, interdisciplinary, international service learning courses. Journal of Political Science Education, 14(4), 473-490. Berdahl, L., Hoessler, C., Mulhall, S., & Matheson, K. (2021). Teaching critical thinking in political science: A case study. Journal of Political Science Education, 17(sup1), 910-925. Miller, E.  M., Walton, G.  M., Dweck, C.  S., Job, V., Trzesniewski, K.  H., & McClure, S. M. (2012). Theories of willpower affect sustained learning. PloS one, 7(6), e38680. Metcalfe, J. (2017). Learning from errors. Annual review of psychology, 68, 465-489. Yeager, D. and Dweck, C. (2012). Mindsets that promote resilience: When students believe that personal characteristics can be developed. Educational Psychologist, 47, 302-314. Rattan, A., Good, C., & Dweck, C.  S. (2012). “It's ok—Not everyone can be good at math”: Instructors with an entity theory comfort (and demotivate) students. Journal of experimental social psychology, 48(3), 731-737.

CHAPTER 3

Constructive Alignment in Course and Degree Design

How can degree programs be designed to reflect a personal growth mindset and offer students the best possible preparation for adapting to and thriving in changing framework conditions to their chosen careers? What does this mean for the design of individual courses (i.e., modules)? This chapter offers a broader perspective on how the personal growth mindset can be embedded into both degree programs and individual courses using constructive alignment of teaching activities with the learning objectives and assessment practices within a course and constructive alignment between courses to allow for a student-centered design that maximizes not only students learning of discipline-specific knowledge, but especially the development of professional skills that will be useful in any later career, whether based on the subject studied or going beyond it. These include the ability to work well in teams, communication skills, leadership, organizational skills, and decision-making (Hart Research Associates, Inc, 2018; Hoover et al., 2010). Degree programs and courses need to be designed with inclusiveness toward all students and their circumstances in mind (Walton & Rusznyak, 2017), instead of assuming that one size, i.e., approach, may fit all students (Waugh & Su, 2015). There are also Quality Assurance- and program accreditation-related framework conditions that need to be taken into consideration (Bellingham, 2008; Bender, 2021; Elijido-Ten, 2015; Kettunen, 2010), as well as regulatory framework conditions of the host country in the case of satellite campuses offering, e.g., a UK degree program in India (Dwivedi, 2013). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Rietig, Innovative Social Sciences Teaching and Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41452-7_3

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This is important because the world changes rapidly and with it work and career opportunities and needs of future employers (Miah & Solomonides, 2021), making it necessary that degree programs adapt to societal needs and challenges (Mo & Chan, 2023). Old industries are disrupted and new industries emerge, offering career perspectives in areas that have not yet existed or will only exist years after students graduated from their undergraduate and/or master’s degrees. This means that their ‘original’ degree programs, i.e., first undergraduate degree and, if applicable, first consecutive master’s degree, need to equip them with further-­reaching skillsets and mindsets that allow students to adapt to these changing circumstances more easily and to identify areas of further development later in their careers. This might mean enrolling in a first or second master’s program that may cover a different discipline than the discipline originally studied, or in most cases, taking single courses that help to develop a new skillset or independently expanding their knowledge through self-study. The time to develop these transferable skills, curiosity, and a mindset around continuous learning is during the undergraduate degree, which, in most cases, tends to be residential and in-person at a higher education institution. Therefore the focus of this chapter is on such a setting, while many aspects also apply to the increasingly emerging online-based undergraduate degree programs and blended approaches combining a university education with existing and/or continuing vocational work experience. The chapter explains how the personal growth mindset can be constructively aligned with the learning objectives and teaching activities. It also explores constructive alignment within a degree program and then focuses on constructive alignment within courses.

The Personal Growth Mindset and Constructive Alignment The personal growth mindset introduced in Chap. 2 can be used as a guiding principle throughout designing degree programs and individual courses. A key aspect is that the degree program and the department/university at large offer a learning environment that allows for time and supportive framework conditions for students to reflect on the knowledge and experience gained through the different courses and to engage in multiple learning loops/cycles. The purpose of these learning loops is that students have the opportunity to develop their skills and to reflect on aspects that could be improved based on teacher feedback, peer feedback, and their own

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reflection. This means that students understand that it does not matter how well they initially do, the reward is in reflecting on feedback and trying again, thus improving their performance. This ‘try, try again’ growth mindset helps to move away from behavior and conditioning that is focused on praising perfection and being smart, and thus builds high pressure on students to not embarrass themselves or perform badly as they only have one chance and would consider themselves failed (or even a failure) if they do not receive a very good mark (Dweck, 2017). This means that teachers need to foster such a positive learning environment that rewards improvement and trying again over initial performance. This can happen through highlighting the importance of such a personal growth mindset especially at the beginning of the degree program, for example, in introductory lectures and seminars, and throughout at later stages at the beginning of a course. As an increasing number of students suffer from social anxiety especially following the Covid-19 years, such a positive learning environment that creates a ‘safe space’ may also be conducive to helpalleviate social anxieties as students can practice and continually improve their social skills. The central aspect is to constructively align the different courses and other elements of a degree program, as well as the teaching and learning activities within a course, to support students in building perseverance, reflect on feedback and improve their performance subsequently. The learning objectives also need to be constructively aligned with teaching and learning activities. This means embedding multiple learning loops that allow students to reflect on new input, either in the form of new knowledge resulting in factual learning, or in the form of gaining new experience through experiential learning. Factual learning is the primary element of any education program and is frequently intuitively meant when educators and students refer to learning. It primarily occurs when students attend lectures and are presented with key aspects of a topic, when they read textbooks and more specialized peer-reviewed academic research outputs, for example, in journals in preparation for seminars, discussion in seminars focused on critically examining such literature, and assessments aimed at recalling facts and figures that were covered in the lecture and/or seminars. Components that allow for experiential learning also have a central position in the personal growth mindset. These include study abroad, work placements and internships, independent study projects, and dissertations, as well as elements within courses such as study groups where students take on the role of teachers and especially simulations, placing students into the ‘shoes’ of decision-makers. If students are encouraged to further reflect on

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their factual and/or experiential learning, there is a possibility that they engage in constructivist learning through formulating and/or changing beliefs and values, and as a result of this form convictions and the motivation that allows them to act as policy entrepreneurs, taking on leadership roles to affect change within organizations and society (Rietig, 2021). This in turn can result in reflection and learning on the organizational level of their place of employment such as a company, government, or university.

Constructive Alignment in Degree Programs Degree programs usually consist of a mix of core/compulsory courses, especially in the first and second years, and elective courses that students can choose from within the department or in some cases beyond. These electives tend to be linked to the teachers’ academic research interests and expertise, and are usually offered in the second and third years, as well as on the master’s level. While the offering of these courses grows organically to a certain extent based on the expertise among the academics in a department, especially first- and second-year courses are usually based on broader objectives such as introducing students to major subdisciplines. Constructive alignment of learning objectives and the personal growth mindset means identifying how the different courses and their learning objectives fit together within a stage/year of study and how they build upon each other as students specialize in their sub-field(s) of interest in the later stages. What skills and competencies should graduates of the degree program have developed? Does every student, regardless of their choice of electives, have the opportunity to develop these skills and competencies? Answering these questions helps to identify gaps, especially in the offering of core courses. This could be achieved through developing pathways within a degree program that allow students to develop a set of employability-related skills regardless of their area of specialization (Raza et al., 2021). This is valued by students who are aware that their degree alone may not be enough to allow them to succeed to secure their preferred job in a competitive labor market (Tomlinson, 2008). In most social sciences disciplines, this includes qualitative and quantitative research skills, information literacy, and the ability to find, identify, and assess the relevance of information with regard to a particular (research) question, public speaking skills, intercultural competencies, organizational skills, leadership, and management skills (Hoover et  al., 2010; Sledgianowski et  al., 2017), the ability to critically evaluate

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information, and to write up findings in reports, policy briefs, or other forms of presentation relevant for decision-makers. Furthermore, there are an increasing number of cross-cutting skills such as an awareness and ability to foster a work environment that meets best practice standards with regard to equality, diversity, and inclusion in terms of gender, race, religion, socioeconomic backgrounds, physical and mental (dis)ability, and other protected characteristics (Papa, 2020; Vos et al., 2016; Wolbring & Lillywhite, 2021). There is an increasingly rich body of literature that provides valuable insights and reflections into embedding equality, diversity, and inclusion as well as intersectionality aspects into the curriculum. For example, these include, but are not limited to, Brooms et  al., (2019), Crimmins (2022), McGregor and Navin (2022), Papa (2020), Thomas and Arday (2021). These cross-cutting aspects of skills and knowledge also include an awareness of sustainability concerns (Celia Palma et al., 2011; Karmasin & Voci, 2021; Wahr et  al., 2013) with regard to, e.g., the Sustainable Development Goals and overall environmental sustainability, and how this can be achieved or improved upon in student’s personal and professional lives. Such aspects could be integrated into the content of first year core courses and be picked up again in second year courses to encourage students to engage with them in more detail, or be mainstreamed into a professional development program (Choate et al., 2019). Two elements beyond subject-specific courses are highly important for student’s personal development: intercultural competence and an employability-­related skillset. These are study abroad opportunities and gaining practical experience through internships or other professional work placements (Bender, 2021; Rigsby et al., 2013). While there are often practical and other limitations to allowing every student to study abroad, at least all students should have the opportunity to do so through, e.g., university partnerships and exchange programs that are integrated into the degree program so that students do not need to study longer than if they had stayed at home. There are a number of logistical and organizational challenges linked to study abroad, as well as financial aspects and the need for students to research their potential host countries and universities. The process of organizing a semester or year abroad itself is already a major skill building exercise in developing resilience, organizational skills, flexibility, and adaptability. Students gain firsthand experience about different cultures, educational systems, living abroad, and further advance their own independence and, in most cases, foreign language skills.

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Students also need to be aware of possible career routes upon graduation (Steele et  al., 2020). Especially in social sciences disciplines/degree programs that have no clear career pathways (e.g., geography, political science, sociology), but even those who have with a variety of options (e.g., law), gaining practical experience is very important. Having done one, two, or more internships during the degree program allows students to gain firsthand insights into different career options and pathways, to develop an understanding of the type of skills required from graduates in their industry/field of choice, and to network with potential later employers. This can be achieved through informal approaches such as active encouragement of students by, e.g., personal tutors, or through formal integration into the degree program and related assessment components (Saville et al., 2020; Von Treuer et  al., 2011; Williams, 2010; Yorke & Vidovich, 2014). In many cases, students find their first position post-­graduation through work experience they gained during their degree program or get invited to interviews/selected for a position due to their proven interest in the field and existing work experience. This work experience becomes even more valuable if it is combined with living abroad and working for an international employer. For example, students in political science could explore different career options during their undergraduate degree by working with a party/ politician in a local, state, or national parliament, doing an internship in a government department that develops and/or implements policies, with the diplomatic service in an embassy abroad, work with an international organization based abroad, a non-­governmental organization, or explore other career paths in a company, consulting, or the media. Only through exploring different options and gaining work experience, students can learn about themselves and what career as well as work environment best suits their personalities and personal preferences. Internships can thus open opportunities to enter into a career and secure a competitive position students would not have been able to secure otherwise. It can also help to gain a better understanding what students do not want to do, especially if a field that appears attractive and desirable at first glance turns out to be different and a less ideal match. Degree programs should offer both flexibility and support for students to gain work experience during the program. This could be in the form of a compulsory semester to be spent gaining work experience through an internship domestically or abroad, or through a more flexible approach requiring students to gain a certain number of months of work experience throughout the duration of the degree, e.g., in the form of summer internships or part-time internships where feasible.

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There are equality, diversity, and inclusion considerations related to both internships/work experience and studying abroad, given the related costs and disruption to the students’ personal lives if this includes moving abroad and likely giving up their local accommodation. There is, however, broad scope to mitigate most of these challenges through a more coordinated approach to student exchanges with partner universities. For example, students could be encouraged to sublet/swap their local accommodation with the incoming student from abroad. Most exchange programs also include fee waivers where students continue to pay their home fees while studying abroad under, e.g., the Erasmus+ programs within the European Union. There should also be financial support available to top up student’s budgets to cover travel costs and higher costs of living in the host country. Students could potentially combine a study abroad semester with a work placement in the same city in the semester break before/after the local university’s term time to make use of available accommodation, or to do a part-time internship while studying abroad. A full semester abroad may not be possible for all students, especially those with special needs and/or caring responsibilities at home, or who already have a part-time job. Here it is important to offer alternative opportunities such as week-long excursions and field trips, virtual/remote working internships, taking an online-based course from a partner university (virtual study abroad), or encouraging students to act as a local ‘buddy’ to international exchange students. It would also be beneficial to set up and further develop an alumni network, which could include mentoring opportunities to broaden student’s networks (Ashline, 2017). Many of the study abroad/internship-related skills can, to a certain extent, also be developed through local opportunities.

Constructive Alignment Within Courses Most courses contain lectures and seminars and, in some cases, workshops or similar experiential learning-focused elements such as simulations. When designing a new course or revising an existing course, it is important to clearly specify the learning objectives, i.e., what students are expected to have learned and the skills they are expected to have developed upon successfully completing the course (Raza et al., 2021). These learning objectives are the starting point for constructive alignment with the teaching activities that facilitate the knowledge and skill building to meet the

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learning objectives. Elements of a personal growth mindset could be embedded along the steps by including feedback loops where students gain feedback from the teacher, from peers and are encouraged to reflect on their previous learning activities to further improve. It is important to consider how the curriculum/course content and delivery could be decolonized (see on decolonizing the curriculum, e.g., Bakshi, 2021; Grue, 2021; Moncrieffe, 2022; Wilson et al., 2022 for more detail on different approaches, reflection, and emerging best practice); how equality, diversity, and inclusion aspects, including widening participation, could be integrated to ensure that all students benefit equally from the course (Fossland & Habti, 2022; Leese, 2010) and to also integrate aspects around sustainability (Karmasin & Voci, 2021; MacVaugh & Norton, 2012) and climate change to encourage student’s reflection on key societal, economic, and environmental challenges. This means asking and finding a course-appropriate response to questions such as what equality, diversity, and inclusion adaptations could be done to make the courses more accessible and what decolonizing the curriculum means in the disciplinary context (Charles, 2019; Moncrieffe, 2022; Thomas & Arday, 2021). Adding global south voices to the reading list, examining geographical origins and historical contexts of key theoretical concepts of the discipline, considering broadening toward non-classical theories/approaches, adding critical voices, and encouraging student reflection are some aspects that could be considered as a starting point (Nagdee et al., 2021; Tuitt & Stewart, 2021). It is also important to include students in this process (Meda, 2020). Especially (larger) first year/core courses tend to be taught in teaching teams of two or more academics (team teaching), which requires a certain level of co-ordination and regular communication to ensure that core elements of the course are delivered in a coherent manner, i.e., that students have a similar experience regardless of which seminar group they are in/ which teacher they encounter, that the lecture content fits with the seminar activities and that the different weeks logically build upon each other while avoiding redundant topics or gaps due to individual teachers’ expertise and interpretation of what should be covered. It is also important to review the geographical distribution of empirical examples used and the diversity of literature discussed with regard to decolonizing the curriculum and equality, intersectionality, inclusion, and diversity aspects (Brooms et al., 2019; Crimmins, 2022; Moncrieffe, 2022; Papa, 2020; Thomas & Arday, 2021).

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A central aspect of constructive alignment is the choice and mode of assessment. Students have different preferences for the assessment method (Furnham et al., 2008), which may also impact upon their course choice in elective courses. Assessment methods need to fit the learning objectives, i.e., students should be assessed in a way that allows to confirm the extent to which they meet the learning objectives. The assessment should also fit within the personal growth mindset by allowing for learning and feedback loops so that students can experiment, make mistakes, receive feedback, reflect on the initial try, and subsequently improve their performance in the assessment. Some of these reflective assessment elements include seminar contributions, study group reports, country position papers in preparation for a simulation, presentations in seminars and policy briefs focused on policy-relevant aspects, and providing recommendations to decision-­ makers. There may be limits based on the department’s and/or university’s guidelines for assessments, but in case of flexibility, it may be appropriate to award a low percentage of the overall course mark to such reflective assignments. This motivates students to put effort into the time-­intensive learning activities and to do their best and participate actively in seminars/ workshops with high quality contributions (which offers benefits for other students) while remaining low-stake and leaving room for improvement in the course’s main assessment. This needs to be done carefully to avoid overassessment of students and overburdening the teacher with additional marking responsibilities. At the same time, assessment needs to be designed carefully to avoid disincentivizing students to deeply engage with the literature and the main assessments through too frequent quizzes and passing the course through simple attendance and engagement, or by adopting strategic approaches to pass assessments without actually engaging with and reflecting on the material (for more details on assessment practices, see Price et al., 2011). There is a high value in formative assessments as opposed to summative assessments. Formative assessments focus on feedback and further improving practice in the future by feeding forward, thus allowing the student to reflect on the feedback and consider how they can improve their performance or master particular skills in the future, such as in the summative assessments that count toward their course mark and possibly their overall degree (Brown & Pickford, 2006). Where the first year of undergraduate study does not count toward the degree classification but only requires a pass-mark, student learning happens in a space between formative and

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summative assessment that allows for more experimentation and skill building given the comparatively lower stakes than in later years of study. Not all degree programs or courses include formative assessments, but these could still be offered through informal approaches and example materials. Where there is sufficient scope, the seminar teacher could, for example, provide instructions and formative exercises around these assessment types so that students gain an understanding what a good policy brief, position paper, or seminar presentation is. This could be achieved through sharing anonymized best practice examples from previous cohorts (with their permission), formative peer-assessment where the student audience is, e.g., asked to fill in a feedback form after a student’s seminar presentation, encouraging students to make use of office hours to discuss essay plans, presentation outlines, and outlines of policy briefs with the teacher to gain informal feedback, offering written feedback on a dissertation chapter, or discussing sample exam questions in seminars. The main assessment component is usually an essay (e.g., 2000–4000 words on a given or self-selected topic) and/or an exam of 1–3 hours. The exam could contain a selection of essay questions, multiple choice questions, questions assessing the retention of facts or a combination of elements. Universities tend to have strict rules around plagiarism of especially takehome assessment components such as essays. It is standard practice to run student essays through plagiarism detection software such as Turnitin that is capable of identifying instances of copy-and-paste. Challenges in detecting and deterring plagiarism continuously increase through the emergence of paraphrasing software, ghostwriting services and especially free Artificial Intelligence software applications such as ChatGPT that are capable of writing parts or full essays on given prompts based on existing literature. The key challenge is that such plagiarism is difficult to detect with existing software programs, which may be improved but are likely to remain one step behind the free and paid-for plagiarism opportunities on offer. Some universities try to counter these services through honor codes, while others move toward assessment modes that make the use of such plagiarism software impossible. This means in most cases replacing essays with exams and integrating critical evaluation of artificial intelligence-­containing software such as ChatGPT into the assessment practice. This could mean not assessing the quality of a policy brief or country position paper itself, but assessing the student’s critical reflection on how a, e.g., ChatGPT-created policy brief contains factual inaccuracies or how it could be further improved if used as a starting point. This allows students to learn how to critically

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reflect on the outputs of tools containing AI-software and how to use it in a way that is responsible and measured. The use of exams ensures to confirm that students actually developed the skills and knowledge set out in the learning objectives, and that they are still able to carry out key tasks when no ChatGPT or other internet-based applications are available. The following course handbook (i.e., module guide) offers an example how learning objectives, activities, and assessment methods could be constructively aligned in a third year elective course. I designed this course before the Covid-19 pandemic within the framework conditions of the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University, UK. This is intended as an example and not as best-practice, but as a starting point for critically evaluating how a given course within existing framework conditions could be constructively aligned to encourage a personal growth mindset.

International Organizations and Diplomacy

(3rd/final year undergraduate elective course, designed and taught by Dr. Katharina Rietig, Newcastle University, UK) Course Outline, Aims and Learning Outcomes Course outline The course introduces and discusses the governance structure, capabilities, and limitations of different international organizations. It examines the governance structure of the United Nations from its origins to potential reforms, explores how the different international organizations within and outside the United Nations system work together to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems such as armed conflict, economic crises and climate change, as well as analyzes how countries can influence the negotiation process towards achieving outcomes. The course also provides links to key concepts of international relations theories. At the heart of the course is the Diplomacy component, which allows students to take on the roles of diplomats representing countries in simulations of international negotiations by proposing and negotiating solutions to international challenges. (continued)

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(continued)

Course aims This term 1 third-year undergraduate course introduces students to international organizations and their role in global governance as well as their influence on national policymaking. Key aims are: Deepening student’s knowledge about major international organizations, in particular the UN System, WTO, IMF, World Bank, and regional organizations. Examining the governance structure of the United Nations from its origins to potential reforms, exploring how the different international organizations within and outside the United Nations system work together to address the world’s most pressing problems Analyzing how countries can influence the negotiation process toward achieving outcomes Develop a deeper understanding of the challenges and limitations faced by international organizations in the area of international cooperation via experiential learning. Students take on the roles of diplomats representing their assigned countries’ interests on a given topic and explore options to negotiate resolutions to the international problem. Learning outcomes Intended knowledge outcomes On successful completion of the course, students will have: Developed an appreciation of the opportunities and challenges linked to decision-making in intergovernmental negotiations within the United Nations (e.g., UN Security Council, UN Human Rights Council, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) and other international organizations Knowledge of the key topics discussed in multilateral negotiations such as peace and security, economic development, environmental degradation, and reforms to the architecture of global governance (e.g., UN reform) Intended skills outcomes Advanced public speaking skills Advanced research skills Critical analysis skills (continued)

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(continued)

Gain practical experience and apply negotiation strategies to achieve outcomes in multilateral negotiations Cognitive/intellectual skills Critical thinking Active learning Literacy Information literacy Source materials Use of computer applications

A P A

Data synthesis Numeracy

P N/A

A P

Synthesize and present materials A

Self management Self-awareness and reflection Planning and organization: Goal setting and action planning Personal enterprise Innovation and creativity Independence Problem solving

P P

Decision-making

P

P P P

Initiative Adaptability Budgeting

P P N/A

Interaction Communication Oral Interpersonal Team working Collaboration Leadership Peer assessment/review

P P

Foreign languages Written/other

N/A P

P P P

Relationship building Negotiation

P P

Application Occupational awareness Commercial acumen Market awareness Financial awareness Ethical awareness Legal awareness

P

N/A N/A P P

Governance awareness Business planning Social, cultural, and global awareness

P N/A P

(continued)

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(continued)

Outline of Syllabus and Teaching Arrangements ‘International Organization and Diplomacy’ is composed of 11 lectures, 9 seminar/workshop sessions, and 1 Newcastle-­ based Model United Nations Simulation. Seminars contain different elements including student presentations, debates, public speaking training and simulations of decision-making forums (such as the Security Council, World Trade Organization, United Nations Environment Program, Human Rights Council). The course consists of three parts: Part 1: Role of International Organizations in global governance and how international cooperation on global challenges is negotiated among sovereign nation states. Part 2: An important aspect of international cooperation is diplomacy. The course will thus also examine negotiation strategies and the influence of state as well as non-state actors in international negotiations hosted by international organizations. It will draw on international relations theories as well as theories of public policy making to explain why and under what conditions international cooperation emerges. Part 3: The course has a strong focus on building a team spirit among the students and developing skills to successfully work within a team via guided and independent study phases and one 1.5-day simulation of the work of diplomats representing their country at a UN conference. For example, students are taking on the roles of diplomats to represent the UK, France, the US, Russia, or China in the UN Security Council or other UN bodies to discuss crises to international peace such as in Syria or North Korea, or how migration crisis due to armed conflict and climate change can be addressed. Students will develop advanced public speaking skills and build a high level of confidence to speak about issues of international concern to a large audience. As they will be representing the political position of a foreign country, students will improve their understanding of other countries’ political interests, foreign policy, economy, and culture, thus developing problem-solving skills. To prepare their (continued)

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(continued)

speeches and convey the countries’ political interests, students will use and improve their research and critical analysis skills to find, synthesize, evaluate and apply complex information while also developing a working knowledge of international law and the rules of diplomacy. Students will understand the necessity, opportunities, challenges, and limitations of international cooperation and collaboration. The immediate benefits to students are exposure to new perspectives and a highly inspiring environment. By working together with other students during seminar sessions, debating and participating in Newcastle Model United Nations, students develop a strong team spirit as well as build lasting friendships and study support networks for their final term at Newcastle University. Through strengthening their research and analytical skills, students will be very well equipped to perform well in their other academic courses counting towards their degree. This directly improves student’s chances at securing highly desirable internships and graduate level jobs. Students gain successful experiences of mastering challenging tasks and build confidence and a high level of motivation. Lectures/Seminars/Workshops Topic Subject lecture, 1 h

Subject seminars, 1 h Other activity

1

Assignment of presentation topics Public speaking

2

3 4

5

Introduction to international organizations Theories of IOs (realism, institutionalism, constructivism, public policy theories) Origins and development of international organizations Institutional design: how do international organizations differ from another and why? Actor’s demands and support: state actors

Mini-Model UN

Presentations I: Security (continued)

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(continued) Topic Subject lecture, 1 h

Subject seminars, 1 h Other activity

6

Presentations II: Human rights

Please use office hours for portfolio consultation

Presentations III: Sustainable development Presentations IV: Environment

Portfolio consultation tutorial Newcastle Model United Nations

Presentations V: Global economy and finance Presentations VI: Trade

Essay consultation tutorial Essay consultation tutorial

Decision-making in International Organizations Writing position papers 7 What IOs produce: soft (and hard) international law Writing resolutions Reading week Work on presentation/portfolio 8 Achieving breakthroughs in international negotiations 9

10

11

Multilevel reinforcing governance dynamics between the international and domestic level Negotiating resolutions Survival and reform of international organizations Regime complexity and fragmentation: interactions among IOs

The key readings and discussion questions are set out below for each seminar/workshop session. The further readings provide an introductory guide for the seminar presentations. It is essential for the success of the seminar discussions that all students have read the key readings prior to the seminar, as these will form the basis for the presentations and the discussions. The quality of student’s contribution to the seminar discussions will be assessed in the form of a ‘workshop participation’ mark accounting for 10% of the final course mark. Newcastle Model United Nations This internal 1.5-day simulation will offer an introduction to Model United Nations. Students will be given the opportunity to apply for their role (representing one member of the UN Economic and Social Council) by submitting three unranked country preferences to [course leader email] by [date]. Please understand that these (continued)

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(continued)

are preferences only and the actual country assignment may be different and it is not possible to change the assigned country. [references and links] Students are required to read the background guide on the topic under discussion and to prepare a position paper stating their countries official negotiation position on the topic (400 words for both topics, +/−10%). The second preparation element is a ‘zero draft resolution proposal’, stating five substantive suggestions on how the negotiation topic can be addressed from the point of view of the represented country (300 words for both topics, +/−10%). This ‘internal’ document will be a helpful starting point for the negotiations. Both the position paper and resolution proposal form 10% of the course assessment mark (portfolio). If the student cannot participate in the negotiation due to illness, the position paper and resolution proposal must still be submitted by the deadline [date]. See topic 6&7 for sources on position paper and resolution writing. Further information on the topic can be found in topic 6&7. Assignments and Assessment Outline of course assessment The assessment is constructively aligned with the learning outcomes and teaching activities. International Organization and Diplomacy is assessed as follows: Component Essay Portfolio

Date/deadline

[date] Position paper + resolution proposal Newcastle MUN: [date] Oral Seminar sessions presentation weeks 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10 Professional Every seminar and skills assessment workshop session

% of Comment mark 60 10

20

10

2500-word essay Portfolio of position paper and resolution proposal in preparation for Model United Nations simulation (total of 700 words) Individual presentation, 10% of mark for presentation slides, 10% for oral presentation 7% for participation in workshops, seminars, and lectures, and 3% for participation in Newcastle MUN (continued)

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(continued) Presentation

Students provide a presentation to the class (see overview table) to strengthen their knowledge on the governance of key international organizations as foundation for the other assessments. All presentations are assessed individually based on the quality of content and oral presentation (i.e. there will be no ‘group mark’). To ensure a high quality presentation (and thus good individual marks), it is however important that all students assigned to one seminar session meet, discuss how they want to divide the presentation into equal parts and ensure coherence of the information provided. Each presentation is 8  minutes (timekeeping is part of the assessment). The presentation should respond to the questions raised in the weeks’ reading list linked to the lecture topic. They should be based on the further readings provided in the reading list and additional literature search, e.g., adding empirical examples or case studies of the theoretical concepts discussed. Each seminar with presentations focuses on a different policy field. Each presentation should focus on a different international (sub-)organization/agency/ program within this policy field. Providing a summary of the key readings is insufficient as all students will have read these as part of the seminar preparation. Each individual presentation should finish with a discussion question related to the sub-topic. There will be presentations of 3–4 students each in the following six sessions: Week 4 Week 5 Week 7 Week 8 Week 9 Week 10

Security Human Rights Sustainable Development Environment Global Economy and Finance Trade (continued)

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(continued) Participation, attendance, and ReCap[audio-recording]

Participation is assessed and thus rewarded since the course has a strong teamwork character (while maintaining individual assessment) and requires active participation and good preparation to achieve the learning outcomes. About 7% of the course mark are attributed to active participation in the lectures, seminars and workshop and 3% are attributed to active participation in the Newcastle MUN.  All lectures/seminars/workshops are relevant to perform well in the essay (which requires reflection on all three parts of the seminar). Therefore, attendance is mandatory and will be recorded. If students cannot attend a seminar (e.g., due to illness or extenuating circumstances), they are expected to inform the course leader. The course is designed to maximize student participation and engagement. To be as interactive as possible and due to the relatively small number of students enrolled, the lectures are set up to allow for questions and small group discussions to analyze the reading and apply the concepts introduced in the lectures to examples. To achieve the learning objectives of the course, a safe atmosphere is essential that allows students to critically discuss and examine also controversial topics. It also allows the course leader to share insights gained at international negotiations and during research fieldwork that fall under Chatham House rules, thus allowing students deeper insights into the inner workings of International Organizations. Therefore, attendance at all lectures is essential as no sessions of the course are recorded on ReCap and no other audio or visual recordings are allowed to maintain a safe atmosphere for open debate under Chatham House rules. To reduce the need for note taking and accommodate any special needs, the lecture slides offer a relatively high level of detail and will be available on Blackboard one day before the lecture. Portfolio To perform well and enjoy the Model United Nations conferences, good preparation is essential. This will be rewarded with an assessed portfolio consisting of a position paper of 400 words +/−10%, i.e., about 200 words per topic (students will be assigned to represent one country; the position paper outlines their countries’ position on (continued)

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(continued)

the agenda topics) and proposed resolution of 5 substantive suggestions per topic on how to address the issue under discussion of about 300 words +/−10% (which will allow the students to make constructive proposals during the negotiations on how the international problem can be solved). This assessment is independent of the students’ participation in the internal Model United Nations conference. Essay questions The 2500-word essay (+/−10% of word length; word count includes everything except the bibliography) requires reflection on all sessions of the course and counts for 60% of the final mark. In the essay, students are expected to reflect on the MUN experience and how this relates to the actual governance of international organizations and negotiations. Further guidance on structuring the essay and expectations for the quality of sources will be provided during seminars (i.e. drawing on international relations theories and empirical examples as well as literature searches beyond the reading list). The essay question is as follows: Critically discuss to what extent international organizations are capable of effectively addressing challenges of the twenty-first century. In your assessment, draw on your reflection of your participation in Newcastle MUN, the theory-based seminar discussions on the governance of international organizations and the diplomacy workshops. The essay should reflect on the interplay between national interests and governance structures of international organizations. Please submit one electronic copy to TurnitinUK. The deadline for submission of your assignment is [date]. Lecture/Seminar Content and Readings The books and other resources below provide a starting point. All books and articles below should be available via the University Library or online—those which are not will be provided by the course leader via Blackboard. References of core/further reading have been omitted. 1. Introduction to international organizations: the United Nations System, World Bank/IMF, and WTO (continued)

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(continued)

Discussion questions What are the commonalities and differences between international organizations? How do they relate to one another? Consider the origins of the United Nations, its main organs and competencies. What might account for the decline and stagnation of international organizations since the 1980s? Is there actually a decline? 2. Theories of international organizations (realism, liberal institutionalism, and constructivism) and diplomacy I: negotiating effectively (public speaking) For this seminar session, we will be practicing public speaking in a lecture theatre. This will be a fun session focused on quick debates of current topics in international affairs. 3. Origins and development of international organizations and mini-Model UN The topic of the seminar will be a mini-Model UN simulating a UN Security Council meeting on Children and Armed Conflict. You will be provided with your country assignment/briefing, however it is strongly advisable to do further reading/research beyond your position paper. Discussion questions How can the situation on the involvement of children in armed conflict be addressed? What are the central interests of the actors involved? What options are feasible and available to the UNSC to achieve peace and improve the human rights situation? 4. Institutional design: How do international organizations differ from another and why? Discussion questions Under which conditions will international organizations be created? How do the circumstances of their creation impact on institutional design? What IR theory-based and empirical explanations exist for explaining differences in the leeway international organization bureaucracies enjoy from their member states? (continued)

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(continued)

5. Actor’s demands and support: state and non-state actors Discussion questions What role do non-state actors play in international negotiations and how can they influence the outcome? What opportunities and challenges do non-state actors bring to global governance? Through which channels can non-governmental actors formulate demands on, and lend support to, international organizations? Give examples for each channel of input. How and why can the administrative staff of international organizations make an autonomous impact on decision-making in international organization? 6. Decision-making in international organizations and resources for researching and writing your position paper and draft resolution for Newcastle MUN (portfolio) Discussion questions What are the main differences between the intergovernmental decision-making model and the bureaucratic-politics model? Illustrate your answer with specific examples of decision-making in international organizations. Are decisions made by intergovernmental negotiations more legitimate than decisions made through standard operating procedures? What is the role of procedural legitimacy? 7. What international organizations produce: soft (and hard) international law and resolution writing Discussion questions What is the difference between soft and hard law? How do these differences impact upon the effectiveness of international organizations with regard to implementation, enforcement? How can soft law be effective, i.e. what alternatives are there to ‘enforcement’? Think about transparency, accountability, legitimacy, monitoring, verification etc. 8. Achieving breakthroughs in international negotiations Discussion questions (continued)

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(continued)

How can member states achieve international cooperation within international negotiations? How can negotiation deadlocks be overcome? How realistic are Model United Nations compared to actual UN negotiations? 9.  Multilevel reinforcing governance dynamics between the international and domestic level and negotiating resolutions Discussion questions How are negotiations influenced by domestic politics? To what extent can negotiators use the domestic level strategically? What result can interactions between the domestic and international level have on the negotiation outcome/national policies? Under what conditions can repeated interactions between the domestic and international level strengthen negotiation outcomes? Newcastle Model United Nations Over 1.5  days, we will be simulating the work of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and discuss two topics: Integrating Sustainable Development into Post-Conflict Reconstruction Implementing SDG 7: Ensure Access to Affordable, Reliable, Sustainable, and Modern Energy for All You need to prepare both topics. At the beginning of the simulation will be an agenda setting session, where the ECOSOC will decide on which topic to discuss first. Time permitting, the second topic will be discussed after a resolution on the first topic has been agreed. A useful introduction to the topics can be found here: [references and links] Individual preparation is based on your country assignment. A useful starting point for your own research are: [references and links] 10. Survival and reform of international organizations Discussion questions What determines the stability of international organizations? (continued)

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(continued)

How important is effectiveness of the international organization for its continued existence? Can international organizations act independently of the interests of its member states? 11. Regime complexity and fragmentation: interactions among international organizations Discussion questions How do international organizations interact with each other? How do they cooperate in areas of overlapping mandates (e.g. on cross-cutting issues)? –– Why does regime fragmentation occur? –– What options does regime complexity and fragmentation open up for states to achieve their national interests on the international level (e.g., venue shopping, regime shifting)? Which strategies can states use to achieve this? –– What are the implications of regime complexity and fragmentation for the effectiveness of global governance to address key challenges of the twenty-first century?

Conclusion This chapter offered an overview of key considerations for constructively aligning a personal growth mindset, learning objectives and assessment within courses, and overall degree programs, which opens up avenues for longer term learning (Boud & Falchikov, 2006). It first linked constructive alignment of learning objectives and learning activities to the personal growth mindset and explains how both fit together. It then focused on constructive alignment in degree programs and how this can be achieved through core and elective courses, skill building pathways, study abroad opportunities, developing transferable employability-­ relevant skills, and gaining practical work experience through internships and comparable placements. The next section zoomed in on constructive alignment within courses and introduced the different core modes of teaching, i.e., lectures, seminars, and workshops. These will be the focus of the second part of the book. The section then focused on the central cross-cutting elements of

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assessment. There are different options of assessing student performance in a way that is constructively aligned with the learning objectives and a personal growth mindset. These include seminar contributions, study group reports, marks for simulation preparation and/or position papers, essays based on a review of the academic literature, policy briefs aimed at communicating academic findings to decision-makers, as well as the traditional exam that could include essay questions, multiple choice questions, or other subject-specific elements. These assessment methods are also increasingly facing challenges with regard to academic integrity and the question how much of the work submitted is that of the student, and how much help the student had from, e.g., ghostwriting services and/or online-based tools such as ChatGPT, a free artificial intelligence software released in November 2022 that quickly developed applications that can pass off as student work and that has the potential to bypass traditional plagiarism detection software such as Turnitin. It also offered an example of a course outline/guide that constructively aligns the different elements within the local framework conditions. The second part of this book focuses on the different learning and teaching elements of a course and degree program. These include lectures, seminars, and dissertations, as well as optional elements such as study groups or simulations of decision-making.

References Ashline, G. (2017). Real-World Examples: Developing a Departmental Alumni Network. PRIMUS (Terre Ht Ind), 27, 598–605. Bakshi, S. (2021). Towards Unmaking of Canons: Decolonising the Study of Literature. In D.  Thomas & J.  Arday (Eds.), Doing Equity and Diversity for Success in Higher Education. Redressing Structural Inequalities in the Academy (pp. 117–126). Palgrave Macmillan. Bellingham, L. (2008). Quality Assurance and the Use of Subject Level Reference Points in the UK. Quality in Higher Education, 14(3), 265–278. Bender, D. (2021). Internship Assessment in Professional Program Accreditation: A 10-Year Study. Education + Training, 63(2), 256–270. Boud, D., & Falchikov, N. (2006). Aligning Assessment with Long-Term Learning. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 31, 399–413. Brooms, D. R., Brunn-Bevel, R. J., Byrd, R. J., Clayton, W. C., Cuellar, W. C., Gast, K. A., Goerisch, M. G., Iverson, M. J., Johnson-Ahorlu, D., Jones, S. V., Kimball, R. N., Lane, T.-A., Lee, E., Mahoney, T. B., Matthew, E. M., Maynard, A. D., Mohajeri, E., Nanney, T., Ovink, O., et al. (2019). Intersectionality and

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Higher Education: Identity and Inequality on College Campuses. Rutgers University Press. Brown, S., & Pickford, R. (2006). Assessing Skills and Practice. Routledge. Celia Palma, L., de Oliveira, L.  M., & Viacava, K.  R. (2011). Sustainability in Brazilian Federal Universities. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 12(3), 250–258. Charles, M. (2019). Effective Teaching and Learning. Journal of Black Studies, 50(8), 731–766. Choate, J., Demaria, M., Etheve, M., Cran, S., & Carroll, D. (2019). A Professional Development Program with an Assessed ePortfolio: A Practical Solution for Engaging Undergraduates with their Career Development in Large Student Cohorts. Journal of Teaching and Learning for Graduate Employability, 10, 86–103. Crimmins, G. (Ed.). (2022). Strategies for Supporting Inclusion and Diversity in the Academy. Palgrave Macmillan. Dweck, C. (2017). Mindset. Changing the Way You Think to Fulfil Your Potential. Random House. Dwivedi, M. (2013). Studying and Teaching at UK Degree Programmes in India. Asian Education and Development Studies, 2(1), 70–86. Elijido-Ten, E. (2015). Experiential Learning in Accounting Work-Integrated Learning: A Three-Way Partnership. Education & Training, 57(2), 204–218. Fossland, T., & Habti, D. (2022). University Practices in an Age of Supercomplexity: Revisiting Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion in Higher Education. Journal of Praxis in Higher Education, 4(2), 1–10. Furnham, A., Christopher, A., Garwood, J., & Martin, N. (2008). Ability, Demography, Learning Style and Personality Trait Correlates of Student Preferences for Assessment Method. Educational Psychology, 28, 15–27. Grue, M. (2021). Diversity of Decolonise? What You Can Do Right Now and How To Get Started. In D.  Thomas & J.  Arday (Eds.), Doing Equity and Diversity for Success in Higher Education. Redressing Structural Inequalities in the Academy (pp. 161–172). Palgrave Macmillan. Hart Research Associates, Inc. (2018). Fulfilling the American Dream: Liberal education and the future of work. A survey of employers conducted on behalf of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Retrieved from https:// www.aacu.org/research/2018-­future-­of-­work Hoover, J. D., Giambatista, R. C., Sorenson, R. L., & Bommer, W. H. (2010). Assessing the Effectiveness of Whole Person Learning Pedagogy in Skill Acquisition. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 9, 192–203. Karmasin, M., & Voci, D. (2021). The Role of Sustainability in Media and Communication Studies’ Curricula throughout Europe. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 22(8), 42–68.

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Kettunen, J. (2010). Cross-Evaluation of Degree Programmes in Higher Education. Quality Assurance in Education, 18(1), 34–46. Leese, M. (2010). Bridging the Gap: Supporting Student Transitions into Higher Education. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 34(2), 239–251. MacVaugh, J., & Norton, M. (2012). Introducing Sustainability into Business Education Contexts Using Active Learning. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 13(1), 72–87. McGregor, J., & Navin, M. C. (Eds.). (2022). Education, Inclusion, and Justice (1st ed.). Springer. Meda, L. (2020). Decolonising the Curriculum: Students’ Perspectives. Africa Education Review, 17(2), 88–103. Miah, S. J., & Solomonides, I. (2021). Design Requirements of a Modern Business Master’s Degree Course: Perspectives of Industry Practitioners. Education Information Technologies, 26, 763–781. Mo, Y., & Chan, T-M. (2023). The factors affecting curriculum design of social work degree programs in Mainland China: Accounts of social work educators. International Social Work. Online First. https://doi. org/10.1177/00208728211073647 Moncrieffe, M. (Ed.). (2022). Decolonising Curriculum Knowledge. International Perspectives and Interdisciplinary Approaches. Palgrave Macmillan. Nagdee, I., Shafi, A., Thomas, D., & Arday, J. (Eds.). (2021). Doing Equity and Diversity for Success in Higher Education. Redressing Structural Inequalities in the Academy (pp. 139–149). Palgrave Macmillan. Papa, R. (Ed.). (2020). Handbook on Promoting Social Justice in Education. Springer. Price, M., Carroll, J., O’Donovan, B., & Rust, C. (2011). If I Was Going There I Wouldn’t Start from Here: A Critical Commentary on Current Assessment Practice. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 36(4), 479–492. Raza, S. A., Qazi, W., & Yousufi, S. Q. (2021). The Influence of Psychological, Motivational, and Behavioral Factors on University Students’ Achievements: The Mediating Effect of Academic Adjustment. Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education, 13(3), 849–870. Rietig, K. (2021). Learning in Governance: Climate Policy Integration in the European Union. MIT Press. Rigsby, J. T., Addy, N., Herring, C., & Polledo, D. (2013). An Examination of Internships and Job Opportunities. Journal of Applied Business Research, 29(4), 1131–1143. Saville, K.-M., Birdi, G., Hayes, S., Higson, H., & Eperjesi, F. (2020). Using Strength-Based Approaches to Fulfil Academic Potential in Degree Apprenticeships. Higher Education, Skills and Work-Based Learning, 10(4), 659–671. Sledgianowski, D., Gomaa, M., & Tan, C. (2017). Toward Integration of Big Data, Technology and Information Systems Competencies into the Accounting Curriculum. Journal of Accounting Education, 38, 81–93.

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Steele, K., VanRyn, V. S., Stanescu, C. I., Rogers, J., & Wehrwein, E. A. (2020). Start with the End in Mind: Using Student Career Aspirations and Employment Data to Inform Curriculum Design for Physiology Undergraduate Degree Programs. Advances in Physiology Education, 44(4), 697–701. Thomas, D., & Arday, J. (Eds.). (2021). Doing Equity and Diversity for Success in Higher Education. Redressing Structural Inequalities in the Academy. Palgrave Macmillan. Tomlinson, M. (2008). “The Degree Is Not Enough”: Students’ Perceptions of the Role of Higher Education Credentials for Graduate Work and Employability. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 29(1), 49–61. Tuitt, F., & Stewart, S. (2021). Decolonising Academic Spaces: Moving Beyond Diversity to Promote Racial Equity in Postsecondary Education. In D. Thomas & J. Arday (Eds.), Doing Equity and Diversity for Success in Higher Education. Redressing Structural Inequalities in the Academy (pp.  99–115). Palgrave Macmillan. Von Treuer, K., Sturre, V., Keele, S., & McLeod, J. (2011). An Integrated Model for the Evaluation of Work Placements. Asia-Pacific Journal of Cooperative Education, 12(3), 195–204. Vos, M., Çelik, G., & de Vries, S. (2016). Making Cultural Differences Matter? Diversity Perspectives in Higher Education. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, 35(4), 254–266. Wahr, F., Underwood, J., Adams, L., & Prideaux, V. (2013). Three Academics’ Narratives in Transforming Curriculum for Education for Sustainable Development. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 29(1), 97–116. Walton, E., & Rusznyak, L. (2017). Choices in the Design of Inclusive Education Courses for Preservice Teachers: The Case of a South African university. International Journal of Disability, Development and Education, 64(3), 231–248. Waugh, M., & Su, J. (2015). Online Instructional Program Design: One Size May Not Fit the Needs of All. Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 16(1), 1–10. Williams, L. (2010). Assessment of Student Learning Through Journalism and Mass Communication Internships. Journal of Applied Learning in Higher Education, 2(1), 23–38. Wilson, C., Broughan, C., & Daly, G. (2022). Case Study: Decolonising the Curriculum—An Exemplification. Social Policy and Society, 21(1), 142–150. Wolbring, G., & Lillywhite, A. (2021). Equity/Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) in Universities: The Case of Disabled People. Societies, 11(2), 49. Yorke, J., & Vidovich, L. (2014). Quality Policy and the Role of Assessment in Work-Integrated Learning. Asia-Pacific Journal of Cooperative Education, 15(3), 225–239.

PART II

Teaching Activities to Develop a Growth Mindset in Students

CHAPTER 4

Lectures

How can lectures be set up and delivered to keep students engaged? Lectures remain a key element of any social sciences degree program. They introduce a topic, offer the opportunity to provide an overview of major elements and debates, and to convey the knowledge considered to be essential for achieving the learning objectives. Lectures tend to last 1–2 hours (50 minutes or 90 minutes with a 10-minute break) and are sometimes delivered in two 1-hour sessions split across different days of the week, depending on the design of the course and timetabling restraints. This chapter first examines the role of the person giving the lecture and of lectures within courses designed to advance a personal growth mindset. It then reflects on changes to the default delivery mode of face-to-face/ in-person lectures with increasing shifts to online lectures and pre-recorded lecture material. Especially following the Covid-19 pandemic, many universities are experimenting with the inclusion of online lecture content and blended approaches. The third section discusses the preparation of lectures before moving on to different aspects around the delivery of lectures in the fourth section. These include the role of a clear introduction and providing an overview, activities during the lecture to increase student’s active involvement such as questions to be discussed in small groups and polls, as well as how lecture material can be provided to make the lecture as inclusive as possible.

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Lectures, Lecturers, and the Personal Growth Mindset The purpose and relevance of lectures continues to be questioned since more than 30 years. Lectures reflect a more traditional, teacher-focused learning approach that highlights the expertise of the teacher who disseminates knowledge to the students as passive listeners. Originating from a time where knowledge was contained in unaffordable and/or unavailable books, the focus was on ‘reading out loud’ the knowledge contained within these books or offering an overview of a field of scientific knowledge filtered through the expertise of the lecturer/professor. Since the easy availability of this scientific knowledge through libraries, electronic databases, and the internet, the status of the lecture is being questioned and challenged with regard to its usefulness and the limits of lecturer’s ability to provide inspirational lectures (Laurillard, 1993). Over the last 30–40 years, the function of the lecture has changed from the source of knowledge to providing an overview and introduction to a topic, often in the form of a big picture that shows linkages between complex topics in an engaging way, frequently supported by pictures and videos (Race, 2019) increasingly in a form of ‘infotainment’. It serves a social function that brings students together as a cohort and highlights key aspects to facilitate self-study in preparation for the seminars, practicals, or tutorials where the deeper exploration of the topic occurs. When attending the lecture, the vast majority of students would not yet have engaged in reading any core or additional literature from the course reading list. This means that the lecture is the entry point into a topic for students. It thus serves the purpose of providing a knowledge basis, explaining key terms and concepts, and raising student’s interest to explore the topic in more detail and to gain a deeper knowledge about at least some aspects of the lecture topic. Ideally, there are clear links between the current lecture topic and the previous and/or the following lecture as part of a logically structured course. The lecture also serves as the entry point to shifting toward more student-centered learning activities in the seminar session and to empower students to take responsibility for their own learning. These purposes mean that the lecture stands at the beginning of a learning loop in the personal growth mindset. The focus is on providing input in the form of knowledge that students subsequently reflect upon and engage in factual learning (Rietig, 2021). The lecture needs to provide enough motivation so that students advance to experiential and

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ideally constructivist learning through preparing for the seminar, e.g., in study groups, and attending the seminar to engage in conducive seminar activities such as student presentations, debates, or discussing the literature. Especially when lectures are recorded or the lecture script is provided, students can ‘go back’ and revise certain key points that emerge as being relevant for the later seminar activities or exam preparation. Lectures tend to be delivered by permanent members of the teaching-­ active academic staff such as Professors, Associate Professors, or Assistant Professors (and the equivalent ranks of Professors, Readers, Senior Lecturers, and Lecturers in, e.g., the UK). In some cases, they are also held by postdoctoral research fellows. There is a mix of research-active staff and teaching-focused staff delivering lectures with increasing initiatives to keep senior academic staff members active in introductory/first year lectures in addition to teaching-focused colleagues. Lectures in electives, and final year  undergraduate and Master-level courses tend to be more specialized and covered by research-active staff from across all ranks. Across many countries, there is, however, an increasing tendency to employ teaching staff on precarious short-term contracts such as Adjunct Professors in the United States or Teaching Fellows/Lecturers in the United Kingdom on teaching-only contracts without time allowance for research activities. In other countries such as Germany, there is an established practice of short-term contracts requiring teaching and research with a time limit on how long academics can remain within the academy, also resulting in high levels of anxiety, dependency on senior Professors, and inability to plan an academic career. There is also an increasing number of adjunct teachers who are not remunerated for their teaching at all or paid a symbolic flat rate for the entire course. In some cases (e.g., Germany), this is tied to maintaining a status as ‘Privatdozent’ following a habilitation as qualification for a professor position. Workloads are furthermore increased in the case of online-based delivery and online-only degree programs (Blair et al., 2022). While there may be considerations from the department to fill gaps emerging from maternity/paternity leave, research grant buyouts or colleagues leaving at short notice, there is also strong push-back from unions and individual academics toward this practice of longer-term precarious employment and casualization through a number of short-term contracts covering only teaching time but not sufficiently taking into consideration the time required for related activities such as marking, preparation, responding to student queries, and pastoral care. Or, in the case of Germany, the time limit restricting how long

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academics can be employed by a German university outside an Associate/ Full Professorship (W2/W3), resulting in protest in the form of the ‘Ich bin Hanna’ movement and related Twitter Hashtags. As a consequence, the status and security of employment, career level and overall university environment (Bodhi et al., 2021), and an inclusive workplace (Panicker et al., 2018) have a considerable impact on the teacher’s ability and capabilities to deliver high quality lectures, to incorporate inclusive education practices (Vos et al., 2016), and to focus on a personal growth mindset for students. Especially the time required for the preparation of lectures is a major personal investment that usually only pays off if the lecture is delivered over a longer time frame. This chapter assumes that teachers are in a secure employment position and will give the lecture more than once, while acknowledging that there are limitations and constraints, especially in terms of time and resources imposed by precarious work situations. Overall, lectures thus serve as the entry point to a learning loop within the personal growth mindset. This means that they need to motivate students to go deeper and enable them to become active in the subsequent student-centered learning activities. Given the focus on the teacher in the lecture, a balance needs to be found between personal circumstances and limitations, and meeting the core objective of allowing for enough momentum so that students take the lead in the subsequent learning activities.

In-person Lectures, Online Lectures, and Blended Approaches Since the technological means emerged, universities have been experimenting with blending the traditional in-person lecture with online lectures. There are different options now to choose from. These include in-person lectures, in-person lectures that are recorded with audio and/or video, online synchronous lectures (i.e., live) with and without recording available afterward, and pre-recorded asynchronous lectures. In-person lectures have been the default in most universities before the Covid-19 pandemic and, in most cases, there was a strong push from university management to return to the in-person lecture with some exceptions and where there were good reasons for blended approaches. By design, inperson lectures take place at a certain time, usually based on a weekly schedule. They last for anywhere between 50 minutes and 110 minutes with a

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short break, 90 minutes or two 50-minute sessions within one week covering the week’s lecture topic. Especially introductory-­level lectures for one or more degree programs take place in large lecture theatres with hundreds of seats, usually in a tiered setting so that all students can see the teacher and screen/whiteboard. This setting offers a number of benefits for students as the lecture also serves a social function and helps to structure the student’s day and week. The lack of mandatory preparation allows for a low entry barrier with the promise of learning something new. Initially random encounters with other students can form into friendships and into groups of students who attend lectures together, sometimes also working together as study groups. This results in informal and formal commitments for students and motivates them to attend the lecture, especially if the break also promises a catch-up with friends or going to the cafeteria for lunch with the study group afterward. Lectures also offer the opportunity for students to directly benefit from teachers’ expertise on a topic, in most cases based on their advanced knowledge of the state of the art in the subject area in the case of introductory-level lectures, or even their own research as part of researchled teaching. In-person lectures that are not recorded encourage a high level of student attendance with the necessity to take notes or at least add personal notes to provided lecture notes and slides. Depending on how detailed the lecture slides are, this can also mean a more traditional approach as some of the knowledge would only be available through attending the lecture, paying attention, and keeping detailed notes, either handwritten or on a laptop/mobile device. Since the late 2000s and early 2010s, there is a tendency for lectures to be recorded and the recordings being made available to the students enrolled in the course afterward. This has become a popular option especially since the rise of online platforms allowing access to recorded lecture materials such as Blackboard, Moodle, and Canvas, among others. There are different models when and why lectures are recorded with an increasing shift from an opt-in system, where teachers request a recording, to an opt-out system, where teachers need to opt out of one or all of their lectures being recorded. A non-recorded lecture has the advantage that the teacher can be more spontaneous and maximize interaction with the students through posing questions, encouraging group discussion, and also discussing/reflecting upon more contentious issues, thus engaging in free thinking and open debate, one of the core privileges of the academy. This would not be possible when the lecture and student’s contributions are recorded and stored

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potentially indefinitely as both the teacher and student would not necessarily voice their opinions or ask/answer questions on contentious topics for fear of being taken out of context and/or negative consequences. This can be especially problematic for students from countries where free speech is restricted and voicing certain opinions can have serious personal or professional consequences, even abroad. There are, however, also instances where teachers would want to carefully consider whether they record their lectures, especially in subject areas where potentially politically sensitive topics are discussed that might be interpreted as problematic at a later point in time by political actors with certain motivations. For example, in the wake of the Brexit debate in the United Kingdom and the Brexit referendum 2016 to leave the European Union, there were requests from politicians in favor of Brexit and critical to the European Union to UK university managers to release any recorded lectures to them that discussed the European Union. The intention appeared to be to check that a ‘politically balanced’ approach would be taught and to call out any teaching that could be regarded as in favor of the European Union or critical of Brexit. Although denied by the university managers, this instance shows that lecture recordings can potentially turn into political ammunition and cause considerable damage to the careers and, potentially, lives of academics when political majorities change, giving power to actors on the extreme right or left of the political spectrum even in countries that pride themselves for their high standards of free speech. Once recorded, there may be circumstances where releasing lectures could not be prevented, for example, in the case of freedom of information requests or hacks of the IT infrastructure that can result in a publication of emails, internal files, and lecture recordings. There is also an increasing worry among some teachers that they might be replaced/their employment contract not continued as their lecture recording could be reused for subsequent student cohorts, or to reduce the effectiveness of strikes for fair working conditions. Recording a lecture can thus change its nature toward a scripted monologue of the teacher that focuses on conveying uncontentious facts and figures. Benefits of recording a lecture are especially the flexibility it provides for students and equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) benefits. There is also increasing pressure from students to record lectures and to make these available to increase their flexibility and choice whether to attend a lecture or rather listen to the recording. University management also tends to encourage lecture recordings to satisfy student demand, and potentially due to the flexibility it provides when strike action occurs or teachers are otherwise

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unable to deliver a lecture. Lecture recordings do have clear EDI benefits for students as they allow students to not attend a lecture and still be able to access the recordings and not miss the content. Non-­attendance can have a variety of reasons. Students could be primary or secondary caregivers to family members or face physical or mental health challenges that prevent them from attending the lecture. There could be clashing work schedules where working during term time is necessary to afford the rising costs of education, especially for students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, and mature students combining part-­time or full-time study with part-time or full-time work (Slowey et  al., 2020). Being able to access a lecture and listen to all or parts of it can also be useful for students who attended the lecture. This can be for personal reasons such as mitigating the effect of disabilities (Wolbring & Lillywhite, 2021), revisiting the lecture to clarify complicated aspects or improve understanding of key concepts/theories, or revising for the exam. Especially audio-visual learning types can benefit from being able to access lecture material when needed. Lecture recordings may also be more accessible for students based on their personal preferences over, e.g., reading a textbook chapter or the lecture notes, or to allow for a combination of information to facilitate retention. Given the benefits of both not-recorded in-person lectures and recording of in-person lectures, it is important for the teacher to maintain a maximum of agency over whether the lecture is recorded or not. This depends on the course and the content of the lecture, i.e., if recording would necessitate self-censorship and prevent an important discussion, or if such a discussion could be moved to a setting that is focused on student-­ centered activities and not recorded, such as the seminar session. Student’s EDI needs could also be met through, for example, allowing teachers to edit their lecture recordings before they are posted online and saved in an archive. This would allow to cut out sections with potentially problematic content and contributions from students such as responses from students to questions and other interactive lecture elements. Frequently, there is also a break that could be edited out for the convenience of those listening to the recording. In many cases, students also approach the teacher before/after the lecture or during the break to clarify questions or discuss matters with the teacher that would usually be discussed during office hours such as seminar preparation, clarification questions about assessments, or personal tutoring matters. These potentially confidential conversations that may also contain personal information have certainly no place in a lecture recording and should thus also be carefully edited out

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before the lecture recording is saved and shared with the rest of the student cohort enrolled in the course. The safest approach would be to assume that any lecture recording could also end up on YouTube, TikTok, or similar video-based social media platforms and that it should thus not contain content that could have negative consequences in the future for anyone captured in the recording. The Covid-19 pandemic necessitated a rapid shift toward online teaching. One key aspect was synchronous and asynchronous online lectures. Synchronous lectures (Harris et  al., 2021) move the in-person lecture experience online, in most cases, to an online videoconferencing platform such as Zoom. Anyone with the Zoom link (and password for security reasons) can join the lecture as listener, while there are also online tools that allow for interactive elements such as the ‘raise hand’ function to signal a question or willingness to make a contribution. There is the option to ‘mute’ oneself to avoid disturbing the lecture group with background noises, which is particularly important when in a public place, but also at home when family members, friends, or pets are present in the background. There is also the option to activate or deactivate the camera and to display one’s name/profile picture or remain fully anonymous. For privacy reasons, and especially when a lecture is being recorded, e.g., through the recording function on Zoom, the established practice and default mode is that only those who speak have their video cameras on, while the audience deactivates their cameras with a name display being a personal choice. This means that once the number of participants reaches ten or more, the own tile/profile is displayed at a later place, thus increasing anonymity. There are a number of advantages and disadvantages to synchronous lectures. They allow for a high degree of flexibility as to the location where the lecture is given and attended. This can be useful to, e.g., bring in a guest speaker from a different city, country, or continent who would otherwise not be able to give a lecture and share expertise on a particular topic, it may provide flexibility for the teacher to still deliver a scheduled lecture while at a conference, carrying out research or impact-related activities such as presenting evidence to policymakers at a scheduled event clashing with the lecture, or on research field work. It also has EDI benefits for students who live further away from the university and would not be able to attend every lecture for financial reasons given the costs associated with travel or who are prevented from traveling due to weather- or strike-related disruptions. They may be able to find one or two hours away

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from family caregiving duties for, e.g., children or (grand)parents, or from their full-time job to attend the online lecture, but might not be able to accommodate traveling to and from the university and thus end up not being able to attend otherwise. While there are equality, diversity, and inclusion benefits, there are also disadvantages. Many of the benefits of an in-person lecture cannot be replicated in an online lecture, especially the social aspects of students following a residential degree program. They organized their lives to be able to attend lectures and seminars in-person through living on or close to campus and they are frequently without family members, related caregiving duties, or full-time jobs, but prioritize their residential educational experience. An important aspect of this is also having a circle of friends, frequently from their degree program, who they meet at the lecture, which also offers the opportunity to combine social gatherings, having meals together, or ‘catching up’. There is also less of a chance of random encounters and making new friends in an online lecture than there is when starting a conversation with a student sitting next to them during a break. These advantages and disadvantages are even stronger in asynchronous lectures, where the lecture is pre-recorded by the teacher with no opportunity for live interaction or asking questions. The benefit is the added time flexibility for both the teacher and the student where both are in different time zones or where students have part- or full-time work/caring commitments and can thus watch the lecture when it is most convenient for them. There is an increasing tendency that students meet in small groups to watch lecture recordings, even if they have the option of attending them in-person. This allows to link a maximum of flexibility where and when the lecture material is watched with social interactions, while also avoiding and/or minimizing health risks associated with sitting in frequently poorly ventilated and crowded lecture halls. The disadvantages of asynchronous online lectures are similar to synchronous online lectures. In addition, there is no opportunity to directly ask clarification questions or otherwise interact with the teacher, which would happen through email/ forum discussions or attending dedicated synchronous online or in-person meetings such as office hours. Especially students in residential educational programs feel disappointed about online lectures as they see little difference to watching, e.g., a YouTube video, and subsequently question the financial costs of attending university as well as the value for money. The lack of social interaction with other students and the teacher also contributes to feeling isolated and alone in their educational journey with

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subsequent challenges for mental health and motivation to continue studying. Some of these challenges were intensified during the Covid-19 pandemic (Shim & Lee, 2020). Given the advantages and disadvantages of all in-person and online lectures, it becomes important to find the right balance for the student cohort to offer them the best learning experience possible while supporting a sense of community (Rovai & Jordan, 2004). This can mean recording in-person lectures that are afterward edited to remove personal information and opinions, maintaining flexibility to include some synchronous online lectures into a course where appropriate to offer opportunities that would not be possible otherwise (such as inviting guest speakers) and clearly explaining the student target group for a course. Where students organize their life around a residential educational degree program, the default option would be to offer in-person lectures to maximize the social aspect of a lecture beyond the dissemination of information and to help students form friendships as well as learn from each other and from the teacher. There is also an increasing tendency to offer online degree programs (Joshi, 2022; Yang et al., 2017) similar to more traditional distance learning or correspondence schools such as the Open University in the UK and the Fernuniversität Hagen in Germany (Benson, 2003; Carraher Wolverton & Guidry Hollier, 2019; Moore et al., 2011). Here a mix of synchronous and asynchronous lectures can be beneficial especially when the student target group are mature students, those with family care responsibilities or full-time work who require a high level of flexibility to fit their education around their other commitments. Recording synchronous lectures (and the option of editing/deleting interactive content available to the teacher) may be a good compromise in these cases. The lecture allows for spontaneous interaction with the teacher while also offering those who were not able to attend the opportunity to catch up, as well as provides a means for revision and clarification when needed for later learning such as exam preparation. In any case, it is important to clearly advertise the lecture mode to avoid disappointment and allow students to make informed choices in line with their personal preferences and life circumstances before enrolling in a degree program or specific course (Scarabottolo, 2019).

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Preparing the Lecture This and the next section assume a recorded in-person lecture that  if recorded can be edited by the teacher before publication on the online platform to remove any aspects that would not be included in a pre-­ recorded asynchronous online lecture. These include conversations with students during the break or after the lecture and interactive elements such as students sharing the findings from their small group discussions. When designing the lecture on a given lecture topic within an existing or new course, the first consideration is the expected previous knowledge that students bring to the lecture. In the case of a first-year undergraduate or master’s level introductory lecture, a considerable time may need to be spent on explaining key concepts that students should have learned in secondary school or their undergraduate degree programs. Depending on that curriculum and school system, it is safe to assume that not all students have the same knowledge. Therefore, it may be useful to include in the lecture materials recommendations for further reading as well as where students can find background information on the topic in case they want to refresh their knowledge. This could include links to online resources, peer-reviewed journal articles, or, in most cases, likely chapters in academic textbooks on the topic that offer a good introduction and summary of the topic. This may also be important for second or third/final year undergraduate courses where not all students had the same compulsory courses or where students would benefit from refreshing their memories on the underpinning content. Thus, the consideration is to strike a balance between pitching the lecture ‘at the right level’, providing enough background knowledge so that students can easily follow the rest of the lecture, and offering resources through additional/background reading material to revise the underpinning concepts in more detail. The second consideration is the question how the individual lecture sits within the course and the course’s mode of delivery. This can be relatively straightforward when there is only one teacher giving the lectures and seminars on a course, who also happens to be the course leader and an expert on the lecture topic. It, however, becomes more complex when there is a teaching team of two or more academics giving the lecture and the current lecture follows on a colleague’s lecture (Baeten & Simons,

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2014; Simons et al., 2020; Tajino et al., 2016). Here it is important to take into consideration the content of the previous lectures and the knowledge students already gained through those lectures. What key concepts have already been introduced? Can the current lecture topic be linked to earlier topics, or could these potentially be briefly summarized with a focus on the relevant knowledge underpinning the current lecture? This kind of signposting can be useful for the students to see the lecture as part of the overall course and to start making links between the different lecture topics to see broader patterns or a bigger picture. Some degree of coordination within the teaching team would be very useful so that all are aware of how their topic fits with the other teachers’ lecture topics and what key concepts have already been introduced in previous lectures. The more integrated and coherent the different lectures are across the course, the easier they become for students to follow and to remain engaged throughout the course. Especially where the seminars are not taught by the same academic giving the lecture, there should also be close coordination with regard to discussing the seminar activities and how they draw on/further deepen knowledge introduced in the lecture. The key question is what content should be included in the lecture. This obviously depends on the subject matter, the level of the lecture, and the expertise of the teacher. There are broadly two options—first, consulting text books/chapters in academic text books on the topic and assessing their content for suitability and a first idea of the key aspects that could or should be covered in the lecture. This should also include any relevant aspects with regard to decolonizing the curriculum in the form of moving beyond the Western white male-dominated and originating content to include perspectives and voices from the global south, indigenous knowledge and contributions from ethnic minority groups, in addition to a gender balance (Moncrieffe, 2022; Neimann et al., 2022; Papa, 2020). Where such Western concepts belong to the core curriculum, they could be critiqued with postcolonial and global south perspectives, especially in subject areas where knowledge and the selection of the literature is subjective with a resulting plurality of perspectives. Considering that decolonizing the curriculum initiatives are only beginning to take hold in universities within the global north, the majority of academic textbook chapters likely could be expanded upon through the inclusion of more diverse perspectives. The second option for identifying the underpinning literature for the lecture is for the teacher to draw on their own knowledge of the topic, especially if it sits closely within their area of expertise. This would allow

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them to draw from a diverse variety of peer reviewed journal articles and wide selection of examples from the global south and global north to offer a comprehensive introduction to the topic, including own research publications. This is most likely the case for elective/final year courses that dive deeper into specialized topics within a subdiscipline and are often taught by an academic who is also research-active in the field. The actual preparation of the lecture content and slides for a new lecture can take a considerable amount of time. Depending on the teachers’ expertise on the topic and familiarity with the literature, this can range from a few hours to a few days. Here it is important to set a time limit for preparing a good lecture, not necessarily ‘the’ perfect lecture. If the lecture is to be delivered also in later years, it will require regular updating, which also offers scope for further improving the lecture content based on the first/previous years’ lecture and student feedback. If it is an introductory lecture or part of a larger core course, there is a likelihood that the lecture is not new but has been delivered by another teacher previously. Depending on the terms on which the predecessor left the course and/or university, the previous teacher may be willing to share their lecture materials/script and give permission for it to be reused. If this is the case, it needs to be personalized and updated to fit within the overall course and cover content the current teacher is familiar with to avoid a ‘PowerPoint karaoke’-like situation where it would be difficult to answer student questions for clarification on lecture content. The lecture script contains the content to be shared, either fully formulated like in a research publication, or ideally in bullet points to allow for a more natural and flexible delivery that is informed by the bullet points in the script, which also makes it easier for students to follow the lecture. Any introduction of key concepts, theoretical frameworks, or theories should move beyond the abstract/generalizable aspects and also include examples to allow for a more intuitive understanding of the abstract concepts. In most cases, there is scope for ‘decolonialization’ (decolonizing the curriculum), for example, there may also be critiques and more critical points of view of said concepts, limitations of their practical applicability, or unintended/negative consequences that could be discussed through a mix of examples from the global north and especially global south. Once the content of the lecture is determined, the script should be turned into a presentation that supports students’ learning through visuals underpinning what is said. This could be tables/figures, pictures of aspects discussed within an example, and a limited amount of text highlighting

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key points of the narrative. Given that natural attention spans last in most cases significantly less than the duration of a lecture or until the main break (Bradbury, 2016), it is beneficial to interrupt the teacher’s monologue using visuals, videos, or interactive elements, encouraging student participation through, e.g., including a slide with a question to be discussed with other neighboring students or adding a link to a video that could be discussed by the teacher and/or students afterward.

Delivering the Lecture At the beginning of each lecture, students benefit from signposting that introduces the lecture topic, offers a short introduction of who the teacher is and their expertise, especially if it is the first lecture in the course or by that teacher within a teaching team, and explains how it fits with the overall course. This could include a highlighting of the learning objectives of what students should have learned at the end of the lecture, and how these learning objectives fit with broader learning objectives of the course. Especially if there is a close integration with a previous lecture and/or seminar activities that further deepen knowledge and understanding of a topic, it is important to highlight these links. Then the lecture could be linked with previous lecture key-takeaways through a brief recap/summary of these key points. There may have been case studies or examples introduced in previous lectures that also have relevance for the current lecture topic or that could be further developed in the current lecture. In addition to the teacher-focused delivery of the lecture through the script turned, e.g., into a PowerPoint presentation containing engaging slides with visuals and limited text, the lecture could also include more reflective and interactive elements. These could be break-out groups to discuss questions and polls asking students to individually answer, e.g., a multiple-choice question. Break-out groups discussing questions could be included after a key concept has been introduced and an example discussed. Students could be asked to come up with potential critiques of a concept or empirical examples where its practical application may be problematic and limited. The questions should allow for a few minutes of discussion among students to get them to reflect on the lecture content and connect it with, e.g., lived experiences or previously existing knowledge in an intuitive manner. The question should be relatively easy to answer so that each group can come up with two or more responses and be made aware that they should be ready to share one response with the larger

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group. Discussing within a group of 2–4 peers sitting next to/ahead of/ behind them allows students to either talk to their existing study group/ circle of friends, or to expand their network to other students they have not yet/rarely spoken to. This interactive element has a number of benefits. It turns students from passive listeners to actively engaged co-creators as they start thinking about certain aspects of the lecture topic. Given that the question is pitched at a difficulty level that someone who paid attention to the current lecture should be able to answer, possibly drawing on everyday/lived experience, it means a low entry barrier to students to move toward active participation. This can also result in a feeling of successful participation and experience of shared learning with other students, thus allowing for a higher rate of remembering the lecture content and ideally raising student’s interest to find out more by engaging with the literature on the reading list. A student break-out discussion could also be initiated after a short video that offers a more immersive and intuitive visual support than could be provided by the teachers’ explanation alone. Students should be instructed before the video of the aspects they should pay particular attention to and be made aware of the question to be discussed afterward. The video should be viewed critically, i.e., with an analytical lens, assessing different points of view, including that of the producers of the video. After about five minutes, the teacher could ask for responses from a few student groups, repeat them to the larger lecture group and then provide their own reflective answer to the question, including a linkage to the next subtopic of the lecture. Another interactive approach is the use of polls (Calma et al., 2014). There is an increasing variety of software to facilitate participation in polls using mobile phones or small handsets to be distributed to students. A more traditional polling approach is to ask for a show of hands, although this can bias student responses when they look to other students who may or may not be raising their hands. Such polls can be useful to include lived experiences in the lecture so that students feel more connected to examples, or they could be used to test student’s understanding. For example, following the introduction of a complex concept in a lecture, a multiple-­ choice question could be displayed within the lecture slides offering four answers that all may sound plausible, but only one answer is correct and if students paid attention beforehand, it is easy to pick the right answer. Especially if there is no clear consensus on the response, the teacher should use the opportunity to explain why a particular answer is correct, and why the other answer options are not. This allows for a reflective learning loop

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as students need to reflect on the lecture content, determine which answer option is correct, and understand why this is the case. Especially if they selected a different answer, there is scope for learning from the error (Argyris, 1976) and subsequently more reflective recalling of the lecture content. Toward the end of the lecture, it is useful to leave five minutes for clarification questions, provide a summary of the key points of the lecture and to also offer a preview of the next lecture, especially how it links to the current lecture. This is also the opportunity to explain how the lecture and the seminar activities fit together to encourage students to prepare for the seminar session, to attend and to actively participate.

Conclusion This chapter zoomed in on the most traditional part of any course, the lecture. It positioned the lecture as most teacher-focused activity and highlighted how the lecture serves as the introductory point providing students with the necessary knowledge to take on a more active role in their learning in the subsequent independent study/seminar preparation and attending the seminar. There are a number of considerations around selecting a mode of lecture delivery through in-person/face-to-face lectures (recorded or not recorded), synchronous (live) online lectures, or asynchronous online lectures (recorded videos) with inherent advantages and disadvantages for students based on their different equality, diversity, and inclusion-related needs and expectations from either a residential/ campus-based educational program or more independent distance learning. The chapter then focused on the preparation of the lecture and different considerations drawing from a diverse literature/knowledge base and offering scope for critical reflection on key concepts, as well as considerations around team teaching (Baeten & Simons, 2014; Simons et  al., 2020; Tajino et al., 2016). The final section discussed the delivery of the lecture, especially the importance of signposting to situate the lecture within the overall course and to explain how it relates to the seminar activities. It also offered two examples of interactive elements as entry point for more active learning through questions to be discussed in small groups or polls that test student’s understanding of key concepts.

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References Argyris, C. (1976). Single-Loop and Double-Loop Models in Research on Decision Making. Administrative Science Quarterly, 21(3), 363–375. Baeten, M., & Simons, M. (2014). ‘Student Teachers’ Team Teaching: Models, Effects, and Conditions for Implementation. Teaching and Teacher Education, 41, 92–110. Benson, A. (2003). Dimensions of Quality in Online Degree Programs. American Journal of Distance Education, 17(3), 145–159. Blair, B. L., Slagle, D. R., & Williams, A. M. (2022). Institutional and Programmatic Determinants for Graduate Public Affairs’ Online Education: Assessing the Influence of Faculty Workload. Teaching Public Administration, 40(2), 181–198. Bodhi, R., Singh, T., Joshi, Y., & Sangroya, D. (2021). Impact of Psychological Factors, University Environment and Sustainable Behaviour on Teachers’ Intention to Incorporate Inclusive Education in Higher Education. International Journal of Educational Management, 36(4), 381–396. Bradbury, N. (2016). Attention Span During Lectures: 8 Seconds, 10 Minutes, or More? Advances in Physiology Education, 40(4), 509–513. Calma, A., Webster, B., Petry, S., & Pesina, J. (2014). Improving the Quality of Student Experience in Large Lectures using Quick Polls. Australian Journal of Adult Learning, 54(1), 114–136. Carraher Wolverton, C., & Guidry Hollier, B. (2019). A Minimalist Design for Distance Learning. International Journal of Educational Management, 33(7), 1457–1465. Harris, R., Blundell-Birtill, P., & Pownall, M. (2021). “A More Personal Way to Learn During Such an Isolating Time”: The Value of Live Lectures in Online Teaching. A Practice Report. Student Success, 12(3), 113–117. Joshi, M.  S. (2022). Holistic Design of Online Degree Programmes in Higher Education—A Case Study from Finland. International Journal of Educational Management, 36(1), 32–48. Laurillard, D. (1993). Rethinking University Teaching: Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for the Effective Use of Educational Technology. Routledge. Moncrieffe, M. (Ed.). (2022). Decolonising Curriculum Knowledge. International Perspectives and Interdisciplinary Approaches. Palgrave Macmillan. Moore, J., Dickson-Deane, C., & Galyen, K. (2011). e-Learning, Online Learning and Distance Learning Environments: Are They the Same? The Internet and Higher Education, 14(2), 129–135. Neimann, T., Felix, J. J., Shliakhovchuk, E., & Hindman, L. L. (Eds.). (2022). Policy and Practice Challenges for Equality in Education. IGI Global.

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Panicker, A., Agrawal, R. K., & Khandelwal, U. (2018). Inclusive Workplace and Organizational Citizenship Behavior: Study of a Higher Education Institution, India. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, 37(6), 530–550. Papa, R. (Ed.). (2020). Handbook on Promoting Social Justice in Education. Springer. Race, P. (2019). The Lecturer’s Toolkit. A Practical Guide to Assessment, Learning and Teaching (5th ed.). Routledge. Rietig, K. (2021). Learning in Governance: Climate Policy Integration in the European Union. MIT Press. Rovai, A. P., & Jordan, H. (2004). Blended Learning and Sense of Community: A Comparative Analysis with Traditional and Fully Online Graduate Courses. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 5(2), 1–13. Scarabottolo, N. (2019). Comparison of Students in an Undergraduate University Degree Offered Both in Presence and Online. Interactive Technology and Smart Education, 17(1), 36–48. Shim, T.  E., & Lee, S.  Y. (2020). College Students’ Experience of Emergency Remote Teaching due to COVID-19. Children and Youth Services Review, 119, 105578. Simons, M., Coetzee, S., Baeten, M., & Schmulian, A. (2020). Measuring Learners’ Perceptions of a Team-Taught Learning Environment: Development and Validation of the Learners’ Team Teaching Perceptions Questionnaire (LTTPQ). Learning Environments Research, 23(1), 45–58. Slowey, M., Schuetze, H., & Zubrzycki, T. (Eds.). (2020). Inequality, Innovation and Reform in Higher Education. Challenges of Migration and Ageing Populations. Springer. Tajino, A., Stewart, T., & Dalsky, D. (2016). Team Teaching and Team Learning in the Language Classroom (1st ed.). Routledge. Vos, M., Çelik, G., & de Vries, S. (2016). Making Cultural Differences Matter? Diversity Perspectives in Higher Education. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, 35(4), 254–266. Wolbring, G., & Lillywhite, A. (2021). Equity/Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) in Universities: The Case of Disabled People. Societies, 11(2), 49. Yang, D., Baldwin, S., & Snelson, C. (2017). Persistence Factors Revealed: Students’ Reflections on Completing a Fully Online Program. Distance Education, 38(1), 23–36.

CHAPTER 5

Seminars

How can seminars and lab activities be constructively aligned with the learning objectives and developing a growth mindset? This chapter focuses on a central element of any degree program—the seminar, or, in some cases, countries and disciplines, the ‘lab’, ‘class’, or ‘workshop’ related to the lecture. The seminar is intended to give students an opportunity to deepen the learning regarding the lecture topic and to apply what they learned through student-centered activities. It usually requires and expects preparation from both the teacher and the students and follows clear learning objectives that act as pieces to the larger puzzle of the overall course. Students are informed of the key seminar activities ahead of time, usually through the course handbook/syllabus or in the related lecture. This chapter first links the growth mindset to the seminar design by explaining how the ‘learning loops’ of reflecting on new knowledge and experiences can be maximized through connecting the learning objectives with the teaching activities of the seminar. It also discusses considerations such as seminar preparation, time management, and the importance of a harmonized approach within the teaching team if there are more than one seminar teacher in the course. The second section explores the differences between face-to-face/in-person seminars and online seminars and offers reflections on relevant considerations for equality, diversity, and inclusion of these approaches, including hybrid and blended approaches. The third section focuses on the running of the seminar and works through different stages from the opening of the seminar through presenting the structure © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Rietig, Innovative Social Sciences Teaching and Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41452-7_5

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and activities to guiding the seminar discussion, the importance of signposting, and clear explanation of the rules/shared norms for the seminar as an important EDI element. It also highlights the importance of making sure all students understand the teacher and each other, posing and discussing reading-related questions and seminar activities that are focused on student-centered activities, as well as the conclusion of the seminar with a reflective element. The fourth section explores different seminar activities including student presentations, simulations and mini-debates, answering sample exam questions and working through math problem sets in business/economics courses, case studies and other example-based exercises, and discussing questions based on the course reading list and other media, such as videos or podcasts. The final section concludes on the main points and offers a reflection on equality, diversity, and inclusion aspects of seminars as a student-centered learning activity.

The Growth Mindset and Seminar Design When integrating a growth mindset, seminars are designed to focus on giving students maximum agency and encouraging them to apply information they gathered from the lecture or previous reading. The overall objective is to strengthen the student’s perseverance through trying challenging yet achievable tasks, to reflect on the feedback they gained, and to try again to improve their performance and solidify the learning effect toward long-term retention. It also needs to be inclusive with regard to strategies, actions, and processes that help to ensure that all students can be successful (Moriña, 2017). Seminars are a key aspect to develop a growth mindset as the central, student-focused activity of any course that is a compulsory part. Ideally, the seminar takes place after the lecture with some time allowing to digest the information from the lecture and prepare well for the seminar through, e.g., reading the literature assigned for the seminar session, researching answers to the seminar questions, doing the math problem sets, or reading relevant business case studies. Ideally, students combine the seminar preparation with a study group meeting to discuss their initial learning and widen their horizons by benefitting from their peer’s reflection on the material and potentially different perspectives or from responses to questions based on their experiences and backgrounds. This preparation phase allows for factual learning, i.e., gaining new knowledge by reflecting on the lecture and the seminar literature. The seminar itself focuses on

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experiential learning through discussions and particularly from activities related to practical exercises. These can include working through math problem sets in an economics course, a debate or simulation of a political decision-making setting in a politics course, or case studies working through practical examples in a business course. If students further reflect on their factual and/or experiential learning and as a result form or change beliefs, i.e., how they see things, they engage in constructivist learning (Rietig, 2021) that is more transformative and long-term, especially as it enables students to become and act as agents of change in reflection of their conviction that a certain cause is important and requires societal action (Rietig & Perkins, 2018). Even years later, students may remember their learning experience and draw on the developed growth mindset in their later careers, given that they have formed the ability and motivation to act as a policy entrepreneur. For example, students may have learned about social inequality and its devastating consequences for ethnic minorities and society at large (Brooms et al., 2019). Having reflected on the factual and experiential learning of the seminar, they possess the expertise and motivation to champion stronger EDI policies in their workplace (Neimann et  al., 2022; Panicker et  al., 2018) and thus also teach their future co-workers about the importance of the lessons learned back in their undergraduate course.

Face-to-Face Seminars Versus Online Seminars, and Hybrid Approaches Seminars have been traditionally held face to face with the added benefit of direct interaction between the seminar participants. With the development of Zoom and other online-based, interactive video-conferencing platforms—and in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic—seminars are also increasingly held online or in hybrid form with some in-person participants and some online participants. Most of the aspects discussed below with a focus on face-to-face seminars remain relevant for online-based seminars. Students can be grouped into ‘break-out groups’ to discuss questions within a smaller group or to prepare responses, and assuming cameras are switched on, discussions can be held online in real time. An added benefit emerges from an equality, diversity, and inclusion perspective when using online and/or hybrid seminars as it may allow students with caring responsibilities or those who live further away from the

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university to attend the seminar when they would not have been able to travel to campus for financial or personal reasons. It is also inclusive to students who suffer from acute or chronic health challenges and who may not be able to travel but feel well enough to attend the seminar and, therefore, would fall behind in their learning. At the same time, there are also several challenges associated with online and hybrid seminars as teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic showed. These can also be equality, inclusion, and diversity related. Many students do not have their own room or quiet study space at home or access to one in their local neighborhood (such as a public library when living in a rural area), which makes concentrating on seminar discussions and actively participating difficult when family members demand attention, especially in the case of childcare or eldercare responsibilities in addition to ‘noisy’ conditions such as running TVs in the background. Access to reliable IT equipment is another major challenge as not all students own a laptop or tablet, or this device may have outdated software/hardware making it impossible to use the delivery program such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams. Especially Microsoft Teams requires recent upgrades to computers/ MacBooks to run at all, which makes the selection of the online delivery program/platform an important EDI concern. There are further practical challenges to holding hybrid online and face-to-face seminars although they have the benefit of allowing people to attend who would not be able to otherwise for a variety of reasons. To work well, they ideally require a teaching assistant or at least administrative/technical support so that the teacher can focus on the overall delivery of the seminar while the teaching assistant monitors the online group and facilitates groups moving into breakout-rooms or adjusts the camera equipment in the room so that the online group can fully follow the face-­ to-­face participants and vice versa. Some teaching activities would require careful adjustment and planning, such as simulations, while others could continue with relative ease, such as working through math problem sets in economics or business courses. The technology in the seminar room must be available in the form of a strong and accessible Wi-Fi or teaching IT equipment. This could be either a beamer/large screen to see the online participants or one/multiple cameras so that the online participants can see the teacher and participants present in the physical teaching space. An alternative approach would be to ask the participants to bring laptops/ tablets so that they can see the online participants on their screens and vice versa.

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One key aspect is to establish a social norm and shared understanding among participants that cameras should be switched on so that participants can see each other, and the seminar experience is as ‘normal’ and close to a face-to-face seminar as possible. It is also helpful for participants and the teacher to be able to see the other participants’ facial reactions such as they would usually see their body language. Of course, there may be situations where deactivating the camera would be necessary and/or appropriate, but there should be a shared understanding that this would be an exception and not the norm. Students deactivating their cameras has been frequently reported as a major challenge to synchronous online teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic where teachers ‘stared into the void’ of black tiles/screens when teaching seminars and a lack of engagement with regard to students willing to speak and switch on their cameras. Especially as seminars are meant to be in small groups where students get to know each other’s names and have a safe environment to discuss openly and freely including making mistakes and reflecting on them as part of the growth mindset (Dweck, 2017), being able to see each other is a basic pre-requisite for a successful seminar. One advantage of online-based seminars is that students and the teacher learn each other’s names more easily when they are displayed at the bottom of the online view. As the Covid-19 pandemic moved into an endemic phase in 2023, some of the practices established between 2020 and 2022 out of necessity were continued while others were dropped in favor of the tried-and-tested in-person seminars and workshops. There is certainly a higher openness among some universities and departments to allow for blended and in some cases hybrid approaches when teaching students or when offering professional development courses that may have an online option. A possible avenue would be a blended approach that gives students a choice based on their individual life circumstances. For example, if a course has a larger number of seminar groups, it may be feasible to offer one seminar group as an online seminar to accommodate those students with family commitments or who live further away. This is especially important if the typical student demographic is not the residential young student in their late teens/early 20s but mature students with family or in many cases work commitments who combine studying for an undergraduate or a master’s degree while maintaining at least part of their current lifestyle. At the same time, attending the online seminar group may not be appropriate for the young undergraduate student who lives at home and shares a room with

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siblings and would, thus, greatly benefit from attending the seminar in-­ person and developing friendships with classmates.

Seminar Preparation It is possible for teachers to spend infinite amounts of time preparing teaching, especially seminars. There is always more to do, another case study to prepare, background to research, literature to read, scenario planning on how the debate or discussion of the reading might develop, or model response to an old exam question to write. The important point to keep in mind is that seminars are student-focused learning spaces that should give as much agency to the students as possible. The teacher changes position and moves from an expert who disseminates knowledge in a lecture to a different role as a moderator and facilitator. This seminar facilitator sets the framework conditions through a well-researched and thought-through reading list, seminar discussion questions, and other seminar activities that are diverse and tailored to help students achieve the learning outcomes. Thus, it makes sense to work backward from the learning objectives and the desired learning outcomes and to ask what seminar activities may be helpful to achieve these. The second step is to develop a roadmap toward this goal. The roadmap may contain key takeaways the students should bring up in the discussions or other activities and be able to reflect on toward the end of the seminar. This sets the benchmark for the necessary preparation, which may include preparing several key responses to the seminar questions or model exam questions, or points students should agree on at the end of a simulation or debate. However, there should also be enough space to allow students to explore additional and/or different answers that may also help to achieve the learning outcome. The key role of the seminar facilitator is to guide students along the roadmap toward the learning goals/outcomes while letting them find their own way there. Developing such a roadmap and having a harmonized approach to facilitating the seminar is especially important in the case of a large course with more than one seminar group and more than one teacher running the seminars, as well as when the lectures and seminars are not held by the same person. Especially when designing and developing the course it is important to work within the teaching team to agree on the seminar activities (Baeten & Simons, 2014; Simons et al., 2020; Tajino et al., 2016). Furthermore, there may be seminar activities that not all members of the teaching team are familiar with or have used in the past. In this case it would be useful to

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organize an internal training for the team or, ideally, to invite the teaching team members with less experience in facilitating particular seminar activities to observe other teachers in another seminar, which could be for the same or a different course. Some informal mentoring could be helpful until all team members are confident in using the seminar activities and feel that they are ‘on the same page’ with the other teaching team members in guiding the seminar group toward achieving the learning objectives.

Running the Seminar Based on a typical seminar session of 1  hour (50  minutes) or 2  hours (100 minutes plus 10 minutes break), a typical seminar has an introductory part, one or two activities of 20 minutes (or up to four activities in a 2-hour seminar), and a conclusion part. To facilitate building a growth mindset, it is important to introduce the learning objectives at the beginning of the session so that students can take ownership of their learning and understand how the different seminar activities are intended to advance their learning. It is important to link the seminar to other relevant activities such as key lessons from the lecture or the preparation within a study group or individual preparation. This introduction part could take about 5 minutes and should allow for clarification questions. Especially in the first seminar session it is helpful to clarify the ground rules, for example, the expectation that every participant raises their hand if they want to speak and waits until called upon and that there is an expectation that everyone participates actively and contributes to the group discussion. This is crucial from an equality, diversity, and inclusion perspective to also encourage quieter/shyer participants to speak and to avoid the session being dominated by the outspoken, extroverted participants. There should also be a shared understanding about the use of mobile devices, accessing websites not relevant to the seminar session on laptops/ tablets, and if there is a need/expectation to take notes or if these will be provided/made available beforehand. It also helps to clarify that/if there will be a break in the middle, especially in the case of a 2-hour seminar, and that students can leave the room at any time if necessary for personal reasons without asking for permission/sharing their reasons, but should try to do this in a way that does not disturb the seminar discussion/ activities. During the main part of the seminar with 1–4 seminar activities (see next section), the teacher moves to the role of a moderator or facilitator. This means guiding the students through the different seminar activities

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while allowing for as much student-centered and student-led learning as possible to support the student’s ownership in their learning and reflection. The moderator needs to keep in mind that the students in the class have different backgrounds and requirements from an equality, diversity, and inclusion perspective to be able to participate effectively and should accommodate different needs as far as possible and feasible. These may include, among others, disabilities and health challenges, anxiety, limited ability to speak or understand the language of instruction (and thus requiring the help of, e.g., translation apps), and cultural norms facilitating and/ or hindering active participation. It may be helpful to encourage students to inform the seminar teacher of any special needs they have ahead of the first seminar session through meeting in office hours or email communication if they feel comfortable doing so, or by using the university’s support services (if available), who may make the seminar teacher aware that one or more students enrolled in the seminar group have special needs and what accommodations/modifications to the seminar would be helpful for the student. This usually includes making seminar questions or information about seminar activities available one or two weeks before the seminar to allow for a more thorough preparation, offering visual aids and/or summaries of key information, or speaking slowly and clearly and stopping at regular intervals to check if students understood and if there are any clarifications or questions. This is also important when not all students have a very high level of proficiency in the language of instruction but is also best practice, given the wide variety of local dialects and pronunciations within any language. The moderator could also repeat/rephrase main points made by a student, which would serve both to validate the student’s response and to ensure that all other students understand what has been said to be able to build upon it in further discussions. Toward the end of the seminar, the final phase is a conclusion of 5–10 minutes that reflects on the key takeaways of the seminar and links them to the learning objectives and the relevant elements of the growth mindset. Have the objectives been met? How did the learning activities help to build certain skills or allow for deeper reflection on particular topics? This reflection may also offer an opportunity for student feedback on their learning and if there is anything that would help/could be modified for the next seminar session to further improve their learning. In the case of novel learning activities that students were not familiar with before, a debriefing in the form of a ‘tour de table’ might be beneficial. This includes going through the room/around the table and asking each student individually for their feedback, what they liked, what surprised them, or what

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they thought could be improved. It is important to finish on time and rather leave a few buffer minutes for ad-hoc questions rather than going overtime. In many cases, students have scheduled teaching sessions afterward with considerable distances to be covered within buildings or in many cases across campus. The next teacher and their lecture or seminar group will also be grateful if the room is vacated in time for them to refresh the air (if there are windows) and get settled to start on time.

Seminar Activities This section offers more details on the most common and popular seminar activities in social sciences undergraduate and master degree programs. It focuses on student presentations, practicing essay-style exam questions, solving math problems and practicing quantitative methods in computer labs, discussing questions based on literature and case studies, as well as debates. Especially where students are encouraged to work in small groups, such group work can improve academic performance (Gaudet et al., 2010). Student Presentations Learning how to give a presentation in front of a peer group and developing public speaking skills is highly relevant for most later careers. Presentations are a form of oral tasks within a group project that can be assessed by the teacher and/or peers (Cheng & Warren, 1999). The seminar session offers a safe space to develop and further improve such skills and to link different aspects of the growth mindset, especially continuous improvement through explaining difficult topics, experience in teaching and responding to questions of other students, and gaining confidence through acting as ‘topic expert’. If the seminar presentation is linked to a study group or presentation group where 2–4 students are tasked with presenting on a given topic and sharing the presentation time within the group, there is also a good chance that students would engage in discussions and reflect on each other’s perspectives as well as practice the presentation within the group to ensure good timekeeping. Asking students to give presentations also has the advantage that the seminar session becomes student-centered and potentially student run, when, for example, they are asked to come up with discussion questions at the end of their presentation and to moderate the discussion. This allows the teacher to take on a monitoring and facilitating role as a backup while students develop skills in moderating group discussions.

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To motivate students to prepare high quality presentations that help meet the learning objectives and to reward them for the time it requires to prepare and deliver a good presentation, a share of the course mark could be dedicated to the seminar presentation. If this is to be given as a group mark, EDI aspects need to be taken into consideration with the option of awarding individual marks if it becomes clear that not all students equally contributed to the presentation and some may be free-riding while others do more than their fair share to ensure a good mark. The seminar presentation provides also an opportunity to shift student’s perspectives from simply listening to the presentation’s content to observing what makes a good, high quality presentation. The seminar teacher could distribute a questionnaire asking students to provide peer-feedback to the presenters around some key categories such as the quality of the content, the mode of delivery (easy to comprehend, speaking at an appropriate volume and speed), timekeeping, and visual support in the form of, e.g., pictures and videos. Students from the presenting group could also be asked to provide peer-feedback on each other’s contribution to the presentation to get clearer insights into individual contributions to the group work (Rafferty, 2013) and to assign individual marks if necessary. At the same time, students also need to be clear on the criteria the teacher uses for awarding the mark. There may be additional university requirements for keeping evidence of the presentation such as a recording. It may also be useful to ask students to provide an outline of their presentation to the teacher during their office hours one or two weeks before the presentation to allow for developmental feedback and if necessary adjust the focus of the presentation topic to fit with the seminar sessions’ learning objectives. This can also offer an additional ‘learning loop’ for students to reflect on the feedback and subsequently improve their presentation. Answering Sample Exam Questions Especially when a part of, or all of the course is assessed through an unseen exam at the end of the semester or academic year, practicing how exam questions can be answered offers a key element to improve student’s confidence and advance their growth mindset. Especially essay questions can be challenging for students, where the expectation is to write an essay of 3–5 handwritten pages within one hour in response to one essay question. Such essay questions usually contain several elements that students need to be aware of to do well. In terms of timekeeping and structuring the time available, students need to decide on an essay question if there is

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a choice, fully analyze and understand the question, and make an essay plan with the key points to be explained. For example, there may be an explicit or implicit expectation to combine theory/theoretical frameworks with empirical examples to underpin or apply the theory/theoretical framework or other concepts. Sometimes there is the expectation to reference (usually by Author/Year) key literature from the reading list. An essay usually consists of an introduction with a definition of key terms and an outline of the key elements of the essay, a theory-related conceptual part where such key concepts are introduced and explained, and an empirical section where examples are used to apply or underpin the theory, followed by a conclusion that offers further implications. Especially where students come from different educational and disciplinary backgrounds, for example in a masters-level course, but also in a first year undergraduate course, leveling the playing field and giving students equal chances of doing well through practicing ‘how to’ answer exam questions in seminar sessions can be very helpful. The continued practice, feedback, and reflection on their essay writing technique mirrors the growth mindset by further improving and not giving up. Familiarity with this frequently seen as stressful and high-pressure type of assessment can also help to reduce anxiety with the objective to help students to develop the skills necessary to do well in the actual exam. There are different options of activities around answering sample exam questions. Students could work together in small groups of 2–4 students to first individually analyze the question and develop an essay plan, and then discuss and compare their approach within their peer group. Alternatively, the group could develop one essay plan. The following plenary discussion could collect a few approaches and then discuss which ones are more or less appropriate with one key takeaway being that there are many different ways of answering an exam question. An important learning objective is that students learn what characteristics make a very good, good, or satisfactory exam answer and thus develop a familiarity with the marking criteria. Students could also be asked to prepare an essay responding to an exam question before the seminar session (taking one hour like in an exam situation) and bring their essay to the seminar. Students could then swap their essays and provide peer-feedback, before discussing key elements of a strong response within the seminar group. Including exercises on exam question responses into seminar sessions is very important from an EDI perspective as it levels the playing field and gives all students access to knowledge that is otherwise available on a random basis at best, and in many cases part of a ‘hidden curriculum’. This is

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especially the case for those being able to afford privately paid tutors/ exam preparation courses, having parents or siblings who have been to university studying similar subjects or, in the case of masters level students, had the privilege of completing their undergraduate education in the same country and are thus familiar with the university and assessment culture. This is a major challenge for first generation students with little access to private and/or family support at both the undergraduate and master’s levels, as well as international students on a one-year master’s degree program, in many cases also in a different language and/or discipline from their undergraduate degree. The short duration of the degree program leaves very little time to get familiar with the assessment culture especially as criteria can be very different, in many cases requiring a higher integration of theory and examples with no clear single right answer. This can be in strong contrast to assessment cultures focusing, for example, on memorization and replication of facts. Working Through Math Problems and Quantitative Methods Training Quantitative methods training and math problems can be particularly challenging for students, especially when they had little recent exposure to math teaching and/or quantitative methods. Approaching quantitative methods with a growth mindset allows to reduce anxiety and focus on achievements as well as gradual improvement. A common practice in economics seminars is to set homework of problem sets based on the lecture material and to discuss the solutions and how to get there as the main activity of the seminar. These sessions tend to be teacher-led with the teacher calling upon/inviting contributions from students to work through the question/math problem. Those students who have done the homework and have (mostly) correct answers feel validated and attend to gain confirmation of their work. Those who did not do the homework attend to get the results to be able to catch up for the exam or use the session to understand how to arrive at the results. In both cases, additional work by the students is required to be able to solve the problems themselves and ultimately under exam conditions. The session could be made more interactive and student-led if students are presented with similar yet new problems and asked to work in small groups to solve the math problems. Then the different approaches/responses could be compared within the seminar group and the teacher could encourage students to improve

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each other’s/other groups’ responses and/or to explain why some groups arrived at different results. Encouraging students to work through homework-style math problems in, e.g., an economics class and discussing how the math problem sets are solved allows for an additional learning loop. Students could also be encouraged to work together in study groups and help each other when gaps in previous knowledge make tasks seem insurmountable. Especially explaining and developing the answer together can facilitate factual and experiential learning. A major obstacle is the student’s expectation that they need to understand complex approaches on the first try or that others are seemingly ahead of them, thus raising the stakes and risk of losing face when making a mistake. Here it is important to foster an atmosphere where mistakes are part of the path to success and the importance of understanding and being able to explain the ‘why’ and the pathway to the solution. These steps along the way are as relevant as arriving at the correct answer. Students also need to feel comfortable asking for help and explanations when things are not clear for them—the chance is high that there are also other students who did not fully understand but are afraid to ask seemingly obvious questions. This is also the case for computer lab-based seminars in, for example, quantitative methods courses. To allow all students to benefit from the seminars, it needs to focus on inclusive problem solving and include some elements of group work to also improve the confidence of students that have been traditionally more anxious when it comes to quantitative methods. The more intuitive arriving at the solution feels and the stronger the focus is on the value of making mistakes and subsequently improving, the more inclusive the seminar gets for students traditionally struggling with math and/or quantitative methods. Discussing Questions and Case Studies In many social sciences disciplines such as international relations, geography, sociology and politics it is common to provide core-readings on the reading list in the form of textbook chapters and/or peer-reviewed journal articles, and in some cases links to videos, blogs and/or podcasts. The expectation is that students attend the lecture/watch the lecture recording, do the reading, and then attend the seminar. One core activity of the seminar is to discuss the literature/core readings, usually through guiding questions posed by the seminar teacher. In some cases, these questions are provided beforehand so that students can focus their preparation on

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searching for answers to these questions and to improve the overall quality of the seminar discussion. This is a similar qualitative approach to the common practice of working through math problem sets in economics/quantitative methods seminars. The quality of the discussion depends on whether students have done the reading and come prepared to answer the questions. In many cases, students only selectively skim-read some of the core readings or rely on the lecture content as preparation. This can lower the quality of the seminar discussion, result in selective participation of those students who come prepared, or even lead to overall lower attendance as students are worried about losing face/being called out when it becomes clear they have not done the reading. Some students also rely on their overall knowledge of a topic to make comments and contribute to the discussion. Two ways of encouraging student preparation and thus improve their learning in the seminar is to provide incentives for either good preparation or for high quality seminar performance in the form of participation marks. Focusing on high quality preparation allows for the added advantage of encouraging students to participate given the up-front time investment while allowing for flexibility when students cannot attend the seminar due to personal or EDI-related reasons. This could be done through the submission of an individual portfolio of, e.g., one-page summaries of readings. Given that the resulting marking volume may be unfeasible, this could be combined with encouraging study groups who submit group portfolios instead. This reduces student workload as they can share reading and summarizing the literature within the group and work together to prepare responses to the group questions. This allows for a high level of preparation and lively discussions during the seminar session as students have different contributions to make. This can also help students who are more introverted or prefer having their responses pre-validated by a peer group to increase their confidence of making a good quality contribution and thus reducing any public speaking anxiety. Students can also be encouraged to build upon their literature-based preparation by introducing examples and/or case studies in the form of showing scenes from a movie, a documentary, or playing parts of a podcast after providing clear instructions as to what students should focus on/ what question they should answer based on the input provided. Afterward students could discuss the input and their response either directly in the larger class group or for a shorter amount of time in break-out groups of 3–4 students before sharing key aspects of their discussion with the larger group. Introducing a case study can also be helpful as it also provides an

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example through which conceptual frameworks or theories introduced in the literature/core readings and/or lecture could be applied and be made more accessible as well as memorable. Debates Debates are a seminar activity that requires students to assume an assigned position/point of view and to represent this point of view with arguments as good as possible. This adds a layer of reflection as the assigned debate position may significantly diverge from the student’s personal opinion of the issue under debate. Arguing a client’s or employer’s point of view that they do not necessarily personally agree with is something students are likely to encounter in their later professional career. Debates encourage students to put aside their personal perspective and to assess an issue from a different point of view. It also supports the development of team working skills (Hughes & Jones, 2011) when students work within debate teams. This facilitates and encourages students to examine contentious topics from different perspectives and to broaden their view to include positions that they would personally not identify with. This can advance constructivist learning when students reflect on the assigned positions and arguments made by other students to identify the extent to which they agree with those positions and to then form or modify their own perspective, likely taking into account information they were less aware of before. The key aspects of a debate are also relevant for including short simulations and role play exercises into a seminar session, including online games (Klein et al., 2022). Simulations are discussed and examined in detail in Chap. 7. When assigning debates it is important to clarify the purpose and intended learning outcomes of the debate, including the broadening of personal perspectives to become more tolerant toward other world views or positions on certain topics. There are two options to run debates within seminar sessions, which allows for 20–40 minutes of debate time, depending on whether there are other seminar activities planned and how long the seminar session is. First, debates can be relatively spontaneous, focusing on the experiential learning aspect of public speaking and ‘thinking on one’s feet’. The topic can be kept relatively generic in relation to the lecture, so that students can come up with arguments in favor of one perspective relatively easily and quickly. Alternatively, the seminar teacher can also provide students with, e.g., a one-page briefing of key arguments. Students are then randomly assigned into their debate teams comprising of 50% of

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the attending students and given the brief/role assignments and 10 minutes for preparation. This preparation time should be used to read the briefing note and to come up with several arguments in favor of their assigned position. The second option to run the debate is to pre-assign students their positions, e.g., one or two weeks before the seminar, and to thus give them more time for preparation. This offers the opportunity to work within smaller teams such as study groups to collect arguments and to do some background reading and research on the topic. This pre-­ assigning of roles thus focuses on the factual learning aspect with more time for in-depth preparation and the opportunity to debate a topic of more complexity. It also provides introverted students and those with equality, diversity and inclusion-related needs more opportunity to prepare and thus to perform well. As with the more spontaneous approach, it is also helpful to allow students about 10 minutes to settle in their debate team and to discuss strategies as well as collect key arguments. At the beginning of the debate, the seminar teacher assumes the role of impartial moderator and sets the frame by welcoming the students to the debate, reiterating the topic and the rules of the debate. These could be that students should take turns making arguments so that each team member will have contributed by the end of the debate; to keep speaking time to 30  seconds, 45  seconds, or one minute; to open the debate with an opening argument; and to carefully listen to the arguments of the opposing side so that they can respond to the arguments made. The moderator’s role is to grant the floor to either side and keep an eye on the speaking time. Toward the end of the debate, the seminar teacher reminds students that the debate is ending (which can be because the allotted time is close to expiring or students ran out of arguments) and that each side should present their closing argument. After the conclusion of the debate, the crucial ‘debriefing’ and reflection phase begins. The seminar teacher asks students to ‘take off their debating hats’ and begins the discussion with a short reflection of key points raised during the debate. If this is the first debate of a seminar cohort, it may be useful to reflect on the experience by asking students for their impressions and reflections on the debate. If debates have become an established learning practice, this part can be skipped, moving on to a reflection on the content of the debate. This should be linked to key themes of the lecture and the seminar readings, especially more generic/ conceptual/theoretical aspects. The resulting discussion could follow a similar pattern of reading/literature-based seminar discussion (see above)

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with the added layer of student’s experience and reflection on particular interest groups or sides of a debate.

Conclusion This chapter offered detailed insights into how seminar sessions can be set out, organized and run to allow students to further develop their growth mindset through activities that encourage reflection and continuous improvement through active participation. It discussed the differences and challenges associated with online delivery of seminar sessions in comparison to in-person/face-to-face seminar sessions and outlined potential ways forward with regard to hybrid and blended approaches to support different equality, diversity, and inclusion aspects. Both face-to-face and online teaching offer advantages and challenges and can support different needs of students. The chapter then introduced key aspects of the personal growth mindset with regard to seminar sessions and outlined key considerations for preparing and running the seminar session. There are several seminar activities that can be particularly useful to advance a personal growth mindset. Among others, these include student presentations, answering exam questions, solving math problem sets and business case studies, discussing literature-based seminar questions as well as debates and simulations/role play exercises. All seminar activities and key considerations discussed in this chapter have implications for equality, diversity, and inclusion of students. A key consideration is to be as inclusive as possible and to adapt the seminar sessions to the needs of the particular student cohort while maximizing students’ agency in their own learning and their positive impact on facilitating each other’s learning.

References Baeten, M., & Simons, M. (2014). ‘Student Teachers’ Team Teaching: Models, Effects, and Conditions for Implementation. Teaching and Teacher Education, 41, 92–110. Brooms, D. R., Brunn-Bevel, R. J., Byrd, R. J., Clayton, W. C., Cuellar, W. C., Gast, K. A., Goerisch, M. G., Iverson, M. J., Johnson-Ahorlu, D., Jones, S. V., Kimball, R. N., Lane, T.-A., Lee, E., Mahoney, T. B., Matthew, E. M., Maynard, A. D., Mohajeri, E., Nanney, T., Ovink, O., et al. (2019). Intersectionality and Higher Education: Identity and Inequality on College Campuses. Rutgers University Press.

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Cheng, W., & Warren, M. (1999). Peer and Teacher Assessment of Oral and Written Tasks of a Group Project. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 24, 301–314. Dweck, C. (2017). Mindset. Changing the Way You Think to Fulfil Your Potential. Random House. Gaudet, A. D., Ramer, L. M., Nakonechny, J., Cragg, J. J., & Ramer, M. S. (2010). Small-Group Learning in an Upper-Level University Biology Class Enhances Academic Performance and Student Attitudes Toward Group Work. Public Library of Science One, 5, 1–9. Hughes, R. L., & Jones, S. K. (2011). Developing and Assessing College Student Teamwork Skills. New Directions for Institutional Research, 149, 53–64. Klein, M. G., Jackson, P. L., & Mazereeuw, M. (2022). Teaching Humanitarian Logistics with the Disaster Response Game. Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, 20, 158–169. Moriña, A. (2017). Inclusive Education in Higher Education: Challenges and Opportunities. European Journal of Special Needs Education, 32(1), 3–17. Neimann, T., Felix, J. J., Shliakhovchuk, E., & Hindman, L. L. (Eds.). (2022). Policy and Practice Challenges for Equality in Education. IGI Global. Panicker, A., Agrawal, R. K., & Khandelwal, U. (2018). Inclusive Workplace and Organizational Citizenship Behavior: Study of a Higher Education Institution, India. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, 37(6), 530–550. Rafferty, P.  D. (2013). The Evaluation of MBA Group Work: A Case Study of Graduate Student Experiences and Perceptions of Positive Group Work Outcomes. Journal of Education for Business, 88(1), 43–50. Rietig, K. (2021). Learning in Governance: Climate Policy Integration in the European Union. MIT Press. Rietig, K., & Perkins, R. (2018). Does Learning Matter for Policy Outcomes? The Case of Integrating Climate Finance into the EU Budget. Journal of European Public Policy, 25(4), 487–505. Simons, M., Coetzee, S., Baeten, M., & Schmulian, A. (2020). Measuring Learners’ Perceptions of a Team-Taught Learning Environment: Development and Validation of the Learners’ Team Teaching Perceptions Questionnaire (LTTPQ). Learning Environments Research, 23(1), 45–58. Tajino, A., Stewart, T., & Dalsky, D. (2016). Team Teaching and Team Learning in the Language Classroom (1st ed.). Routledge.

CHAPTER 6

Study Groups

Study groups are self-guided and self-organized groups by students enrolled in the same course, and in most cases in the same seminar group (Nachlieli, 2011; Smith et  al., 2011). As students engage in different forms of group work, including study groups, they can also improve their skills of working successfully within teams (Rafferty, 2013). Study groups can be a useful addition to the more structured and teacher-led lecture and seminar activities as they allow for an additional reflection and learning process. They usually consist of 2–6 students, with 4 students making for a good balance between workload-sharing and social accountability to the group. Students can be assigned to a specific group by the teacher, or they are based on self-selection that reflects random acquaintances at the beginning of a course or existing friendships. Students meet before the lecture and/or seminar to deepen their knowledge and discuss assigned readings or prepare other seminar activities. If they meet between the lecture and the seminar, the study group can have the added benefit of allowing for a space to discuss and clarify key points from the lecture and reflect on relevant aspects for the seminar. This has the advantage that students arrive at the seminars more prepared and ready to participate actively, which in turn benefits all students in the seminar group and encourages a high level of attendance. Study groups can also contribute to a positive learning environment and thus reduce levels of procrastination (Stewart et al., 2016). This chapter explores in detail how study groups can be an important element in supporting students to develop a growth mindset. Especially © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Rietig, Innovative Social Sciences Teaching and Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41452-7_6

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the additional reflection on the lecture material and core/assigned seminar readings and the discussion among peers allows for a strong focus on students as peer-learners and student-led teaching. This chapter first discusses how study groups can help to develop and further embed a growth mindset among students. It then provides more details on different approaches to integrating study groups into course design based on the university’s and department’s framework conditions and the teachers’ ownership of the course, as well as structural determinants such as the size of the course and its mode of delivery as team-taught or individually taught course. It furthermore explores different study group activities. The third part focuses on the advantages of study groups for student’s professional development, team-building (Hughes & Jones, 2011), and leadership skills. This is in addition to the more immediate benefits for the smooth running of the course, which include a positive learning experience due to enhanced camaraderie and friendship among students, the support and reassurance provided to more reserved/anxious students, and other benefits related to equality, diversity, and inclusion. The fourth section reflects on some of the practical challenges of study groups, most commonly related to individual student opposition to additional work and perceived free-riding risks, as well as cultural differences and other challenges that may result in strained relationships within the study group. It subsequently suggests potential avenues of addressing these challenges before offering a conclusion.

How Can Study Groups Help Develop/Embed a Growth Mindset? Study groups can be embedded into courses as a core element that supports students to develop a growth mindset. It also allows for developing and enhancing a wide variety of skills that will be useful in the student’s future career, especially with regard to the ability to work well in teams (Hughes & Jones, 2011), be accountable to colleagues, and assume leadership roles within a team (Hoover et al., 2010) with regard to presenting information and acting as an expert on a specific sub-set of course-relevant knowledge. A central framework condition for such a growth mindset to develop is a conducive learning environment that allows time for reflection on new knowledge based on the lecture, readings, or, e.g., simulations. With each

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learning cycle the chances increase that students would reflect on this input and enter into meaningful learning that outlasts the next assessment, assignment, or exam, but build skills that will benefit them throughout their career. This is where the study group allows for such an additional learning cycle due to its nature of requiring preparation and discussion with other students, thus offering more time and space for reflection. A key aspect is the in-built reflection on new knowledge, i.e., factual learning (Rietig, 2021; Rietig & Perkins, 2018), as students revise the lecture content and assume the responsibility for reading and summarizing an assigned text for the group. They then become the expert in this text, which can serve as a piece of a puzzle represented by, e.g., a discussion question that requires combining information from the assigned readings and to which the other students hold their own pieces. Students need to work together to answer the question, which will subsequently be discussed in the related seminar session. This allows for reflecting on the feedback of the study group and applying the acquired knowledge when participating in the larger seminar group. There is also an element of experiential learning, i.e., learning from reflection on previous experiences (Rietig, 2019, 2021), when students assume the role of the teacher within the study group discussion. Especially experiencing something allows for a higher level of retention than simply reading or hearing information (Biggs, 1996). The discussion of the seminar questions among students, who may represent different lived experiences, cultural backgrounds, and other characteristics, has the strong potential to result in additional reflection on the factual and/or experiential learning and thus in constructivist learning. This means that students would change their underlying beliefs and the way they see things (i.e., aspects of the topic under discussion) from their reflection and discussion with their peers. For example, students might be discussing environmental justice theories and their implementation in the context of climate change. This affects livelihoods disproportionally and negatively in the global south and in poor, frequently ethnic minority communities in the global north. The perspective of a global south or ethnic minority student with lived experience of these challenges may prove invaluable in changing another student’s perspective, who may be from a white middle-class background from the global north with far limited theoretical knowledge. This constructivist learning may result in different and enriched perspectives of all students involved as it allows the broadening of horizons and inculcates reflective practices in future related situations.

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As a result, students may be enabled and motivated to act as a ‘policy entrepreneur’ (Theys & Rietig, 2020) by taking on thought or organizational leadership roles and championing a topic within an organization or social group, subsequently achieving social change or at least increased knowledge and potentially changed perspectives among colleagues or other actors they are seeking to influence. This in turn can result in reflection and learning on the organizational level of their workplace/other institution such as a company or government (Rietig, 2021).

Study Group Examples and Typology For the remainder of this chapter, I will draw on four examples of study groups to illustrate and reflect on how they can support a growth mindset. The following background description is intended to contextualize and empirically underpin some of the lessons learned, advantages and disadvantages discussed in the following sections. Study Group 1: The Friendship and Peer Group Study Group 1 was a voluntarily formed study group following a course leader’s recommendation that students self-organize into study groups. The students are Master/Postgraduate students at a leading UK research university and come from very diverse backgrounds. The overall degree program is relatively small with 40 students, plus a parallel-running degree program with another 40 students who share most of the courses. The student’s age ranges from 22 at the younger end to 40 at the mature end, with an average age of 25–30 reflecting student’s work experience in sectors relevant to the degree program. The students in this degree program come from all parts of the world, including about 50% of students from the global south, with no dominant group in terms of geographic origins. Based on this, four female students decided to form a study group based on random interactions following the first seminar session that contained the recommendation to form study groups. They are from Colombia, Denmark, Germany, and India and have diverse backgrounds ranging from biology and engineering to business and political science. Two have previous work experience in their home countries and two continued their education following their undergraduate degree. They also come from different socio-economic backgrounds ranging from upper class, middle

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class to working class; as well as first-generation at university to children of university professors. They form a study group for one course that contains weekly lectures and seminars, and they decide to meet in-person on a weekly basis at a set time after the lecture and before the seminar, which are on two separate days. There is no clear leader or organizer of the group, but a shared responsibility and feeling of accountability for each to attend the study group meeting usually held in a coffee-shop outlet on campus. Each seminar is thematically linked to the lecture and goes into more detail of key concepts. The core reading list usually contains two readings of peer-­ reviewed journal articles with another ten further readings offering more details and case studies. There are also 2–4 guiding questions for each seminar session that will be discussed and can be answered based on the core readings. The study group agrees to divide the work by assigning responsibility for reading and summarizing one academic article per person, which allows to also include two articles from the further reading list. In return for summarizing one text, each member of the study group receives three summaries from the other core reading and two further readings. This means a considerable time saving as opposed to reading, and summarizing for exam revision, three further journal articles. At the study group meeting, they discuss the answers to each of the guiding questions for the seminar session. This allows putting the ‘pieces’ of the puzzle based on the core readings together. In addition, the study group members also reflect on each other’s responses and compare them with their lived/professional experiences. This results in interesting and, in some cases, eye-opening debates as pre-conceptions can be challenged and perspectives are widened to include views from diverse lived realities and observations in Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Study Group 2: The Social Club Study Group 2 was also formed from Master’s students of the same degree program at the research university, but for a different course. It contains six core members and two further, occasional members who join on an ad-hoc basis. There is also no clear leadership of the group, which was established following a lunch meeting after the first seminar session, which was also the first time the students met and got to know each other. It also consisted of a mix of geographical origins, gender, subject-background, work experience, and socio-economic backgrounds. The students also

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decided to meet once per week between the lecture and the seminar session and to prepare summaries of the readings, usually splitting papers between them so that, based on summarizing half of a journal paper, each would receive summaries of three further papers for exam revision and in preparation for the seminar. The commitment of members to this study group however was not particularly high and soon motivation slipped when the first members arrived at the meeting with excuses as to why they were not able to summarize their text or did not prioritize the study group meeting over other commitments. As a result, the discussions within the study group were less focused and of a varying quality, and not all readings had been summarized to support exam preparation. Instead of holding each other accountable on missed summaries, the study group members took this as a signal that their own summaries were less of a priority. After a while, the study group dissolved into an afternoon social gathering that was frequently held at the local pub instead of a study group workspace or coffee shop. Study Group 3: The Student-Led Exam Prep Course Only when the exam phase approached a few months later, the members of Study Group 2 began to feel anxious about the missed summaries and the resulting challenge of reading and summarizing a large number of journal articles. After some members decided to try their luck on their own, mostly in the form of selectively revising and/or ‘winging’ the exam, others merged with Study Group 1 from the other course to form a new Exam Preparation Study Group (Study Group 3). This group consisted of eight members who regularly met in a group study space in the library. They decided on an approach that would help them maximize their learning and exam preparation based on a work-sharing basis. The course to be revised consisted of ten weeks of teaching, with two weeks that could be merged into one topic, and one introductory session. This left each study group member with one topic to summarize and become the expert on to teach the other members of the group. This included summarizing the core and two of the additional readings, providing a summary or notes of the lecture material, and giving a 30–45 minute presentation to the group based on the summarized material. In return, each member of the group received 7 sets of summarized study materials of an average of 6–8 pages covering the main aspects of a topic. However, instead of sitting by themselves and summarizing/revising material, the study group members

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gained much more. The exam revision, similar to the weekly study group meetings for the seminar, offered an additional learning loop to reflect on the material and engage in factual learning. Students also engaged in experiential learning when they assumed the teacher’s role and gave a presentation, including moderating the subsequent group discussion. This again allowed all study group members to benefit from each other’s diverse lived experiences and perspectives based on their different cultural, socio-­ economic, and educational backgrounds. They were exposed to arguments and ways of looking at a problem that they had not considered previously and would not have considered simply based on reading the academic literature. It also allowed them to use examples in answering exam questions that went beyond the reading materials/course content. In the last phase, the Exam Preparation Study Group met regularly to discuss their answers to old exam questions, which allowed them to move beyond the single-topic focus to connect different topics and see the linkages between topics  taught in the different weeks of the course. They again benefitted from each other’s diverse experiences and approaches to addressing the questions as well as from discussing topics related to the exam questions. In the end, all agreed that they were less nervous and performed better in the exams than if they had revised on their own and not participated in the Exam Preparation Study Group. In addition, although it was indeed a work-intensive phase, the friendships formed throughout those regular meetings and the shared memories of working towards the common goal of doing well in the exams, made spending time with the study group an enjoyable experience. Study Group 4: The Incentivized Group Study Group 4 was formed in response to the course’s requirements to work in a study group to receive 20% of the course credit based on a portfolio of submitted study group work, which would be applied as a group mark unless there were serious indications of free-riding and complaints from other members of the study group. It consisted of students who were all enrolled in a final year undergraduate course at a ‘modern’/post-1992 university in the UK, i.e., a former poly-tech, teaching-intensive institution that traditionally serves students from very diverse backgrounds and the local community with low entry barriers based on A-level achievements. The majority of the students on the course came from the local community/city, were in their early 20s, and lived either at home or in

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student house-shares. Over 50% were British-born ethnic minority students with diverse roots to Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, the Middle East, and various African countries. Most were the first generation in their family to attend university and some had family caring commitments or were mature students. There was some familiarity among the students having attended the same program for two years, but given the large cohort size and various courses/seminar groups, most did not know each other. At the beginning of the course, the course leader/teacher explained the study group assessment component in the lecture and, in the subsequent seminar session, asked students to form a study group of four members and then to send an email containing the names of the study group members within 7 days. Those students who contacted the course leader and informed that they were not successful in finding a study group or preferred to be assigned to one were grouped into a new study group by the course leader on a random basis. The study group assignment was to meet every two weeks, i.e., before each seminar session, either in-person or online, and exchange and present summaries of the core readings. With two core readings of an average of 30 pages each per seminar session, this meant reading and summarizing about 15 pages for each student. The summary was expected to be of 200–300 words. In addition, there were 4 questions provided that could be based on the core readings, in most cases requiring students to work together as each had different aspects of the questions’ response based on their readings. Who read/summarized which core reading was up to the students. The portfolio submission was due 24 hours before the seminar session (to be submitted via email to the course leader). It contained a 400–600 summary of each core reading plus a 300-word response to the four questions in the form of a study group report. As a result of the study group assignment, students were well prepared at the seminar session as they had done some of the readings and discussed the answers to the seminar questions. This allowed also the shyer students to participate actively as their responses were pre-approved by their peers, which means that they had a higher level of confidence that the response would advance the class discussion. Students also tended to sit together with the other members of their study groups and in many cases formed friendships with their peer group. The level of attendance was improved as there was a positive incentive to attend, given the good level of preparation (and, in turn, less of a disincentive due to lack of preparation and fear of being ‘called out’ or

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being embarrassed) and the quality of participation and thus the discussion, as students attended prepared. Study Group 5: The Never Have-Beens The most common study group is the one that never existed in the first place. In most courses, teachers/course leaders do not specifically encourage students to form study groups. Even when they do, most students do not feel motivated to make the effort of forming a study group that is committed and reliable. The tendency is to work alone but with a varied degree of success. Especially where the expectation that core readings have been read and students attend class (only if they are) prepared is high, this can result in considerable pressure on individual students to work through a high number and volume of class readings. This challenge is compounded if students have not learned ‘how to’ read an academic text, i.e., scan for the relevant information instead of reading the full article and trying to digest every aspect of information. Even following a high level of motivation at the beginning of the semester, the tendency among students is to reduce their effort in digesting or even summarizing all core readings when working on their own. This likely results in fewer contributions to the class discussion, or a lower quality of discussion, as students have not done the reading or cannot recall key aspects of it. Where there is a social loss of face associated with not being prepared for seminars, this can also be a major motivation to not attend the seminar. Come exam preparation time, the level or anxiety increases as the reading that has not been done during term time needs to be done within an even shorter time frame, again resulting in likely poorer exam performance or a reduced ability to draw on different parts of the course, in the case of essays. This is of course not true for all students. Some, especially the introverted, highly motivated, and highly competitive students, may see study groups as a distraction and potential free-riding on their efforts and high-quality work. As a consequence, they prefer to work alone.

Integrating Study Groups into the Course When it comes to integrating study groups into courses guided by traditional teaching activities such as lectures and seminars, the framework conditions need to be considered to determine what is feasible. There are broadly two options: first, the teacher and/or course leader encourages

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students to form study groups at the beginning of the course and offers some advice on how these could be set up, structured, and what the benefits of working in a study group are. Afterwards, it is up to the students to form and join a study group, or not. The second option is to integrate study groups into the course design and thus offer a more structured and managed approach to study groups. This reduces student’s choice whether they want to be part of a study group or not as it is a compulsory aspect of the course, but it also enables students to have a similar study experience and supports students who would be struggling to find a study group otherwise. As illustrated in the example of Study Group 4, the structured approach of integrating study groups into course assessment allows offering students incentives in the form of marks and participation credit. This highly depends on the university’s/department’s assessment rules and the extent to which the teacher has ownership of the course. In most cases, this requires a careful redesign of existing courses or could be integrated into a new course. An ideal share of the mark would be between 10% and 30%, with 20% offering a feasible avenue. In some departments, there are thresholds that require moderation and/or second marking. Given that the study group mark is most feasible as an ‘all or nothing’/‘yes or no’ mark, i.e., those who submit a report of acceptable quality receive a high mark, whereas those who do not submit their portfolio receive a very low or failing mark. This may be 0% versus 100%, or, more likely, within the UK marking frame 30% versus 80%. Keeping this de facto participation mark at a low percentage has the advantage that students who submit their portfolio reports can improve their overall mark or reduce it if they don’t submit, it is of minor consequence to the overall mark with regard to potentially distorting it towards an unrealistically high mark. The regular submission of a study group portfolio also allows the teacher to monitor the progress of the groups and to follow up on missed or incomplete submissions, as these may indicate problems within the study group. A major consideration is how the study groups are set up. In both managed and unmanaged approaches, the starting point would be to let students self-select into study groups. This allows students to find like-minded peers with similar personalities and/or working approaches and select a group that makes them feel most at ease. This may be within their ethnic/ linguistic group with other students from their country of origin, a same-­ gender group where working with the opposite gender is a challenge from a cultural or religious perspective, or with existing friends from previous

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years of study or other courses. If the setting up of the study group is left to the students, they are most likely to self-select into a homogenous group. The self-selection could be supplemented by encouraging the students who have not yet found a study group to contact the teacher/course leader to assign them to a group. This could be ‘filling up’ existing groups that only have, e.g., 3 members where 4 are preferred, or forming new additional groups. This may help such students to also form new friendships, counter loneliness within and beyond the course, and engage with students they might not have engaged with otherwise and who come from different cultural, ethnic or socio-economic backgrounds. Depending on the course leaders’ objectives and framework conditions, there is also the option of strategically assigning students to study groups especially where the objective is to have heterogenous groups to allow students to benefit from a variety of perspectives based on lived experience, gender, ethnic origins, and other characteristics. This may also be in the form of, e.g., requiring a gender balance of self-assigned groups or asking students to work together with someone who is not in their circle of friends, or from a different country. Some programs have a high number of students from the same country/ethnicity who tend to choose to work together most of the time with little integration with other students. Here it may be beneficial to, for example, encourage students to form internationally mixed study groups to allow all to improve their English/the language of instruction and to better integrate everyone into the seminar group/course community. A central role of the teacher/course leader is to provide clear expectations and instructions of the expected activities of the study groups. There also needs to be a clear understanding how group marks are arrived at and when/how these are converted into individual marks (Sharp, 2006). This includes how and how often they are expected to meet, for how long, the responsibilities of each group member such as having read and summarized half or one academic article and having shared the summary with the group a certain amount of time before the meeting, and what they are expected to discuss at the meeting. It is also important to highlight the benefits of the study groups and that these will only emerge if everyone in the group is committed to play their part and, e.g., share high-quality summaries given that the other students rely on the summary. It is also useful to provide guidelines on how an article could/should be summarized beyond copy-and-pasting the abstract. These clear guidelines will help the group to hold each other accountable. Together with the

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incentive of offering course credit and the disincentive of reduced marks if the study group does not submit its portfolio regularly, these clear guidelines may help students to mirror Study Group 1 or 4 instead of Study Group 2 or 5.

Advantages of Study Groups Study groups offer a number of advantages that have a high potential to help students better develop a growth mindset due to the additional learning loop provided by the study group meeting. The study group meeting motivates students to engage with their assigned reading more deeply and with the added responsibility—and thus social reward and accountability—of making a summary that their peers will rely on. As there is also a high level of reliance on the other students and their good preparation, there is a high motivation to attend the study group meeting to benefit from the summaries and especially to participate actively in the discussion around the assigned seminar questions. This foreshadows the actual seminar session and thus offers the additional learning loop when students reflect on their study group meeting in preparation for the actual seminar session. As detailed above, the study group discussion encourages all study group members to draw on their lived experiences and otherwise unique perspectives, which allows the other students to reflect on these and subsequently reconsider their own points of view. Such collaborative learning through dialogue (Echeverri Sucerquia & Pérez Restrepo, 2014) may result in constructivist learning that can be transformative as it widens students’ perspectives and may form new beliefs and possibly even values, given the broader perspective. This was especially the case for Study Group 1, which benefitted from a broad diversity and subsequently allowed all group members to re-examine their own beliefs. It also offers a safe space to make mistakes while the student-led learning offers a maximum of agency. Especially non-native speakers, introverted students, first generation students, or students with mental health challenges, among others, may suffer from anxiety to raise their hand in a lecture or class and respond to a teacher’s question if they are second-­ guessing if their response is relevant or ‘correct’, given their worry of losing face or embarrassing themselves in front of the lecture/seminar group. Therefore, study groups can be a major Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion support instrument as they help reduce such anxiety. Students can explore and develop their answers within a safe space and small peer-group that

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continuously works together, which means that all group members develop and understand that nobody is perfect and everybody makes mistakes. The group also helps to reassure anxious students as they gain a higher level of confidence that their response is appropriate. The group support may further help to improve confidence of speaking in front of groups and increase student’s level of comfort and acceptance that they can learn from mistakes—which is the most important aspect of a growth mindset. Only when reflecting on mistakes or imperfections, we can improve in the future (Dweck, 2017). The time saving may lead to higher effectiveness and less time spent studying while actually achieving higher retention of the study materials due to engaging with different aspects of factual and experiential learning. Humans learn better when they are able to triangulate information from different modes of input, and some modes result in higher retention than others. Reading something allows for an average retention of 10%, while listening to a lecture results in remembering 20%. If we experience something, e.g., through a simulation, we tend to remember 70%. The most remarkable retention of 90% comes from teaching and explaining something to someone else (Johnson, 2016). This is because it requires engagement with higher-level cognitive activities as well as reading/hearing/ experiencing, digesting the information, understanding it, and then explaining it in one’s own words to others, and then likely responding to clarification questions, or rephrasing the original content. Study groups require students to engage in teaching-related activities and thus result in a higher level of retention as they require students to first understand concepts before they can explain them to their peers. Especially Study Groups 1, 3, and 4 benefitted from this in their study group and exam preparation group meetings. The friendships formed through regular meetings in a small group have the potential to address loneliness, especially among post-Covid cohorts who spent part of their secondary or tertiary education isolated in a home/ online learning environment with limited opportunities of the ‘typical’ in-­ person university and coming-of-age experience. But even before  the Covid  pandemic it was common that a good number of undergraduate students went through their degree program without forming substantive friendships with their peers in their program or even without knowing a significant number of them by name. Especially when they are living alone or with family, there is limited opportunity to form friendships through participation in student societies or living in a student house/flat-share.

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Caring responsibilities for children and/or elderly/disabled family members can also be a major barrier to participation in ‘typical’ student networking activities. A structured and expected interaction with a study group provides the social justification and opportunity to form friendships and combat isolation from the student community, and can also improve overall academic performance (Gaudet et  al., 2010). While in-person study group meetings have clear benefits that in most cases outweigh online meetings, meeting online at a dedicated time is a good alternative if it becomes necessary to accommodate health or equality, diversity, and inclusion concerns.

Addressing Challenges Asking students to self-organize in study groups for or without course credit can also bring a number of challenges. There may be student resistance due to the required time commitment and a personal preference to work alone such as in the case of Study Group 5. This can be addressed by offering incentives to work in study groups such as the model followed by Study Group 4 with course credit and clear guidelines offered by the course leader on how the groups should meet and what they are expected to do. This may also help in the case of limited accountability of individuals to the group, resulting in implicitly tacit consensus to ‘let things slip’ and transform into a social club that focuses on elements of everyday life, but less on the content of the course such as with Study Group 2. Challenges can emerge from study groups. There are clear benefits from diverse groups with regard to facilitating integration, language learning and improving intercultural understanding; however, there are also potential challenges (Shaw, 2004). These may include different cultural norms and expectations, especially if they remain implicit and can result in misunderstandings among group members. The group may also encounter disagreements between certain group members due to clashing personalities. In the case of an unmoderated model such as Study Groups 1, 2, or 3, addressing the challenges is up to the group members in the first instance, while the course leader when suggesting the use of study groups should clarify that students can approach them with any challenges they encounter and that the course leader will seek to support the students by addressing these challenges. This is especially important in the case of a moderated/embedded approach such as with Study Group 4 and where the assignment has been set or approved by the course leader. It is very

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important to remind students of their obligations and to encourage those unhappy with their study group to meet with the teacher/course leader to seek a solution, such as changing to a different group or removing the student with unacceptable behavior from the group (and, if appropriate/ applicable, explore disciplinary procedures in consultation with the program director/director of teaching). A potential conflict can also emerge from free-riding of some group members, which places an unfair burden on the group members motivated to receive a good mark. As a consequence, they might be doing more than their fair share of the work and allow other member(s) to free-ride. Also, the course leader/teacher at the beginning and, if necessary, throughout the course, should clarify that this is unacceptable behavior and encourage students to bring such behavior to the teachers’/course leaders’ attention. Then there is also the option to assign individual marks instead of a group mark, more clearly reflecting the student’s individual contributions (Sharp, 2006).

Conclusion This chapter examined the advantages and challenges of integrating study groups into course design. This can happen voluntarily by encouraging students to form study groups and offering advice on how study groups can be organized most effectively. Alternatively, study groups can be included into the assessment by, for example, offering a small percentage of the course mark for completed group assignments such as summaries of the core readings/literature and answering related questions in a study group meeting including a subsequent report that summarizes the discussion. This study group report could be submitted to the seminar teacher one day before the seminar, which has the advantage that the quality of the group discussion improves as a certain level of preparation is ensured. The chapter outlined advantages of study groups. These include a better retention of facts/knowledge through teaching and explaining, which requires the student to understand the knowledge conveyed through the readings. This increases the level of retention to 80–90% as opposed to only 10–20% when simply reading a text (Biggs, 1996; Johnson, 2016). Second, students develop friendships that can last for years or even decades as their professional paths develop, and they also benefit from social contact as well as the opportunity to discuss the knowledge in more detail. It also increases student’s accountability as there are direct social rewards for reading the literature and preparing a good summary/report. Third, study

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groups can reduce student’s feeling of being overwhelmed with the reading list and expand their ability to read additional literature through sharing summaries. Fourth, it can provide additional support for students with special needs and increase confidence of quiet/shy students. Finally, if there is an exam as part of the assessment, study group reports and summaries of the literature can facilitate exam preparation. There are also a number of challenges around study groups. These include student resistance due to the additional time commitment of face-­ to-­face or online meetings with the study group. Furthermore, there is the potential for conflict within the study group due to different work ethics, clashing personalities, divergent value systems, gender roles, and expectations. The chapter proceeded to reflect on how these challenges could be addressed. For example, study groups could be embedded into the course design by offering marks/credits (e.g., 20% of the overall mark) for completing study group reports consisting of 1-page reading summaries and group answers to lecture/seminar questions. Depending on the maturity of the students (undergraduate vs. Master students, how well students know each other) there are also different considerations around letting students self-select into study groups, which allows them to work with their friends and thus reduces potential for conflict, or a random assignment into study groups that allows the teacher to take into consideration diversity and allows for forming new friendships, however the potential for conflict is also higher. Overall, study groups can be a useful addition to the more traditional lecture and seminar-based activities within a course, but require careful planning, moderation, and integration with the other teaching activities to ensure inclusiveness and meeting equality and diversity considerations.

References Biggs, J. (1996). Enhancing Teaching through Constructive Alignment. Higher Education, 32(3), 347–364. Dweck, C. (2017). Mindset. Changing the Way You Think to Fulfil Your Potential. Random House. Echeverri Sucerquia, P., & Pérez Restrepo, S. (2014). Making Sense of Critical Pedagogy in L2 Education Through a Collaborative Study Group. Profile Issues in Teachers’ Professional Development, 16(2), 171–184.

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Gaudet, A. D., Ramer, L. M., Nakonechny, J., Cragg, J. J., & Ramer, M. S. (2010). Small-Group Learning in an Upper-Level University Biology Class Enhances Academic Performance and Student Attitudes Toward Group Work. Public Library of Science One, 5, 1–9. Hoover, J. D., Giambatista, R. C., Sorenson, R. L., & Bommer, W. H. (2010). Assessing the Effectiveness of Whole Person Learning Pedagogy in Skill Acquisition. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 9, 192–203. Hughes, R. L., & Jones, S. K. (2011). Developing and Assessing College Student Teamwork Skills. New Directions for Institutional Research, 149, 53–64. Johnson, M. (2016). Communicating Politics: Using Active Learning to Demonstrate the Value of the Discipline. British Journal of Educational Studies, 64, 315–335. Nachlieli, T. (2011). Co-facilitation of Study Groups Around Animated Scenes: The Discourse of a Moderator and a Researcher. ZDM Mathematics Education, 43, 53–64. Rafferty, P.  D. (2013). The Evaluation of MBA Group Work: A Case Study of Graduate Student Experiences and Perceptions of Positive Group Work Outcomes. Journal of Education for Business, 88(1), 43–50. Rietig, K. (2019). Leveraging the Power of Learning for Effective Climate Governance. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 21(3), 228–241. Rietig, K. (2021). Learning in Governance: Climate Policy Integration in the European Union. MIT Press. Rietig, K., & Perkins, R. (2018). Does Learning Matter for Policy Outcomes? The Case of Integrating Climate Finance into the EU Budget. Journal of European Public Policy, 25(4), 487–505. Sharp, S. (2006). Deriving Individual Student Marks from a Tutor’s Assessment of Group Work. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 31, 329–343. Shaw, J. B. (2004). A Fair Go for All? The Impact of Intra-group Diversity and Diversity-Management Skills on Student Experiences and Outcomes in Team-­ Based Class Projects. Journal of Management Education, 28, 139–169. Smith, G.  G., Sorensen, C., Gump, A., Heindel, A.  J., Caris, M., & Martinez, C. D. (2011). Overcoming Student Resistance to Group Work: Online Versus Face-to-Face. The Internet and Higher Education, 14, 121–128. Stewart, M., Stott, T., & Nuttall, A.-M. (2016). Study Goals and Procrastination Tendencies at Different Stages of the Undergraduate Degree. Studies in Higher Education, 41(11), 2028–2043. Theys, S., & Rietig, K. (2020). Pathways of Influence for Small States: Why Bhutan Succeeds in Influencing Global Sustainability Governance. International Affairs, 96(6), 1603–1622.

CHAPTER 7

Simulations

Simulations are role-playing exercises where students take on the roles of diplomats, government representatives, managers, consultants, lawyers, judges, civil society actors and others in an experiential learning focused exercise (Kolb, 1984; Kolb & Kolb, 2005) that seeks to reconstruct professional settings as realistically as possible (Costin et  al., 2017). They simulate the negotiation of legislation or international agreements, e.g., as Model United Nations (Hammond & Albert, 2019), Model European Union (Kaunert, 2009) or Model North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Dunn, 2019).1 Simulations are increasingly recognized and evaluated as a valuable experiential learning approach in addition to lectures and other more traditional forms of teaching and learning (Hamann & Hamenstädt, 2021) and are subsequently getting integrated into courses (Obendorf & Randerson, 2013). The purpose of these simulations is to allow students to develop relevant skills such as debating, public speaking, working in teams (Hughes & Jones, 2011), targeted research, and thinking on ‘their feet’, and, through experience, gain a deeper appreciation for the dynamics of, e.g., international negotiations, stakeholder dialogues, management 1  Frequently, Model United Nations simulate a broad range of committees that may or may not belong to the UN system and can also include government cabinet crisis simulations, NATO, and the European Parliament or Council. Thus, the term ‘Model United Nations’ (MUN) is used as a summary term to include this wide diversity of committees simulated.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Rietig, Innovative Social Sciences Teaching and Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41452-7_7

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board decision-making, and law trials (Engel et  al., 2017). Evaluations and pedagogic research demonstrated that simulations support student learning and offer a wealth of reflections on implementing simulations (Bradberry & De Maio, 2019). Simulations, especially Model United Nations (MUNs), can be successfully integrated into the curriculum while fostering a personal growth mindset among students (Dweck, 2017). This can be achieved through a course design that focuses on practice, feedback, and increasing the complexity over time. This chapter focuses on three steppingstones of short simulations, 1–2-day simulations, and week-­ long external simulations.2 The first part of this chapter explores the benefits and challenges of simulations and why they can be a useful learning tool in the curriculum. The second part offers an overview of the key stages of most simulations, and the third part offers insights into the conceptual and practical considerations of running simulations on a small, medium, and larger scale within a course. Small-scale simulations could be part of 1-hour seminars. Medium-scale simulations are stand-alone workshops between 3–5 hours and 2 days and offer a good first insight for students. Large-scale simulations can be an advanced version in the form of external conferences and 2  This chapter draws on my own experience with using simulations in my teaching in addition to the academic literature on the subject. I integrated MUNs into the course curriculum after participating in dozens of university-level MUNs as delegate, head delegate and faculty advisor during my time as undergraduate student at the Ludwig Maximilian University Munich. I then founded an educational NGO (Model United Nations Association Munich) that since 2008 has prepared over 300 students to participate in such MUNs, including National Model United Nations in New York (with over 5000 student delegates participating) and Harvard World Model United Nations, which takes place in a different location across the world each year and is widely considered as the world championship in universitylevel diplomacy and debating. In 2011, my delegation was placed in the top-10 at Harvard WorldMUN. I also started and, for 3 years organized, an annual international MUN conference with over 300 student participants (IsarMUN). IsarMUN together with attendance at another national-level MUN was integrated into a 10-month preparation course for attendance at NMUN or Harvard WorldMUN. In addition to such long preparation courses, I also integrated smaller scale MUNs into my own courses on International Organization & Diplomacy (see chapter 3) and Environmental Governance & Policy. Both are final year undergraduate courses at Newcastle University and include two short 1-hour simulations, a 2-hour public speaking training in a large lecture theater, student presentations, and a 3-hour simulation of an environmental negotiation (Environmental Governance & Policy) as well as a 2-day simulation of a United Nations or European Union decision-making body discussing two topics of current interest such as the Human Rights Council, the UN General Assembly or the European Parliament (International Organizations & Diplomacy).

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competitions such as the Harvard World Model United Nations (WorldMUN) or the National Model United Nations (NMUN) conference, two simulations that realistically mirror decision-making in United Nations negotiations with thousands of student participants who, often as a delegation of 5–20 students, represent one country in different United Nations committees such as the Security Council or the General Assembly, discussing and negotiating solutions to pressing global problems. A central element of this experiential learning approach is to provide students with feedback cycles in which they can reflect on their experience (Kolb, 1984) and draw lessons for their next participation in a simulation, given that strong performance requires a certain degree of experience and familiarity with negotiation/debating strategies. This is where the personal growth mindset (Dweck, 2017) gets further developed and strengthened as students reflect on their experiences to date, receive feedback, and strive to improve their performance in the next simulation. This in turn allows them to transfer their acquired skills to similar professional settings that require negotiation acumen, debating skills, public speaking, research skills, and the ability to develop solutions to specific and complex problems.

Benefits and Challenges of Simulations There are six key benefits associated with simulations. First, they allow students to fully immerse themselves in decision-making processes and better understand their dynamics, opportunities and challenges. Second, they improve student’s academic performance and factual/knowledge-­ based learning (Bradberry & De Maio, 2019). Third, they offer the opportunity to further strengthen student’s personal growth mindset (Dweck, 2017), especially if a gradual approach is adopted working up from shorter internal to longer external simulations. Fourth, they are also a fun activity—most students thoroughly enjoy them while they increase student’s interest in the subject (Clark et  al., 2017). Fifth, they are an excellent approach to build employability-related skills, preparing students for careers in diplomacy, government and international organizations, but also in any professional context that requires negotiation or the representation of interests, including in business and law (Engel et  al., 2017). Central employability-related skills include negotiation strategies, research skills, presentation skills, public speaking, teamwork, and networking in addition to the topic-based expertise necessary to be able to negotiate a solution to a current societal problem (Quinn & Goody, 2019). Larger

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external MUNs are usually open to interested students from any discipline, which means they can also be beneficial to gain additional non-­ degree related experience in international negotiations and open routes into diplomacy, international organizations, and government for students from across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Sixth, they can have positive medium-to-long term career impacts. Students who participated in such experiential learning were found to be more likely to graduate faster, succeed in getting a postgraduate degree, and have more success in securing employment as well as advancing in their career due to the employability skills developed, the teamwork, camaraderie, and networking with potential mentors, as well as the related work ethic/growth mindset (Bradberry & De Maio, 2019). For these benefits to emerge, a number of challenges with regard to organizing simulations need to be addressed by the teacher. Simulations are certainly more time intensive and require more effort than the average lecture or seminar (Usherwood, 2015), and to be successful the teacher needs to also adopt a growth mindset and continuously reflect on how the preparation and implementation of the simulation can be improved. Further challenges include understanding the dynamics of the negotiation process and planning for contingencies, especially with regard to time-­ keeping and ensuring students get through the key stages of the negotiation/decision-making process within the available time. With growing experience in organizing and running MUNs, students benefit from smooth running of the negotiations and time-keeping. Especially guiding students who have never done or seen a simulation such as MUNs toward an experience that fulfills set learning objectives and outcomes requires practice and experience. This is associated with certain barriers and start-up costs for the teacher (Usherwood, 2015). Thus, it may prove beneficial to shadow and observe other teachers using MUNs or other simulations in their teaching and, if possible, to attend one of the smaller (or larger) MUNs as observer, in addition to using online-based material such as YouTube videos and published reflections on organizing MUNs and other simulations (Pallister, 2015). The teacher chairing a simulation usually oversees the committee and needs to clearly explain the rules of procedure (e.g., who is allowed to speak when, how the mode of negotiation can be changed) to the students in a manner that is easy to understand and intuitive. Ideally, this is done while doing a simulation and providing students with clues to what motion they are expected to bring in at certain points in time. Once students are

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more familiar and experienced with the rules of procedure, they bring in these motions and can also start to use them strategically to further their countries’ interest. The teacher needs to plan the simulation and make judgements if particular motions introduced by students fit with the overall time plan (e.g., the length of informal sessions, giving guidance on by when the chair expects draft resolutions to be submitted), and suggest adjustments accordingly. This is important to meet the planned learning objectives, which can include the application of theories, better understanding the challenges of negotiations, strategies for finding compromise solutions, writing of resolutions/texts that fit the form of international/ national law/legislation, teamwork, and leadership skills.

Planning, Preparation, Running the Simulation, and Reflection Successful simulations require a certain amount of planning by the teacher/person who will be chairing the simulation. The first step is to define the learning objectives and desired learning outcomes for the simulation. These determine the scope, breadth, and depth of the simulation and the required preparation (Shaw & Switky, 2018). Model United Nations and Model European Union simulations (Guasti et al., 2015; Kröger, 2018) follow the negotiation and decision-making process with the objective of agreeing on a solution to the societal, security, economic, environmental or other challenge under discussion. Each student takes on the role of a decision-maker such as a diplomat negotiating on behalf of a country in a decision-making body such as the UN Security Council or the European Council (Brunazzo & Settembri, 2015). This decision-making body is chaired by either the teacher or an experienced student and guided by pre-set rules of procedure. Negotiation Venue A number of practical considerations are important, such as working with the university’s timetabling team well in advance to secure an appropriate room. Small and medium-sized committees ideally allow students to face each other in a horseshoe/round table setting. If the committee approaches a certain size (usually above 40 students), this may not be possible and rows of tables become the preferred option. The negotiation room needs

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enough space to allow for gatherings of smaller negotiation groups, thus a lecture theatre with fixed seats may be the least favored option (if unavoidable, adjacent seminar rooms for breakout groups should be provided).  Tables/chairs that can be freely arranged with short rows that allow individual students to get up/return to their seats would be ideal. This is particularly important as they may need to get up to access a microphone/speak from the front of the room in a larger setting. Country/Role Assignments Depending on the learning objectives/outcomes and associated length of the negotiations, it may be appropriate to assign students roles/countries or allow them some choice/preferences. In short simulations with a focus on introducing students to simulations and communication/discussion, as well as if all students are inexperienced with simulations, random assignments are appropriate. In longer simulations with a research component and a varying level of prior experience, it may be beneficial to identify key roles that require students to stay in character, prepare well, and assume leadership roles with frequent interventions through speaking or proposing negotiation text. These roles should ideally be assigned to students with some prior experience in MUNs or who have been demonstrating their abilities to successfully fulfill these roles prior in the course. Such roles can be assigned directly, or as is common practice, by allowing students to express 3 country/role preferences while making clear that they may also be assigned another role, i.e., there is no guarantee or right to a particular role. Students should also be advised that they should not all submit preferences for the most popular roles (e.g., the United States, China, or Russia in the Security Council), but also provide at least two preferences for less popular roles. This allows to assign roles to students (e.g., using an Excel spreadsheet with names and role preferences) where most students receive one of their preferences and a smaller number of students receives a country assignment that may be similar in  terms of geography/culture/political positions. Position Paper Depending on the length of the simulation and its purpose/learning outcomes and the framework conditions of the course, students can be provided with a briefing on their countries’ position on the topic. This is

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common for 1–3-hour simulations of an introductory nature that are focused on building negotiation or discussion skills. Usually, students are expected to prepare for their role through their own research on the negotiation topic and the countries’ position on it. This is common for multi-­ hour or multi-day simulations. NMUN and Harvard WorldMUN, for example, provide a ca. 10-page background briefing paper as introduction to the topic under discussion with sources as a starting point for student’s individual research. Providing students with briefings is certainly time-­ consuming for the teacher, but can be useful as a starting point. Increasingly, there are sources available online that published countries’ position papers and background guides on topics (e.g., those by NMUN, WorldMUN, and others). When doing simulations becomes an established practice of one’s teaching, it may be useful to archive previous year’s position papers that were researched by students for the multi-hour or one-day simulations and to use these as briefing papers for introductory one-hour simulations in a following academic year. This has the added benefit that students see good-quality position papers early on in the course and know what is expected of them when it comes to researching and writing their own position paper for the longer simulation. Training and ‘Working Up’ to Larger MUNs With a central learning objective being experiential learning and developing negotiation skills, it would be desirable that students actively participate in the negotiations and stay in character with their assigned role. It is therefore important to allow students the time and a safe space to develop their public speaking skills (Quinn & Goody, 2019), increase their confidence to talk in front of a (larger) audience, and hone their research skills so that they can enjoy the simulation and do well. Simulations especially offer personal development opportunities to less extroverted or confident students, but it is important to offer a safe space for this development. This means introducing students to the ‘personal growth mindset’ approach early on in the course and continuously emphasizing the importance of practice, trying again and improving based on reflection from earlier experiences. It is therefore important to help students to get used to speaking in front of a larger audience, e.g., through public speaking training in an (empty) larger lecture theatre with their peers as audience or participating in smaller, group-internal 1–3-hour simulations before embarking on longer group-internal simulations with more complex

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negotiation topics and ultimately meeting other students in national or international simulations. Especially where diplomacy awards are involved, experienced students can be highly competitive (e.g., NMUN in New York), which necessitates building confidence, team spirit, and communicating expectations to the students beforehand. During the Simulation The immediate outcome of a MUN simulation is that student delegates negotiate a written solution (e.g., a resolution) to the topic on the agenda with agreed action points to be taken in the future. Following negotiations on setting the agenda, if two or more topics have been pre-­determined and delegates have decided which topic shall be discussed first, the chair opens a speaking list for delegates to outline their countries’ position on the topic. Once most positions have been heard and common interests for coalitions identified, the committee moves toward informal negotiations. This allows delegates to stand up and sit in small groups with potential coalition partners/other countries who share their interests and begin working on a draft resolution with suggested action points. Depending on the required decision-making majority of the committee, groups then need to begin convincing other groups of the merits of their proposal and seek to merge to a smaller number of draft resolutions capable of receiving the necessary majority. In this phase, formal sessions, where delegates present their groups’ proposals and discuss these proposals, alternate with informal sessions giving delegates the opportunity to merge proposals, make changes (delete controversial points or make amendments) and convince other countries/groups to support the proposals. Once negotiations and discussions have concluded and the chair has approved (i.e., checked for formal errors) and distributed the draft resolutions, countries bring in a procedural motion to move to the voting procedure. In the voting procedure, the draft resolutions are read out loud/ delegates are given the opportunity to read them and then different options for voting are pursued/decided upon through procedural (i.e., 50% majority) votes. These usually include roll call votes, simple votes through raising country placards, or a more elaborate procedure around voting clause-by-clause and bringing in amendments to ‘rescue’ draft resolutions that would overall attract a majority, but contain contentious clauses or allow for a late merging of draft resolutions with similar content.

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Depending on the depth of delegate’s preparation, the size of the committee, the negotiation management skills of the chair and delegates’ familiarity with the rules of procedure, such a negotiation cycle can last anywhere between one hour (in abbreviated and simplified form) to five full days, with 1–2 days being a realistic time frame. Element of Reflection The key difference between integrating simulations such as MUNs into the curriculum and MUNs organized by students is the element of reflection to ensure that the simulation links to the learning objectives. This allows achieving the learning outcomes and helps students to further their growth mindset by reflecting on the experiences to determine where they met the learning objectives and where they could improve their performance at the next simulation. It is thus important to set aside time after the simulation, either directly afterward, or in the next seminar session for reflection. Key questions to ask students would be how they liked the simulation, and then enter into a conversation about the challenges they faced, what went well, what surprised them, what they enjoyed, to which extent their interest in the subject increased (Clark et  al., 2017). The responses provide valuable opportunities to link to the learning objectives, e.g., what aspects of their experience match/do not match with the expectations provided by particular international relations theories (Engel et al., 2017), what strategies proved to be successful, how they could change their negotiation tactics to increase their success in influencing the resolution text or gain/maintain leadership of a negotiation group (Pallister, 2015). This reflection also offers the opportunity to link assessments with the simulation experiential learning by asking students to reflect on particular aspects of the negotiation experience, e.g., in an essay. Such a debriefing, in addition to the simulation, is the most effective approach for knowledge retention when assessed 3  months afterward (Levin-­ Banchik, 2018).

The Simulation Itself MUNs and Other Simulations in 1–2-Hour Seminars This is the shortest time frame for a simulation. It can be used for two purposes—as a stand-alone simulation (e.g., as central activity of a seminar

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session) and as a first introductory element for a longer MUN. This is also the most difficult option to teach that requires strong guidance by the teacher/chair, briefing material provided to the students beforehand such as their country’s position, and a clear learning objective for the session. Usually, the learning objective would focus on growth mindset advancing aspects, such as gaining experience first in what MUNs are and how they work to then perform well at larger MUNs, making early attempts at applying the rules of procedure as an entry point toward negotiation strategy and tactics, and building confidence in public speaking. These 1–2-hour seminar simulations are also easiest to integrate into existing courses as they fit within the usual allocated time for a seminar. They also might be split over two or more seminars. For example, at the Politics and Public Policy department of De Montfort University Leicester, I taught and was course leader for a course on Managing the Environment, which had approximately 100 students enrolled with over 80% business students. Part of the assessment were two-weekly study group reports containing summaries of the readings and reading-based responses to pre-­ set questions. For a session on how non-national actors such as NGOs and civil society groups influence environmental policymaking, I set up a seminar/1-hour long simulation on a stakeholder forum discussing solutions to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Two weeks prior to the simulation, the five study groups of four students were assigned a role to represent the US government, the local government, Greenpeace, the oil company BP and affected citizens/the local community. The study group assignment for each team was to research their actors’ position based on the core/ additional readings. They were asked to prepare an opening statement and four points they would like to achieve in the discussion/negotiation. In the one-hour seminar session, students were asked to sit in their study group/team representing their assigned role and given a placard stating the role. The negotiations opened with a short welcome and introduction by me as the chair setting the scene. I then invited each team to give their 1–2-minute opening statement while reminding them to carefully listen to each other’s position and to directly respond to it during the formal debate (first 15 minutes). I then opened the floor for a debate among the five teams to respond to each other’s opening statements and to introduce their four key points to address the oil spill crisis (10–15 minutes), encouraging students to take turns so that everyone in the team had the opportunity to speak. I then asked them to move toward an informal debate and negotiate a resolution on the way forward to address the crisis, handing out

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whiteboard markers and asking them to write their proposed solutions on the whiteboard (15 minutes). Afterward, I moderated a voting session asking them to briefly present their points and then taking a vote on each proposed point. Some points received a majority, some failed to receive a majority. Those points that did receive a majority became part of the negotiated stakeholder agreement (10 minutes). As preparation for the next session, I asked students to write a 150–200-word reflection on their experiences in the simulation and how they fit/do not fit with the assigned core reading on stakeholder dialogues/deliberative processes, especially the factors that determine successful resolutions to societal conflict situations. In the following seminar session, I dedicated 30 minutes to the group discussion after inviting each student to share their reflections. If two seminar hours are available, this reflection can form the final 30 minutes of the session, while dedicating 10 more minutes to the negotiation phase and allowing a formal presentation and discussion of 10 minutes on the proposed solutions. The most common approach in seminars is to not have study groups— this would mean that the seminar leader could either ask students to prepare their role’s position for the seminar, or this could be given to students as a briefing from the seminar leader (potentially re-using strong student submissions from earlier years). Another option would be to assign students individual roles instead of group roles, with or without expectation to research their role/be provided with a position paper for their role. This depends on the preparation time available to the seminar leader, the expectations/prior knowledge of students and the learning outcomes, i.e., if the seminar session is more focused on topic-related knowledge or on the negotiation process, or at a minimum teambuilding and public speaking/debating skill development. Half-Day up to 2 Day MUNs as Part of a Course Integrating MUNs or other simulations into a course can allow for a focused half-day up to 2-day internal simulation if the course is designed accordingly. This depends on the university’s and department’s regulations and the support/cooperation of the timetabling service. I integrated a half-day MUN on an environmental topic such as negotiations on the implementation of an aspect of the Paris Agreement on climate change into my final year undergraduate course on Environmental Governance and Policy at Newcastle University, as well as a two-day MUN into my final year undergraduate course on International Organizations and

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Diplomacy at Newcastle University. This was approved by the board of studies as part of the courses and contact hours, and requires early annual co-ordination with the central university timetabling department to minimize clashes with student’s timetables/schedules. The afternoon MUN was scheduled for a Friday afternoon and the two-day MUN for a weekend (Saturday and Sunday—requiring co-ordination with campus security to allow for building access). I scheduled one simulation for all students on the course, i.e., combining three separate seminar groups. Alternatively, a two-day MUN can also be held on two Fridays/Friday afternoons to avoid teaching on the weekend for equality, diversity and inclusion reasons. Part of both courses’ assessment (20%) was the submission of a position paper, including 5 recommendations/action points to address the problem/negotiation topic and active participation in the MUN. This ensured the submission of good quality position papers (that could be reused with student’s permission for introductory 1-hour simulations in the following year) and thus student preparation. The assigned reading for the week was background information on the topic to be discussed and a guide detailing the rules of procedure (e.g., adapted from Harvard WorldMUN or NMUN). Given the time frame, I limited the agenda to one topic. This means that students knew which topic would be discussed and reduced the time required for preparation. All students would also have a basic understanding as to what MUNs are, how they work and what is expected from them based on the introductory 1-hour simulation at the beginning of the semester. I would allow students to submit three preferences for their role assignment, emphasizing that they may get one of those, but they may also get a country with similar characteristics in terms of geography, economic development, or position on the issue. Students received their country assignments one month before the simulation to allow for preparation time and writing of the position paper. The day before the simulation, I would print the country placards (name of the country in large letters on A4 landscape). I would also bring the UN flag from my office to hang from the front of my table. Upon arrival, I would ask students to rearrange the tables and chairs in the room so that they could face each other in a roundtable/horseshoe formation. I welcomed them as course leaders to the simulation and would start by saying ‘now, let’s assume your roles as diplomats representing your assigned country at the United Nations’ and then continue in the formal language and third-person references used by chairs in international negotiations. I would welcome the delegates, explain the rules of procedure briefly, the

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timetable for the negotiations, and set the scene for the negotiations by briefly introducing the topic. Then the five negotiation stages commence: 1. Tour-de-table. The chair should ask every delegate to present their position on the topic (based on the position paper) and emphasize the importance of listening to each other’s statements and taking notes to identify potential coalition partners with similar interests. Depending on the time available and the number of students, this should take up the first hour. If the committee is larger than 60 students, and this is a short half-day simulation, this can also be skipped and integrated into formal debate with a request to present their countries’ position and in a second intervention, the proposed solutions. This would mean that not necessarily all delegates speak—alternatively, the speaking time could be limited to 1 minute instead of 2 minutes. 2. Formal debate. After each delegate has spoken, the chair informs the committee that it would be in order to bring in a motion to open the speakers’ list. Delegates need to vote on every procedure/activity of the committee, which needs to be proposed as a motion and voted upon with in favor/against, but no abstentions possible, and pass with simple/50% majority. Following this motion, the chair should ask that those wishing to speak should raise their placards so that they can be added to the speakers’ list. This speakers’ list is important as it forms the basis for the formal negotiations unless delegates vote to have informal negotiations. After collecting 10–20 countries on the speakers list, the chair should inform the committee that the speakers time is set at 2 minutes with the possibility of shortening/extending it through a motion from the committee. The chair should also inform them that this would be the time to present the prepared 5 points to address the negotiation topic/crisis at hand and to react to each other’s proposals to determine common interests and potential common ground for a resolution. Ideally, every delegate speaks at least once and presents their proposal during this session (unless the committee is very large with over 100 students, e.g., a General Assembly/Parliament committee). Together with Tour-de-Table, this should take up 15–25% of the total available time for the simulation. 3. Informal negotiations. In this phase, the chair should encourage the students to bring in a motion to move toward an informal session and specify the desired time, e.g., 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and 45 minutes. Delegates can bring in more than one motion for different time frames,

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which are then voted upon by the committee in the order in which they were introduced. The first motion to receive a simple majority passes, while the remaining motions are voted upon once the time of the first informal negotiations are over. This results in a series of shorter intervals allowing students to discuss their proposals in smaller groups, identify coalitions, and begin writing a shared draft resolution, usually in the format of UN resolutions with appropriate preliminary and operative clauses (it may be helpful to hand out a summary sheet as a reminder). This phase should take about 30% of the overall time available for the simulation. As the informal negotiations progress and groups of delegates write draft resolutions, it may be useful to move from group to group to monitor their progress and answer any questions they may have. . Presentation and discussion of draft resolutions. After a series of informal 4 negotiation sessions, and once it becomes clear that most groups have finished their draft resolutions, it would be appropriate to entertain motions for time-limited discussions on a defined topic brought in by delegates. For example, a motion for a 10-minute moderated caucus with 1-minute speaking time on the topic of financial aid, moderated by either a country delegate or the chair. The chair can allow a number of different motions to be brought in (up to 5), which can be either such time-limited debates or further informal negotiations. The chair can exercise discretion (with a view to the time available) which motions to entertain and in which direction, but should explain why to the committee if not following the order in which they were brought in and allow delegates to vote on the motions. Overall, it would be appropriate to allow a number of defined topic discussions or informal negotiations if it becomes clear that more time is required to finish a specific task. It may also be appropriate to return to the original speakers’ list within a formal debate to allow the groups to present their draft resolutions, and then to entertain topic-specific debates on contentious issues that may be resolved during such a debate that includes other interest groups than the group that drafted the proposal. If it becomes clear that there is scope for merging draft resolutions, allowing informal negotiations to resume would be appropriate. After such discussions, at least one phase of informal negotiations will be necessary to finalize the draft resolutions with their amendments/deletions/mergers and to submit these draft resolutions to the chair for approval. The chair will read the draft resolutions and provide feedback to the group with regard to correction of formal errors and after one or two rounds of

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corrections approve the draft resolution and assign it a number (in the order in which it was submitted). The chair could also keep an eye on overlaps in content or compatible content and suggest mergers/ amendments to the respective negotiation groups. The overall aim of this stage is that the different draft resolutions are discussed, amended and merged, especially if they are similar in the actions they propose or compatible with regard to overall country interests. This phase should take 30–40% of the time available for the overall simulation. . Voting on the draft resolutions. Once the draft resolutions have been 5 consolidated into proposals that have no significant overlap but rather represent competing approaches to address the topic, it would be appropriate to move toward the voting procedure. This requires a motion from a delegate and a simple majority vote from the committee. Depending on the Rules of Procedure used, this can be a complex undertaking and allow experienced delegates to use advanced tactics around friendly and unfriendly amendments to enter into a more formal process of merging draft resolutions. The NMUN and Harvard WorldMUN Rules of Procedure are especially complex—it may be appropriate to simplify these rules beforehand if they do not form part of the learning objectives and if students are inexperienced or do not proceed to participate in a larger, external MUN. If one of the purposes of the simulation is to prepare students for participation in a larger external MUN, it would be appropriate to use that MUN’s Rules of Procedure and to make it a learning objective for students to understand the complexities and opportunities. If there is no further MUN, simple voting would be appropriate following a phase of pre-voting mergers at the stage of discussing draft resolutions. These simplified voting options would include the option for delegates to move for a 50% majority vote by raising placards on the full draft resolution, a roll-­ call vote on the entire draft resolution where the chair calls upon each country in alphabetical order to ask if they vote in favor, against or abstain, or a clause-by-clause vote (usually by raising placards). Following the decision how the draft resolutions will be voted upon, the vote will commence in the order in which the draft resolutions were originally submitted to the chair for approval. Ideally, one draft resolution passes with a simple/50% majority, while usually one draft resolution fails as it represented a smaller number of countries with particular interests (e.g., the country that caused a conflict and its allies). About 5–10% of the overall simulation time should be allocated to the voting stage.

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Time-keeping is the responsibility of the chair and important to allow all stages of the negotiations to take place. Nothing would be more disappointing to students than if they were not able to vote on their draft resolutions because they ran out of time. This means that the chair needs to keep an eye on the time and encourage students to submit draft resolutions by a certain time, and to reserve at least 10–15 minutes for voting. MUNs as Week-Long Championship in Diplomacy and Debating Some courses are set up as preparation course for participating in a large, external MUN such as NMUN in New York and Harvard WorldMUN at a different location around the world each year, or a Model European Union (for guidance on designing a MUN preparation course and running simulations, see, e.g., Kröger, 2018; Obendorf & Randerson, 2013; Shaw & Switky, 2018). Most of these simulations are organized by a local organizing committee comprising of students and faculty and have a delegation structure, or in some cases students can sign up individually. If they have a delegation structure, each student would represent the same country in a different committee. It is the course leaders’ responsibility to register the delegation and communicate with the organizers, submit country preferences and allocate students into committees once the country and committee assignments are available. Then the focus is on preparation with background research on the country and the topics, and in particular the countries’ position on the different topics. The delegation needs to practice the simulation-specific rules of procedure and gain confidence in their application, and ideally expertise in how they can be used strategically to further the countries’ negotiation objectives. When choosing a MUN, there are several considerations—travel budget (and university support), time of the simulation (ideally toward the end of the semester-long preparation course), and culture/philosophical approach to the MUN.  Some are very competitive with long negotiation schedules such as NMUN, while others strike a balance between focused negotiations and a stronger social element of themed cultural nights/parties such as Harvard WorldMUN. Some are more realistic, while others place less focus on rigorous preparation (this can be the case with smaller/beginner simulations or those with individual participation) or have such a competitive atmosphere that students fall out of their countries’ character in pursuit of an award (e.g., NMUN). Frequently, those students who dominate committees at the larger MUNs are highly experienced having attended

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dozens of previous MUNs and winning diplomacy awards. It is important to manage expectations of students and to emphasize the learning experience as well as the social and networking benefits of the external MUN as the highlight at the end of the preparation course.

Conclusion In this chapter, I set out the key elements to prepare and carry out smaller simulations that fit into existing courses in the form of 1–2-hour simulations and half-day to 2-day internal simulations that can be deliberately included in the course design or an experiential learning aspect of a semester-­ long preparation course for participating in larger external MUNs such as NMUN in New York or Harvard WorldMUN. Simulations can be an enjoyable and fun approach to build student’s employability skills and to support their development of a growth mindset that this focused on continuous improvement and reflection on experiences. The experiential learning aspects of simulations include public speaking, negotiation, and research skills in addition to supporting team building among the students, in addition to improved motivation and academic performance. This helps students to develop a growth mindset (Dweck, 2017) and engage with experiential (Kolb, 1984) and deeper learning approaches with regard to facts, procedures, concepts, and metacognition (Engel et al., 2017), while also increasing student’s interest in the subject (Clark et  al., 2017) and their knowledge retention (Levin-­ Banchik, 2018). Simulations offer a wide range of benefits to students with regard to developing a growth mindset and reflecting on their experiential learning. They support the development of employability skills while also teaching the students about themselves—the experience of participating in a MUN can trigger an emotional roller-coaster between frustration at slow negotiation progress, overcoming nervousness of speaking in front of dozens, potentially hundreds of students (General Assembly committees at NMUN can have up to 390 students with two students representing each country), and the thrill of successful negotiation, having a leading role in drafting a resolution and feeling in charge, and a sense of achievement when sharing one’s successes with the group. Leading such a course requires confidence and leadership skills from the teacher/faculty advisor and an appropriate amount of guidance and mentoring along each step or phase of the journey. Students also report that they highly enjoy the process and

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that this learning approach offers a special experience that allows them to grow personally and discover their strengths and weaknesses, as well as further improve their skills wherever their professional journey may take them.

References Bradberry, L.  A., & De Maio, J. (2019). Learning By Doing: The Long-Term Impact of Experiential Learning Programs on Student Success. Journal of Political Science Education, 15(1), 94–111. Brunazzo, M., & Settembri, P. (2015). Teaching the European Union: A Simulation of Council’s Negotiations. European Political Science, 14(3), 1–14. Clark, N., Van Dyke, G., Loedel, P., Scherpereel, J., & Sobisch, A. (2017). EU Simulations and Engagement: Motivating Greater Interest in European Union Politics. Journal of Political Science Education, 13(2), 152–170. Costin, Y., O’Brien, M. P., & Slattery, D. M. (2017). Using Simulation to Develop Entrepreneurial Skills and Mind-Set: An Exploratory Case Study. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 30(1), 136–145. Dunn, J. P. (2019). A “Model” for Active Learning and Leadership Development: International Model NATO. Journal of Political Science Education, 15(4), 528–534. Dweck, C. (2017). Mindset. Changing the Way You Think to Fulfil Your Potential. Random House. Engel, S., Pallas, J., & Lambert, S. (2017). Model United Nations and Deep Learning: Theoretical and Professional Learning. Journal of Political Science Education, 13(2), 171–184. Guasti, P., Muno, W., & Nieman, A. (2015). Introduction—EU Simulations as a Multi-dimensional Resource: From Teaching and Learning Tool to Research Instrument. European Political Science, 14(3), 205–217. Hamann, K., & Hamenstädt, U. (2021). Empirical Approaches to Understanding Student Learning Outcomes and Teaching Effectiveness in Political Science. European Political Science, 20(3), 393–396. Hammond, A., & Albert, C.  D. (2019). Learning by Experiencing: Improving Student Learning Through a Model United Nations Simulation. Journal of Political Science Education, 16(4), 441–458. Hughes, R. L., & Jones, S. K. (2011). Developing and Assessing College Student Teamwork Skills. New Directions for Institutional Research, 149, 53–64. Kaunert, C. (2009). The European Union simulation: From Problem-Based Learning (PBL) to Student Interest. European Political Science, 8(2), 254–265. Kolb, D. (1984). Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Prentice Hall.

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Kolb, A., & Kolb, D. (2005). Learning Styles and Learning Spaces: Enhancing Experiential Learning in Higher Education. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 4(2), 193–212. Kröger, S. (2018). Realising the Potential of EU Simulations—Practical Guidance for Beginners. European Political Science, 17(2), 161–175. Levin-Banchik, L. (2018). Assessing Knowledge Retention, With and Without Simulations. Journal of Political Science Education, 14(3), 341–359. Obendorf, S., & Randerson, C. (2013). Evaluating the Model United Nations: Diplomatic Simulation as Assessed Undergraduate Coursework. European Political Science, 12(3), 350–364. Pallister, K. (2015). Teaching Globalization and Development through a Simulation. PS: Political Science and Politics, 48(2), 364–367. Quinn, S., & Goody, A. (2019). An Evaluation of a Course Aimed at Reducing Public Speaking Anxiety among University Students. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 31(3), 503–511. Shaw, C.  M., & Switky, B. (2018). Designing and Using Simulations in the International Relations Classroom. Journal of Political Science Education, 14(4), 523–534. Usherwood, S. (2015). Building Resources for Simulations: Challenges and Opportunities. European Political Science, 14(3), 218–227.

CHAPTER 8

Supervising Dissertations

Dissertation supervision at the undergraduate, Master’s, and PhD levels includes a close mentoring relationship between the student and supervisor (Fleming & Kowalsky, 2021; Todd et al., 2006; Todd & Smith, 2020). Developing the research project, mentoring, motivating, and providing feedback over several rounds is at the core of this relationship (Reguant et al., 2018), with broad scope for supporting students in developing their personal growth mindset and fostering a positive experience.1 This chapter discusses central elements and steps in the research supervision process. The chapter proceeds to explore the key steps in the supervision process such as finding and specifying/narrowing down the topic, identifying the research question and contribution, discussing the research strategy and methods, the literature review and finding the path through the literature forest, identifying and selecting theoretical frameworks and theories, and subsequently proceeding to the case study/empirical part of the dissertation. It discusses the difference between primary/secondary literature-based dissertations (e.g., in philosophy or history) and case study-based dissertations that include the collection and/or analysis of primary/secondary empirical data. It reflects on different approaches and strategies around primary data collection through interviews, field work, 1  The reflections offered in this chapter are based on supervising over 50 undergraduate and Master dissertations across environmental studies, political science, and international relations with a focus on empirical or case-study based dissertations.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Rietig, Innovative Social Sciences Teaching and Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41452-7_8

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and participant observation, as well as complying with risk assessment and research ethics in the process, and then proceeds to the analysis of quantitative/qualitative data. It closes with key considerations around writing the central discussion chapter that links the theoretical framework/theory to the empirical findings and discusses how they fit within the broader academic literature on the topic, before moving to the conclusion chapter that summarizes the contribution and offers broader implications for theory and policy/practice.

Developing a Supervisor-Supervisee Relationship Each dissertation is an individual journey of personal development, growth, and discovery. It is a focal point for students as it is the central opportunity in their degree to embark on an independent study project based on their personal and academic interests. It also offers them the opportunity to explore avenues and topics that were not possible within core and elective courses. In many cases, the dissertation also provides— or at least has the possibility to provide—the chance for students to gain deep expertise in a topic that will give them a competitive edge when launching their career. It can also open doors, e.g., when the dissertation research includes setting up interviews with representatives in companies, government departments, or non-governmental organizations who subsequently are aware of the student’s expertise on a topic close to their area of work. Sharing these research findings with the original interviewees and their organizations can also increase awareness, create networks, open doors, and in some cases even result in offers for internships or entry position jobs. At the same time, the dissertation supervisor is also a central academic advisor to the student with a significant amount of contact time that likely exceeds the contact time with other academics in a one-on-one setting. It is important to discuss expectations from the beginning (Woolhouse, 2002). Supervisors also act as mentors who are likely to be called upon to write reference letters for the students in the near future. With a growth mindset supervision strategy, the focus is not just on the student’s research project, but also how this research project fits into their wider career aspirations and how the skills developed throughout the dissertation project can be useful to realize these career aspirations. Thus, it is important to get to know the student in the first dissertation supervision meeting and gain a better understanding of how their research project might fit into their

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wider career development trajectory and what their underpinning motivation for the proposed research topic is. While some topics are closely linked to a particular research approach or methodology, others leave the approach open or may be adjusted to allow the student to gain particular expertise and skills in methods that may be useful (or required) in their desired career. Especially when supervising Master’s level dissertations (Ginn, 2014; Macfadyen et al., 2019), it is important to get an understanding of the student’s prior research experience, especially if they have already written a dissertation in their undergraduate degree. In many cases, students were not required and have not written an undergraduate dissertation, which means that they need more guidance in the research process than more experienced students. Depending on the research training provided throughout the degree program (e.g., if there was a compulsory research methods or dissertation writing lecture/course or not), it may also mean that students might benefit from auditing additional research methods-­related courses or do some preparatory reading of research methods resources to catch-up and address knowledge gaps. International students may also have a different understanding of a dissertation, which requires clarifying each other’s expectations (Corner & Pio, 2017; Woolhouse, 2002). It is important to agree on the ground rules of the supervisory relationship, i.e., what the supervisor will and will not do. This is particularly important when supervising a number of dissertations where the supervisor has more or less expertise across the different topics. There may also be a general understanding within the department of the parameters around supporting students with their dissertation and the overall expected and allocated time for supervising dissertations (this is an average of 6–15  hours, most commonly 10  hours/student and academic year). A central question is whether the supervisor gets directly involved in the dissertation by, e.g., researching resources and literature for the student and providing students with a reading list. The ability of the supervisor to provide a targeted literature search and reading recommendations for all students is limited by the time factor and the supervisors’ exact expertise on the particular topic. This usually varies across allocated students and the method of how students are allocated to supervisors (e.g., based on initially submitted topics). Given these limitations, most supervisors do not provide detailed reading recommendations for students to be fair to all students, especially those where the supervisor is not directly familiar with the core relevant literature and would need to spend time researching

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literature. Furthermore, searching and finding appropriate literature is a key element of information literacy and basic research skills, which the students should develop as part of their dissertation research and core learning outcome. Subsequently, students need to understand their responsibilities and the limitations of what the supervisor will do for the student, as well as the level of guidance and supervision they can expect. Key aspects to cover in the first supervision meeting are: • What is the student’s planned/desired dissertation topic? • Does the student have prior experience with writing dissertations (or, in the case of undergraduate students, with independent research projects)? • Is the student aware of the differences (and higher expectations) of a dissertation compared to, e.g., undergraduate essays? • What research methods training has the student, and is it sufficient for the dissertation project, or would the student benefit from some preliminary research course auditing and/or specific reading? • Why does the student want to pursue the proposed topic? Is there prior familiarity (i.e., deepening existing knowledge), or is this related to career ambitions (e.g., specializing in a particular industry/field)? • Does the student have hopes/ambitions/plans to leverage the dissertation research for later career ambitions, and which aspects (e.g., topic, methodology, entry point to open doors/create networks to potential future employers)?

Identifying the Research Question: Or Seeing the Trees in the Forest The second step in the dissertation supervision process is to identify a research question together with the student based on the desired topic and/or initially proposed research question (Fernando & Hulse-Killacky, 2006). This usually happens later in the first or early in the second dissertation supervision meeting. In many cases, student’s initial dissertation topics and early research questions are too broad and/or too generic and need to be narrowed down significantly to lead to a manageable dissertation project.

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With regard to the framing of the research question, the dissertation has a similar scope to a peer-reviewed journal publication with a ‘perfect’ dissertation being comparable to a first draft of a journal article and of a quality that, with revisions, might be submitted to an academic peer-­ reviewed journal. Depending on the discipline, it is more or less common to thoroughly revise a dissertation that received a very good or excellent mark and submit it to a journal, usually with the help of the dissertation supervisor. This is more frequently the case when Master’s students continue with a PhD and the Master’s dissertation becomes one of the first peer-reviewed journal articles and can be relevant (or make a decisive difference) when securing the first post-PhD academic job such as a postdoctoral fellowship or permanent/tenure-track Lecturer/Assistant Professor position. Successful examples include Clementino and Perkins (2021), Rietig (2014), and Sharman and Holmes (2010). At the same time, it is an apprentice piece and usually a first attempt at carrying out academic research. These two guideposts help the supervisor to set the expectations while having a familiar roadmap of the ‘end product’ and steps required to arrive there. Like any good journal article, the research question should be specific and narrowed down enough to be able to be answered within the limitations of a dissertation project. This includes the relatively short time-frame of 4–8 months, especially taking into account the student’s other responsibilities and the time allocated for the dissertation project in the course description and credit-point systems, and financial limitations with regard to original data collection and/or access to existing data-sets. It furthermore needs to take into account the student’s existing skillset of research methods and the extent to which the student can realistically improve research skills, especially with regard to quantitative analysis, within the available time-frame. Especially at the PhD level, but also increasingly at the Master’s (and to a lesser extent at the Undergraduate) level, the research question should allow for some novelty of the research that makes an original contribution to the existing literature and advances overall knowledge in addition to the student’s knowledge. This can mean applying a theory or theoretical framework to a novel case study, analyzing an existing data-set with regard to the causal relationships between variables that have not yet been analyzed, or collecting original qualitative data through, e.g., interviews around a local case study that has not (yet) been examined. Frequently, this focus on current and very localized case studies allows for original research and in many cases novel contributions,

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especially when the findings from the case study suggest a modification of an existing theory or shed light on under-researched aspects of a theory. It also has the added advantage that it can be realistically carried out with given time and especially resource constraints requiring, e.g., only local travel or zoom/online-based interviews. Consequently, it is important to develop a research question together with the student that allows for a dissertation in line with the student’s motivation and (career) ambition while also being manageable within the time and resource constraints. The key requirement for the research question is that it is precise enough to allow the student to clearly differentiate between relevant and less relevant literature to answer it, and to make some (although small) contribution to overall knowledge and the literature.

Typical Dissertation Structure Similar to journal papers, dissertations follow a common structure to logically set the scene, present the evidence and discuss the findings in relation to the literature. An empirical dissertation is more closely set in its structure, while a theory-based dissertation that does not present and analyze empirical evidence is more open and usually follows along key arguments or cases. Depending on the expectations of the degree program, the level of research methods training and the discipline, empirical dissertations may be expected at the Undergraduate level, but are more common at the Master’s and PhD levels. The outlined structure is a common standard in research areas based on positivist epistemological and ontological assumptions and may differ for highly post-positivist/critical theory-driven fields or fields/disciplines with other approaches. This is intended as a starting point and must be adapted to the relevant discipline and its epistemological/ontological assumptions and the subsequent standards for dissertations and journal articles. The word count given is indicative of a 10,000-word dissertation and can vary +/− 10–20% depending on the focus of the research project. There are different strategies to writing the dissertation, but a commonly used approach is to set out the structure of the dissertation in a word document and populate it with the following headings/topic-specific headings:

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Abstract (100–250 Words) • Brief introduction relating to empirical phenomenon/relevant current event on which the research problem is based • Statement of the research question and key contribution Introduction (1000–1500 Words) • Context, relevant empirical phenomenon/current event or theoretical discussion • Problem (theoretical or empirical/‘real world’) that has not been addressed satisfactorily by the existing (academic) literature, underpinned by relevant references to that literature • Answer to the ‘so what?’ question, i.e., why is this important and why should the reader care about this? • Research question that, once answered, helps to address the problem/reduce the knowledge gap on the issue • Educated guess of the findings based on expectations from the academic literature; this can be in the form of one or more hypotheses (depending on the discipline and method used) • Contribution to the literature/addressing the problem with more context and references to the literature • Short overview of the following chapters/sections, showing a logical structure appropriate to address the research problem and answer the research question Literature Review (2000–3000 Words) • Review of the relevant literature with regard to underpinning theories • Review of the relevant empirical literature, e.g., to provide background to the case study or thematic area Methodology Section (200–800 Words) • Explain how theory/theoretical framework guided data collection/ how existing data was identified and accessed/secured

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• Provide details on data collection and how much data was collected, e.g., number of interviews and type of people interviewed based on their job functions/relevance to the research project • Explain how data was analyzed • Recognize difficulties and how they were addressed (e.g., bias, limited data availability) • If the methodology section would be very short, i.e., 150 words or below, it may be useful to integrate it into the discussion as the last paragraph before the section/chapter outline; this is especially the case for theory-based or case study-based dissertations Presentation of Data/Findings (3000–3500 Words) • If the research is qualitative and/or based on empirical case studies from the literature, this section presents the findings that are relevant to answer the research question • This section should be structured with sub-headings along, e.g., themes, chronological order, sub-cases and follow a logical, easy-­to-­ follow narrative • Empirical quantitative data should be presented in one or more tables and figures with narrative explanations of what the tables/ figures show and an interpretation what it means, i.e., as if there were no table/figure, and in a way that is comprehensible to non-experts • In the case of applying a theory/theoretical framework to a new empirical case, follow the key elements of that theory/theoretical framework to present the findings Discussion (1000–1500 Words) • Set findings in relation to the originally reviewed literature from the literature review. Some guiding questions include: how do the findings match with the expectations from the literature? Is the theory/ theoretical framework supported? In which aspects does the data/ empirical findings suggest adjustments/amendments/revisions to the theory/theoretical framework? How certain/robust are the empirical findings, i.e., how trustworthy?

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• Present a summary table/figure if possible and appropriate that both links the theory/theoretical framework to the empirical data and possibly the wider academic literature Conclusion (500–1000 Words) • Provide a summary of the research question and the key findings (this should be similar to the abstract but differently worded) • Reflection on any normative aspects of the research, personal opinions of the student • Implications for theory and/or implications for practice—what would be key recommendations for policymakers? Potential users of the research? References (1500–3000 Words)

Addressing Common Challenges Faced by Students Procrastination and Writer’s Block Frequently students struggle with procrastination and writer’s block (Evans, 2013; O’Connor, 2017). Many have become experts at writing essays on the night before they are due and performing small miracles in productivity when running up against the final deadline. This obviously does not work for the dissertation and is one of the most common reasons for a poor mark. The dissertation is also the largest piece of academic writing students have done so far, in addition to being a new genre of writing for them compared to academic essays. There is also much at stake given the importance of the dissertation mark in the overall degree. In most programs, the dissertation course accounts for a substantive percentage of the overall mark. Some departments may also use the dissertation mark as the deciding factor when a student sits between two degree classifications such as a First or Upper Second in UK Undergraduate programs or a Merit and a Distinction in UK Master’s programs. In these cases exam boards can look toward the dissertation mark to determine if the student gets awarded the higher degree classification, usually if the dissertation is of a higher mark than the assessed coursework average, or remains in the lower degree classification.

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This means that the dissertation can make the difference between getting accepted into a selective Master’s and/or PhD program, winning a scholarship for said program, or being eligible for highly selective graduate schemes. These high stakes can create psychological barriers, uncertainty about where to start and can result in feeling overwhelmed and anxious at the same time. This means that it is even more important to emphasize the relevance of a growth mindset (Dweck, 2017) and that the dissertation research phase is designed as a learning journey. The supervisor is the guide who helps the student to break down the large project into smaller, manageable tasks with deadlines and milestones. There are different approaches to project management such as Gantt charts and setting milestones. The common element is to break down the dissertation into smaller, more manageable steps similar to individual essays. With the help of the supervisor, the student should design a time plan and identify key milestones and deliverable such as a completed literature review submitted to the supervisor for feedback. These deliverables and milestones need to be planned realistically around other commitments such as essay deadlines and exams for other courses, internships, and holiday breaks. The four major phases are: . Identify the research question 1 2. Literature review 3. Empirical data collection and analysis 4. Writing up of the findings into the dissertation and revising the early deliverables (literature review and empirical section) 5. Revision of the first draft of the dissertation Especially the revision of the first draft is a step that students miss, which subsequently results in losing valuable points/marks. As with journal articles, the first draft is not the submission, and the submission gets rewritten multiple times until a manuscript is accepted. The more revision time a student allows for before the submission of the dissertation, the higher the chances are that the dissertation is well-presented, polished, precise, and proof-read. Ideally, there should be one or two weeks before the dissertation deadline to allow for contingencies (that would not warrant formal extensions), and at least one week for revising the first draft. Then the dissertation needs to be proof-read, printed, and bound (if this is still required by the degree program). Overall, this means that the

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student should aim to complete a first draft three to four weeks before the dissertation deadline. Working backwards from the dissertation deadline, the different steps need to be planned realistically, taking into account that steps often take longer than originally expected and that there may be delays especially with the empirical data collection and/or the availability of existing data. Furthermore, the need to gain additional research skills may arise, requiring additional time. Once the time plan is determined, deadlines for the smaller deliverables can be set that should be accompanied with dissertation supervision meetings. In the writing-up phase the student will benefit from earlier drafts that will most likely need to be revised for the final dissertation in light of the empirical findings and how they fit with the overall ‘big picture’ the dissertation paints. This also provides the opportunity to offer feedback on the drafts (if this is permitted within the rules of the degree program) so that the student can reflect on the feedback and improve the draft sections/chapters accordingly. The agreed deadlines also serve the purpose of motivating those students who usually write their essays the night before the deadline to produce work regularly, which will be further improved upon in the subsequent revision rounds. Writer’s block can be addressed by breaking down the writing into manageable pieces and populating sections with bullet-points of the planned content. Once the writing-up phase commences, students can set up a long document and fill it with the section headings appropriate for their dissertation (see the example above—these can also be topic-specific headings) and add sub-headings. Each section and sub-heading should be assigned a target word count to prevent students from spending a disproportionate amount of time writing particular sections and then having to spend even more time trying to shorten the sections or dropping the initial work. Mapping the planned content in bullet points into the sections helps as they provide prompts of the needed content. This allows to compartmentalize the writing process into small, manageable tasks, and daily/ weekly word count targets to reduce anxiety, allow for feedback rounds and develop a sense of accomplishment. Getting Lost in the Woods During the Literature Review Once the research topic and question has been set in the first supervisory meeting(s) based on an initial review of the literature and/or a dissertation proposal submitted by the student, the first key task for the student is to

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conduct a thorough literature review. This is the aspect of the dissertation most students should be familiar with based on writing essays for their first, second, and third year courses. Instead of providing students with bite-sized solutions in the form of relevant literature (as some students are used to from their reading lists in previous courses), the supervisors’ role is to mentor the student through a self-guided literature research. This means first establishing the extent of the student’s information literacy and familiarity with the library’s literature search database, and second explaining the relative value of different information sources. This includes especially understanding the difference between peer-reviewed academic literature and ‘gray’ literature such as reports, and sources that need to be treated as partial expressions of personal opinions such as newspapers, blogs and other internet-based sources. In most cases, students are not or only very vaguely familiar with how to find relevant literature for their dissertation. Ideally, this would be covered in a (recorded) lecture for all students of the cohort so that supervisors do not individually need to explain this basic aspect of information literacy. In degree programs where this is not covered, it would be useful to set aside a part of a dissertation supervision meeting or to schedule a meeting that includes all students of the supervisor to go through the different routes of identifying relevant literature. Key aspects include the university library’s database for journal articles and primary databases that also allow for in-text search and narrowing down thousands of search hits based on discipline, year of publication, citations (to identify key contributions and authors) and quality as well as relevance of the publication outlet/journal. Such databases include EBSCO host, LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, as well as the major publishers’ individual databases such as Elsevier and Taylor & Francis, as well as new databases. Google Scholar is also very useful to identify the publications that have cited an article or book, or further potentially relevant research by an author. Once a number of relevant publications have been identified, their sources can also point towards older relevant literature. A physical visit to the university’s library is also a useful starting point as frequently books are shelved in thematic clusters beyond the easily identifiable relevant books based on the library catalogue. Finding the same and similar sources with different search methods suggests that the key literature has been identified. The second challenge of the literature review is the trap of reading too much, which frequently results in the feeling of not making progress or getting lost in the woods. Here it is important that the supervisor shifts

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the student’s focus toward the research question. While reading broadly around the overall topic may be interesting, it hardly helps with answering the research question. This means that students need to ‘triage’ the literature they identified and downloaded from the database research. Citation counts can be a useful indication of core contributions to the field. Students need to familiarize themselves with a speed-reading approach that works for them, although it is important to identify highly relevant publications through reading abstracts and, if promising and relevant to aspects of the research question, more closely reading the relevant sections. Furthermore, it is useful to devise a system to keep track of what has been reviewed, which can be through a software or the old-fashioned color-highlighting and notes. Students tend to read either too little or too much, both of which can result in feelings of overwhelm and uncertainty. Those who read too much need to check if they are reading in a targeted fashion with the research question clearly in mind to differentiate the relevant from the less relevant publications. Those who read too little need to continue reading until they start to see a bigger picture and begin understanding the links and major arguments in their relevant literature. An indication that students need to move from summarizing literature to identifying larger themes and debates in the literature is when most sentences start with ‘Author A says…’ and ‘Author B finds that…’. This may serve as notes or a first draft with the objective to move toward an analytic literature review that synthesizes major themes in the relevant literature and focuses on the findings, followed by references to two or more authors/publications. It may also be useful to advise students to analyze how literature reviews in the articles they are reading are written by paying attention to how these authors cluster different themes and identify gaps. Keeping the research question in mind, or better, writing it down where the student frequently sees and re-reads the question is a central step in being able to find a path through the forest without getting lost in the woods. Data Availability and Analysis When embarking on the generally high-risk, high-gain strategy of collecting original empirical data for the dissertation, students face a number of challenges that require guidance by the supervisor to build their confidence and offer reassurance. Doing empirical research can have positive

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impacts upon students’ later careers and open doors to entry-level jobs as analysts, as well as set them apart from their peers who have no evidence to show in their CV of having successfully carried out their own research project based on collecting and analyzing qualitative or quantitative data. Depending on the degree program, undergraduate/Master’s stage and discipline, students more or less are either doing a dissertation focusing on a case study drawn from secondary literature (what could be considered a safer and easier approach that is closer to writing essays), or they rise to the challenge of either analyzing existing empirical data or even collecting their own, novel empirical data. There is a wealth of existing empirical data that can still offer new insights. This most prominently includes quantitative data such as published survey data and other published data-sets from publicly funded quantitative research projects, databases on legislation/ policies, speeches of diplomats/politicians, media articles or social media posts. This could be in the form of a quantitative survey they design, pilot, run and analyze, or in the form of qualitative interviews with, e.g., members of the general public or so-called ‘elites’, i.e., people they are interested in based on the job they hold. This might be, e.g., politicians, civil servants, representatives of the media, businesses, or non-governmental organizations. In most cases, students would benefit from additional training or at least reading of the relevant literature before employing these research methods. When designing a survey, they need to pay particular attention to survey design to avoid bias in the data. In some cases, it may turn out that using existing quantitative data offers a more reliable source than self-­ designed surveys, although, when done well, this can also be a major source of competence students may be able to benefit from in their later career. Many students opt for collecting original qualitative data based on interviews with a relevant population, which may be members of the general public, or individuals who are relevant to their research based on their lived experiences and/or job roles. This usually requires some guidance around developing an ‘elevator pitch’ on how their research topic is relevant and interesting to their interviewees, and how the interviewees can support the research by granting some of their time. Students also need to identify potential interviewees and secure the interview. Most of the barriers experienced by undergraduate and Master’s students are around securing interviews with busy ‘elites’. Frequently there may be entry points around common interests or networks (e.g., graduates of the same

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university). Once the first interview has been secured, students can ‘snowball’ to further interviewees by asking who else they should speak to and if the interviewee would be willing to make an introduction via email. Frequently, there are also questions around research ethical considerations such as the agreement between the student and the interviewee around confidentiality and anonymity. It is important to highlight the university’s research ethical guidelines and, in most cases, the need to apply for ethical approval. Research interviews can provide an additional benefit to the student beyond developing interview skills. If the dissertation topic is chosen strategically to match the desired career ambitions, there may be enough of a fit to warrant research interviews with government agencies/departments, businesses, and other organizations that require interviewing individuals working at these potential future employer organizations. This may be an entry point toward a more targeted networking and demonstrating research skills as well as a familiarity with key aspects the team/ department within the organization is already dealing with. This may open the opportunity to apply for an internship or provide a competitive advantage when applying for an (entry-level) position at this or a competitor organization. The data analysis usually requires the use of specialist software such as SPSS, STATA or R in the case of quantitative data, or the use of NVivo for qualitative data. As with data collection, ideally, students get research methods training before or during the early stages of the dissertation phase to be able to competently use these software programs to produce a high-quality analysis. Where this is not offered by the department, faculty, or university, it may be useful to direct students to data analysis books and online tutorials. Too Exhausted for a Clear, Concise Discussion Section A very common shortcoming of otherwise strong dissertations that would have the potential to reach a very high or top mark is exhaustion and the feeling that all has been said when it comes to the discussion section. This is important to thematize in a supervision meeting, especially as at this stage students usually do not receive feedback from supervisors on written submissions of early drafts such as the literature review. Furthermore, writing a discussion section of the length of a short essay is also new to most students.

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Nevertheless, the discussion section may be the most important section of a dissertation as it can clearly demonstrate where the value-addition of the research project is with regard to making an original contribution to the discipline’s understanding of an issue or to the relevant academic literature. This is particularly important as dissertations tend to focus on generating new insights through limited case studies that may be strongly localized or of a limited time frame. Linking insights from these case studies, whether based on self-collected empirical material, the analysis of secondary data-sets or literature-based synthesis, to the existing academic literature allows the student to demonstrate the wider relevance of the research. Ideally, the findings allow to shed new light on existing assumptions through the modification of, e.g., theoretical frameworks by adding new components, highlighting aspects that have been overlooked by the theoretical literature or are of less importance for an outcome than previously thought. Depending on how the empirical section was structured, there are broadly two approaches to structuring the discussion section. If the empirical section was focused on presenting empirical findings or a narrative based on, e.g., a time-line of events, the discussion section needs to explain how the findings from the empirical section fit with the theory and/or theoretical framework introduced in the literature review. This may include drawing out 3–5 key aspects of the theory/theoretical framework as sub-­headings and explaining how and to what extent the empirical findings match with the assumptions in the literature. Where this has already been done in the empirical section, the discussion allows to actually discuss the findings with regard to the existing empirical literature on similar or different cases. The literature from the literature review should be referenced again in the discussion with a focus on the key factors/broader insights from the literature, and if appropriate, also individual authors’ contributions that were identified as particularly relevant. Why are the findings similar? Why are they different? Do the findings match, i.e.,  do the findings confirm the ‘educated guess’ (in quantitative methods terminology, the hypothesis) presented in the introduction? Can a modification or limitation to the hypothesis be suggested based on the new empirical evidence presented in the previous section? What were the limitations of the research project (linking back to the methodology section) and how did they influence the findings with regard to, e.g., biases or limited data quality/availability? What can be said about the findings nevertheless? These questions link back to aspects around reliability and robustness of the data (Yin, 2009).

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The discussion section allows the student to see the big picture and how the research fits with the wider literature. It is also the most difficult section to write exactly because it requires a certain level of reflection. It is also difficult as the student is at this point so familiar with the data and literature, the links may be obvious to the student, suggesting the assumption that it must also be obvious to the reader. Here it is important to emphasize to the student that it is their task to do the hard work for the reader, to ‘take the reader by the hand’ and explain the big picture that emerges. This is also an aspect where students miss valuable marks for an otherwise strong or very strong dissertation. Confusing a Dissertation with an Essay or Including Too Much Personal Opinion Especially in the case of undergraduate students, there may be the misperception that a dissertation is ‘simply’ a long essay like the essays students were required to write as assessment in other courses. It is particularly important to explain that the dissertation is not like an essay and that to do well in the dissertation component, it needs to be seen as a different ‘genre’ of writing as the underpinning assumption is not arguing a point or reviewing literature, but rather answering a research question in a balanced and objective manner following established research methods appropriate for the research question. There may also be the misconception that a dissertation means that the topic to be covered is simply much broader than an essay and may cover, e.g., a longer time period or larger number of case studies. To prevent falling into this trap of a descriptive yet shallow compilation of facts and figures, the students need to understand that the dissertation is about going into depth of a very narrow, specific topic and, more specifically, needs to frame and answer a research question of appropriate scope. Some students may also be under the impression that a dissertation is a long, personal opinion piece where they argue and try to convince the reader about a particular point of view and/or personal opinion on a current event. It is important to explain to the student that the objective of a dissertation is not to convince the reader of a particular point of view, but to provide a balanced and nuanced analysis of a topic in response to a pre-defined research question. There may be scope in the second part of the conclusion chapter to offer personal opinions and normative insights.

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Conclusion In this chapter, I set out the key aspects for supervising dissertations in the social sciences with a focus on dissertations that use empirical data in their analysis. I discussed the key considerations around developing a supervisor-­ supervisee relationship, the importance of time-management and breaking down a seemingly insurmountable endeavor into smaller tasks, and the role of feedback and the growth mindset for guiding students along the research journey. The chapter also offered insights into some of the key challenges faced by students and how these can be addressed such as the importance of a research question to avoid getting lost when reviewing literature, the advantages and challenges of collecting and analyzing empirical data, as well as the pivotal importance of the discussion section for bringing the elements of the dissertation together. The chapter also offered a common structure to the dissertation (which may vary depending on disciplines) and reflection on the importance of explaining to students how the dissertation is a different genre of writing than the more familiar coursework essays, and thus requires a different approach. The dissertation is usually the most complex, time-consuming and high-profile piece students produce during their degree program. It may open doors to desired career-paths if the topic is chosen strategically together with the approach to data collection and analysis. Students need to have a sense of ownership of their dissertation and require growth-oriented feedback to improve and develop resilience to address the various challenges inherent in (dissertation) research. The supervisor plays a central role in making the dissertation an enjoyable experience full of personal growth and confidence building.

References Clementino, E., & Perkins, R. (2021). How Do Companies Respond to Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Ratings? Evidence from Italy. Journal of Business Ethics, 171, 379–397. Corner, P. D., & Pio, E. (2017). Supervising International Students’ Theses and Dissertations. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 16(1), 23–38. Dweck, C. (2017). Mindset. Changing the Way You Think to Fulfil Your Potential. Random House. Evans, K. (2013). Pathways Through Writing Blocks in the Academic Environment. Birkhäuser Boston.

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Fernando, D.  M., & Hulse-Killacky, D. (2006). Getting to the Point: Using Research Meetings and the Inverted Triangle Visual to Develop a Dissertation Research Question. Counselor Education and Supervision, 46(2), 103–115. Fleming, R. S., & Kowalsky, M. (2021). Survival Skills for Thesis and Dissertation Candidates (1st ed.). Springer. Ginn, F. (2014). “Being like a Researcher”: Supervising Masters Dissertations in a Neoliberalizing University. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 38(1), 106–118. Macfadyen, A., English, C., Kelleher, M., Coates, M., Cameron, C., & Gibson, V. (2019). ‘Am I Doing It Right?’ Conceptualising the Practice of Supervising Master’s Dissertation Students. Higher Education Research and Development, 38(5), 985–1000. O’Connor, J. (2017). Inhibition in the Dissertation Writing Process: Barrier, Block, and Impasse. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 34(4), 516–523. Reguant, M., Martínez-Olmo, F., & Contreras-Higuera, W. (2018). Supervisors’ Perceptions of Research Competencies in the Final-Year Project. Educational Research, 60(1), 113–129. Rietig, K. (2014). ‘Neutral’ Experts? How Input of Scientific Expertise Matters in International Environmental Negotiations. Policy Sciences, 47(2), 141–160. Sharman, A., & Holmes, J. (2010). Evidence-Based Policy or Policy-Based Evidence Gathering? Biofuels, the EU and the 10% Target. Environmental Policy and Governance, 20, 309–321. Todd, M. J., & Smith, K. (2020). Supervising Undergraduate Dissertations. In A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (5th ed., pp. 135–144). Routledge. Todd, M.  J., Smith, K., & Bannister, P. (2006). Supervising a Social Science Undergraduate Dissertation: Staff Experiences and Perceptions. Teaching in Higher Education, 11(2), 161–173. Woolhouse, M. (2002). Supervising Dissertation Projects: Expectations of Supervisors and Students. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 39(2), 137–144. Yin, R. K. (2009). Case Study Research: Design and Methods (4th ed.). Sage.

CHAPTER 9

Conclusion

This book offered reflections on how degree programs, individual courses, and teaching/learning activities can be designed to encourage students to develop a personal growth mindset. This means that students are willing to try something new and improve based on feedback and reflection instead of worrying about being seen as ‘perfect’ or ‘smart’. This is very important given the challenges of wide-ranging societal, economic, and environmental challenges that bring constant change and shifting framework conditions. By reflecting on what these changes mean, identifying opportunities, and gaining necessary skills and knowledge to succeed, students can adapt and thrive. In the changing world of work, they can furthermore inspire others to also develop personal growth mindsets characterized through perseverance and willingness to reflect on feedback, factual learning, experiential learning and constructivist learning, and then in turn to also become agents of change in the form of policy entrepreneurs. The societal, economic, and environmental challenges facing Millennials and Generation Z are so complex and severe that a fixed mindset can result in cynicism, depression, and a feeling of hopelessness. Only through building resilience and perseverance in the face of adversity can students begin to see the opportunities and build necessary optimism to not give up, but confront the challenges head-on. The personal growth mindset is about developing the skills to succeed in the modern workplace, learning to try to develop solutions, fail, reflect, and try again. It is also about inspiring others that there is a future worth fighting for and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Rietig, Innovative Social Sciences Teaching and Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41452-7_9

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about building a work environment that is supportive and inclusive to all regardless of their personal attributes or background. This conclusion chapter briefly reflects on key aspects introduced in this book, especially the importance of constructively aligning degrees and courses with the personal growth framework, and how the personal growth framework can help students to thrive in the rapidly changing world of work, which is further accelerated through artificial intelligence and other new technologies that quickly advance augmentation and automation. It concludes in an outlook on the importance of mainstreaming, i.e., integrating major societal, economic and environmental challenges into the degree programs in a subject-appropriate manner, especially with regard to building truly inclusive learning communities through equality, diversity, and inclusion, decolonizing the curriculum, and mainstreaming sustainability.

Constructively Aligning Degrees and Courses with the Personal Growth Framework The personal growth framework can be constructively aligned with learning objectives, teaching activities, and assessment. Students could be encouraged to build perseverance, reflect on feedback, and try again to improve their performance through feedback mechanisms in the different teaching activities. There needs to be a certain level of constructive alignment within a course to allow students to progress through different learning loops, as well as an overarching logic in the degree program. This especially concerns components such as the dissertation as well as offering equality, diversity and inclusion-appropriate opportunities for gaining work experience and developing intercultural competencies through studying abroad in addition to developing employability-relevant, qualitative and quantitative research methods skills, public speaking, and leadership skills through core courses (Vieno et al., 2022). Lectures are most closely related to factual learning and offer an introduction to a new topic with relatively low entry barriers. Through the inclusion of interactive elements into a lecture such as questions based on the lecture content, videos, or student’s opinion on an issue, students start reflecting on the lecture content. They are encouraged to discuss their response with other students, thus expanding their networks and forming new connections with their peers. This also offers peer feedback, which

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could be in agreement or disagreement with the student’s response, and provides new additional insights the student has not (yet) thought about. The next feedback comes from the teacher when collecting several student responses to the lecture question and by linking these responses to the next lecture section. If the lecture question was focused on testing student’s understanding of complex issues introduced earlier in the lecture, it also offers feedback on immediate factual learning and a potential detection of errors and thus encourages clarifying through questions and engaging with the lecture readings/literature. The seminar with its student-focused activities encourages factual learning, experiential learning, and constructivist learning. The preparation for the seminar offers the scope for an additional learning loop where students are encouraged to work together in study groups. They share the preparation for the seminar session by, e.g., splitting the seminar readings within the group. Each student prepares half or one chapter/journal article. They have the added responsibility of not only reading it for themselves, but engaging more deeply with the literature as they are also responsible for a high-quality summary and explaining the content of the reading to the other students. This encourages deeper engagement and reflection on the information, i.e., resulting in factual learning. When students meet with their study group, they engage in more factual learning as they are provided with summaries of the other readings and reflect on these throughout the discussion to answer the seminar questions. They also encounter experiential learning opportunities when they take on the role of a ‘teacher’ and explain the content of their readings to the other students, thus practicing public speaking skills. The subsequent discussion allows for more reflection on the topic and potentially constructivist learning when students reflect on their own and other student’s perspectives, experiences, and arguments, and subsequently form new points of view or change their existing beliefs. They might also come to feel strongly about a topic and care deeply enough about it to start advocating certain avenues of action and thus develop the potential to act as policy entrepreneurs at that time or at a later stage in their career (Rietig & Perkins, 2018). At the seminar, students engage in further factual, experiential, and potentially constructivist learning by bringing their own and their study group’s reflections to the larger seminar group during literature-based discussions. This means that they participate actively, share their group’s discussion outcomes and also benefit from the perspectives of other study groups, which in turn means an additional learning/feedback loop and

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opportunity for reflection. This becomes particularly valuable if these discussions reflect different points of view and lived experiences such as examples from the global south in addition to the global north, critical perspectives from marginalized communities, and problem-solving approaches (Crimmins, 2022; Papa, 2020; Saeteros et  al., 2021). The course is constructively aligned if it offers assessments related to these activities, e.g., through marks for participation that encourage students to actively participate while also being low stake, i.e., reflection on the seminar performance can be used to improve in other later forms of assessment. A range of seminar activities allows for additional reflection and learning loops in support of a personal growth framework. These include answering sample exam questions, student presentations, working through math problems/quantitative methods training, debates and inclusion of decision-making simulations into the seminar session or the overall course. The assessment components of these student-led aspects can include marks for the seminar presentation, the study group reports, and the summaries of the readings, as well as participation marks or marks for the quality of position papers in preparation of debates or simulations. All these relatively low-stake assessments also provide feedback to students in the form of peer-feedback that allows them to reflect and subsequently improve their performance. The major assessment component is in most cases an essay and/or an exam. The work done throughout the seminars and lectures serves to build the knowledge and experience to do well in these assessments during which students further reflect on their earlier learning experiences and draw from their understanding of the bigger picture and connections between different topics and elements of the course. One of the most student-centered and student-led aspects of any degree is the dissertation. This allows for several feedback loops and a relatively long phase of reflection as well as continuous improvement. After some initial research, students choose their dissertation topic and discuss it with the supervisor who provides them with initial feedback and encourages them to narrow down the topic with a research question that guides the dissertation project. The literature review results likely in an adjustment of the dissertation focus based on reflecting on factual learning by becoming more familiar with the relevant literature. In the empirical section students carry out genuine research through discovering new information when they, for example, interview people with lived experience of their topic of interest. This can include, among others, policymakers, activists, people working for companies or those being particularly affected by societal,

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economic, or environmental challenges. Students might also analyze existing qualitative or quantitative data with their research question in mind and thus arrive at new findings when they, for example, assess media articles, speeches of diplomats at international negotiations or statistical data sets by the World Bank or national government statistics. This allows to reflect on research methods training throughout the degree program, for example statistics or using quantitative analysis software such as SPSS, Stata, or R, as well as experiential learning through their practical use. This can also be the case for qualitative analysis software such as NVivo. Through the regular meetings with their supervisor, students share their research findings and receive feedback as well as further guidance, in some cases, on a draft chapter such as the literature review. This combination of factual and experiential learning can also raise student’s deeper interest in a topic and change the way they see things, especially concerning socio-­ economic or environmental challenges. The writing-up phase of the dissertation especially requires perseverance and the willingness to reflect on feedback to further improve the presentation of the research findings through several drafts and revisions.

Mainstreaming Major Societal Challenges Degree programs and individual courses need to be revised and adapted to reflect the emergence of new societal norms. Compared to the 2000s or 2010s, there is an increasing awareness within academia of the importance of mainstreaming major societal challenges into teaching. Major initiatives include equality, diversity, and inclusion as well as decolonizing the curriculum and removing elements of structural discrimination with regard to age, gender, race, sexual orientation, socio-economic background, as well as an increasing awareness that physical and mental disabilities and mitigating personal circumstances need to be taken into consideration to allow all students fair and equal educational opportunities. Many universities are actively seeking to mainstream these challenges through certification schemes such as Athena SWAN and managerial approaches to regulating equality, diversity and inclusion commitments, which can be a starting point to increase awareness (Scott, 2020; Tzanakou et al., 2021). Another major area is mainstreaming knowledge of the origins and practical solutions to the climate crisis, sustainability, and environmental challenges (Albareda-Tiana et  al., 2018; Cebrián, 2017; Karmasin & Voci, 2021; Weiss & Barth, 2019). It is not only important that university campuses

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become carbon neutral (Poon, 2017), but degree programs also need to consider how they can integrate knowledge of climate change and potential solutions into core courses and offering relevant elective courses adapted to the discipline. This can mean courses on, for example, carbon accounting and net zero business operations in business degrees, climate litigation in law, climate change policies and global climate governance in political science, climate science in geography, and climate justice in sociology. The third major shift is the continuing digitalization of all aspects of work, research, and teaching within the university and beyond, in addition to and in relation with pedagogical and didactic developments (Konst & Scheinin, 2018). Following major shifts in the accessibility of literature through online journal databases and e-books, the use of email for communication and word processing for writing essays, dissertations and research articles, the 2010s saw the increasing popularity of online learning platforms such as Blackboard, Moodle, and Canvas as virtual learning environments that allow easy sharing of learning materials, uploading of videos, and submission of assignments including plagiarism detection and online marking. With the Covid-19 pandemic universities were forced to accelerate online teaching through synchronous and asynchronous lectures as well as synchronous seminar teaching. Many are developing online degree programs to cater to a global demand for high quality degree programs (Joshi, 2022). AI applications such as ChatGPT that summarize large quantities of textual data into short or long responses to questions make detecting plagiarism more difficult and also open new opportunities for further automation of the writing process. All these technological, environmental, and societal challenges continuously change the learning environment highlighting the importance of embracing a personal growth mindset in academia.

The Personal Growth Framework and the World of Work The degree program offers students a variety of opportunities to build a personal growth mindset and to develop the curiosity, resilience and optimism to embrace future challenges in their professional life and career(s). We live in a time of rapid technological and societal change that redefines the world of work and opens new opportunities for all regardless of their personal circumstances and background. It also holds a variety and, in many cases, overwhelming amount of challenges that can make us easily

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feel powerless and at times depressed in the face of economic recession, climate change, social injustices and discrimination, global health emergencies, and war. At the same time, the workplace also changes rapidly with an increased amount of augmentation and automation through artificial intelligence applications and the downfall of old industries and the emergence of new industries that were niches or science fiction only a few years ago. This means that the personal growth mindset gains in increasing importance to equip students with a positive mindset and the resilience to take charge of their own learning and further skill development as part of life-long learning (Raza et  al., 2021). They will need to identify new opportunities, assess their existing skillset, and make use of independent or structured training and learning opportunities to adapt to their changing work environment. This means that the transferable skills developed during a social sciences degree are among its most valuable components in addition to the subject knowledge.

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Index1

A Academic literature, 153 Achievement gap, 7 Active learning, 55 Aim, 22, 141, 157 Alexa, 7 Artificial intelligence, 3–6, 52, 67, 168, 173 Artificial intelligence specialist, 4 Asia, 3, 9, 113 Assessment, 11–13, 21, 22, 33, 39, 43, 51–53, 59–62, 66, 67, 101, 102, 111, 116, 118, 123, 124, 136, 138, 148, 163, 168, 170 Assistant professor, 9 Attendance, 61, 77, 79, 104, 109, 116, 128n2 Augmentation, 5, 168, 173 Automation, 4, 5, 13, 168, 172, 173

B Background knowledge, 83 Big data, 4, 7 Big data analyst, 4 Bigger picture, 84, 159, 170 Biggs, J., 11, 33, 111 Blackboard, 61, 62, 77, 172 Blue-collar job, 4 Board of studies, 22, 138 Break, 11, 49, 73, 77, 79, 81, 83, 86, 93, 97, 104, 156 Business, 3, 55 Business case studies, 92, 107 C Camera, 80, 94, 95 Career, 2–4, 7–10, 13, 20, 34, 38, 39, 43, 44, 48, 75, 93, 105, 110, 111, 130, 148–150, 152, 160, 161, 164, 169, 172

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Rietig, Innovative Social Sciences Teaching and Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41452-7

189

190 

INDEX

Care-giving duties, 81 Challenge, 34, 52, 94, 95, 102, 114, 117, 131, 158, 160 ChatGPT, 52, 67, 172 Chatham House rules, 61 Children, 63, 81, 113, 122 Civil service, 4 Civil society organization, 4 Clarification, 79, 81, 82, 85, 88, 97, 98, 121 Climate Change, 54 Cognitive approach, 22 Cognitive psychology, 8, 19, 20 Cognitive systems, 5 Collaboration, 55 Colombia, 112 Comfort zone, 8, 34 Communication Sciences, 3 Complete cycle of choice, 27 Confidence, 8, 34, 56, 57, 99, 100, 103, 104, 116, 121, 124, 133, 136, 142, 143, 159, 164 Consecutive master’s degree, 44 Constructivist learning, 8, 30, 31, 34, 37, 46, 75, 93, 105, 111, 120, 167, 169 Consulting, 48 Course design, 20, 33, 123, 124, 128, 143 Covid-19, 5, 53, 73, 76, 80, 82, 93–95, 172 Creativity, 7, 9, 23 Critical analysis, 33, 57 Critical analysis skills, 54 Critically evaluate, 1, 6, 46 Critical thinking, 55 Culture shift, 5 Curriculum, 3, 4, 8, 12, 47, 50, 83, 84, 128, 128n2, 135

D Data collection, 154 Data quality, 162 Decarbonization, 5 Decision-makers, 6, 45, 47, 51, 67 Declarative learning, 23 Decolonizing the curriculum, 50, 67, 84, 85, 168, 171 Deeper-level knowledge, 23 Defensive avoidance, 28–29 Degree program design, 20 Denmark, 112 Deutero-learning, 27 Diplomatic service, 48 Dissertation, 39, 52, 147–164, 168, 170 Diversity, 3, 7, 47, 49, 50, 88, 91, 93, 94, 98, 107, 110, 120, 124, 127n1, 168, 171 Double-loop learning, 10, 19, 24, 26 E Early career scholars, 9 Echo, 7 Economics, 3 Electronic databases, 74 Elites, 160 Empathy, 5 Empirical section, 101, 156, 162, 170 Engagement, 32, 61, 95, 121, 169 Environmental degradation, 54 Environmental Studies, 3 Equality, 3, 7, 47, 49, 50, 88, 91, 93, 94, 98, 107, 110, 124, 168, 171 Equality, diversity and inclusion, 7, 49, 50, 88, 91, 93, 98, 107, 110, 168, 171 Erasmus+, 49 Error elimination, 23, 26 Essay, 52, 58, 59, 61, 62, 67, 99–101, 135, 156, 161, 163, 170

 INDEX 

Ethical compliance, 5 Ethnic minority, 8, 84, 111, 116 Europe, 3, 9, 113 Exam, 11, 52, 67, 75, 79, 82, 92, 96, 99–102, 107, 111, 113, 114, 117, 121, 124, 155, 170 Exchange program, 47 Experiential learning, 9, 12, 22–24, 27, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 38, 45, 49, 54, 93, 103, 105, 111, 115, 121, 127, 129, 130, 133, 135, 143, 167, 169, 171 Extroverted, 97, 133 F Factual learning, 30, 36, 38, 45, 74, 92, 106, 115, 167, 169 Fake news, 7 Feedback, 1, 8, 11–13, 33, 34, 37, 44, 45, 50, 51, 85, 92, 98, 100, 101, 111, 128, 129, 140, 147, 156, 157, 161, 164, 167–170 Field work, 13, 80, 147 First-generation, 4, 113 First-generation students, 4 First year, 47, 50, 75, 101 Fixed mindset, 8, 33, 167 Foreign language skill, 47 Formal debate, 139 Formative, 1, 52 Friendships, 57, 77, 82, 96, 109, 110, 115, 116, 119, 121, 123, 124 G Gender, 47, 84, 113, 118, 124, 171 Generation Z, 167 Geography, 3, 53 Germany, 75, 82, 112 Ghostwriting, 52, 67 Global governance, 54, 56, 64, 66

191

Global north, 84, 85, 111, 170 Global south, 50, 84, 85, 111, 112, 170 Government administration, 5 Government department, 48 Government sector, 4 Graduates, 1–4, 6–8, 19, 39, 46, 48, 160 Grant writing, 7 Grit, 10, 20, 32–36 Groupthink, 29 Growth mindset, 4, 8, 9, 11, 32–36, 39, 43, 45, 66, 71, 91–93, 95, 97–102, 107, 109–112, 120, 121, 130, 135, 136, 143, 148, 156, 164, 173 H Harvard World Model United Nations (WorldMUN), 12, 128n2, 129, 133, 138, 141–143 Health risk, 81 Hidden curriculum, 4, 7, 101 Higher education, 6, 9, 10, 19, 20, 24, 25, 27, 30, 33, 38, 39, 44 Home office, 5 Homework, 102, 103 Humanist model, 22 Hybrid working, 5 Hypothesis, 162 I Impact-related activities, 80 Inclusion, 3, 47, 50, 73, 84, 92, 94, 107, 168, 170 Independence, 55 India, 43, 112, 116 Individual level, 22 Industrial revolution, 4 Information literacy, 6, 46, 150, 158

192 

INDEX

Innovation, 7, 55 In-person lecture, 76, 80, 83 Interactive elements, 80, 83, 86, 88, 168 Intercultural competencies, 46, 47, 168 Internet, 6, 53, 74, 158 Internship, 47–49, 161 Interpersonal communication skills, 7 Intersectional, 47 Interviews, 13, 48, 147, 148, 151, 154, 160 J Job advertisements, 7 Jobs, 1, 3–7, 10, 13, 57, 81, 148, 160 Journal article, 114, 151, 152, 169 Jurisdiction, 36 K Knowing facts, 6 Knowledge, 1, 6–8, 11, 19–21, 23, 24, 28, 30, 32, 36, 43–45, 47, 49, 53, 54, 57, 60, 73, 74, 77, 83, 84, 86, 88, 91, 92, 96, 101, 103, 104, 109–112, 123, 129, 135, 137, 143, 149–153, 167, 170, 171, 173 Kolb, David, 10, 19, 23–25, 34, 127, 129, 143 L Labor costs, 5 Latin America, 113 Law, 3 Leadership, 34, 35, 43, 46, 110, 112, 113, 131, 132, 135, 143, 168 Learning, 1, 4, 6, 8–12, 19–30, 32–39, 43–46, 49, 51, 53, 59,

61, 66, 67, 73, 74, 76, 77, 79, 82, 85–88, 91, 92, 94, 96–98, 100, 101, 103–107, 109–112, 114, 120–122, 127–133, 135–137, 141, 143, 144, 150, 156, 167–170, 172, 173 cycle, 24, 25, 27, 29, 34, 36, 111 environment, 23, 36–39, 44, 109, 110, 121, 172 outcomes, 20, 33, 59, 61, 96, 105, 131, 132, 135, 137 Learning-by-doing, 31 Learning in Governance Framework, 10, 20, 29–32 Lecturer, 9 Legal frameworks, 5 Lesson drawing, 34 Library building, 6 Life-long learning, 6, 9, 13 Linear information transfer, 24 Lip-service, 31 Local opportunities, 49 M Mainstreaming, 168, 171 Management, 9, 10, 12, 19, 20, 46, 76, 78, 91, 127, 135, 156, 164 Masters, 8, 10, 12, 83, 147, 151, 155 Maternity/paternity leave, 75 Math problems, 99, 102–103, 170 Media, 4, 48, 80, 92, 160, 171 Memorizing, 23 Mental health, 79, 82, 120 Microsoft Teams, 6, 94 Millennials, 167 Module reading list, 74, 92 Monitor, 118, 140 Motivation, 7, 11, 32, 33, 37, 46, 57, 74, 82, 93, 114, 117, 120, 143, 149, 152 Multinational companies, 4

 INDEX 

N Narrow artificial intelligence, 4 National Model United Nations (NMUN), 12, 128n2, 129, 133, 134, 138, 141–143 Negotiation strategies, 55, 56, 129 Networking, 7, 122, 129, 143, 161 NGO, 128n2 Non-learning, 28, 30 Normative insights, 163 North America, 3 NVivo, 161, 171 O Office, 4, 5, 7, 52, 58, 79, 81, 98, 100, 138 Online banking, 4 Online-based undergraduate degree programs, 44 Online lecture, 73, 81, 83 Organizational level, 22, 36, 38, 39, 46, 112 Organizational skills, 43, 46, 47 P Parents, 81, 102 Participation, 61 Pastoral care, 75 Perseverance, 3, 9, 10, 20, 32–37, 45, 92, 167, 168, 171 Personal development, 3, 13, 22, 47, 133, 148 Personal growth mindset, 1, 3, 8, 11, 13, 19, 38, 39, 43–46, 50, 51, 53, 66, 67, 73, 74, 76, 107, 128, 129, 133, 147, 167, 172 Personal tutor, 48 PhD, 9, 12, 147, 151, 152, 156 PhD candidate, 9

193

Plagiarism software, 52 Podcast, 104 Policy beliefs, 32, 37 Policy brief, 52 Policy entrepreneurs, 20, 32–39, 46, 93, 112, 167, 169 Policymaker, 155 Policy-oriented learning, 31 Political context, 1 Political Science, 3 Popper, Karl, 22 Portfolio, 58, 59, 61 Positive learning environment, 45 Postdoc, 9 Post-truth, 7 PowerPoint, 85, 86 Preparation, 11, 43, 45, 51, 59–61, 65, 67, 73, 75, 77, 79, 82, 85, 88, 91, 92, 96–98, 102–104, 106, 111, 114, 116, 117, 120, 121, 123, 124, 128n2, 130–135, 137, 138, 142, 143, 169, 170 Private sector, 4, 38 Problem, 153 Problem solving, 7, 11, 55, 103 Procedural learning, 23 Procrastination, 29, 109, 155 Productivity, 155 Professional accreditation, 4 Professional development program, 47 Professional work placement, 47 Professor, 10, 20, 151 Protected characteristic, 47 Psychological-philosophical perspective, 22 Public opinion, 35 Public relations, 5 Public speaking, 8, 12, 46, 54, 56, 63, 99, 104, 105, 127, 128n2, 129, 133, 136, 137, 143, 168, 169

194 

INDEX

Q Qualitative data, 13, 148, 151, 160, 161 Quantitative data, 154 Quantitative methods, 11, 99, 102–104, 162, 170 R Race, 47, 171 ReCap, 61 Recording, 76–80, 82, 100, 103 Reflection, 8, 21, 23, 25, 30, 32, 34, 36, 37, 45, 46, 50, 52, 61, 62, 88, 92, 98, 101, 105–107, 109–112, 131–135, 137, 143, 163, 164, 167, 169, 170 Regulation, 5 Religion, 47 Remote working, 5, 49 Research question, 153 Research skills, 8, 12, 46, 54, 129, 133, 143, 150, 151, 157, 161 Residential educational experience, 81 Resolutions, 29, 54, 58, 59, 62, 64, 65, 131, 134–137, 139–143 Resource constraints, 152 Retention, 52, 79, 92, 111, 121, 123, 135, 143 Risk assessment, 148 Roadmap, 96, 151 Russell Group, 9 S Scholarship, 156 Scientific findings, 6 Secondary datasets, 162 Secondary school, 6, 83 Second year, 46, 47

Self-directed learning, 3 Self-reinforcing dynamic, 35 Seminar activities, 11, 50, 75, 84, 86, 88, 91, 92, 96, 97, 99, 105, 107, 109, 170 Single-Loop-Learning, 26 SIRI, 7 Skill, 167 Skilled labor, 5 Slack, 6 Small groups, 73, 81, 88, 95, 99, 101, 102, 134 Small Liberal Arts College, 1, 9 Smart, 8, 33, 45, 167 Social acceptance, 5 Social capital, 7 Social inequality, 93 Social media, 160 Social media manager, 4 Social networking, 7 Societal, economic and environmental challenges, 50, 167, 168 Societal shifts, 6, 22 Socio-economic background, 112, 171 Sociology, 3, 53 Specialist software, 161 SPSS, 161, 171 Stakeholder, 12, 127, 136, 137 STATA, 161 Student-centered, 11, 24, 43, 74, 76, 79, 91, 92, 99, 170 Students of Color, 8 Study abroad, 45, 47, 49, 66 Sub-discipline, 85 Supervision meeting, 148, 150, 158, 161 Supervisor, 158 Surface learning, 23 Sustainability, 3, 47, 50, 168, 171 Synchronous, 11, 76, 80–82, 88, 95, 172

 INDEX 

T Task, 5, 32, 99, 140, 157, 163 Teacher feedback, 44 Teacher training, 25 Teaching certificate program, 9 Teaching fellow, 9 Teaching methods, 9 Teaching pedagogy, 22 Teaching philosophy, 9 Team teaching, 50, 88 Teamwork, 3, 61, 129, 131 Technological advances, 5 Textbook, 79, 84, 103 Theoretical framework, 154 Theory, 154 Theory of Action, 25 Time, 152 Time zone, 81 Tour-de-table, 139 Transferable skill, 1 Transformative, 93, 120 Trial solution, 22, 28, 29 The Try, 34 Turnitin, 52, 67 Twitter, 76 U UK post-1992, 9 Undergraduate, 8, 151, 152, 155 Unions, 75 United Kingdom, 3, 75, 78 United Nations, 12, 53, 54, 56–59, 61–63, 65, 127, 127n1, 128n2, 129, 131, 138 United States, 9, 75, 132

University partnership, 47 Unlearning, 28 V Video, 5, 6, 76, 80, 81, 86, 87, 93 conferencing software, 6 conferencing solutions, 5 Virtual personal assistants, 6 Virtual study abroad, 49 Virtual teams, 7 Vocational work experience, 44 Voting, 134, 137, 141, 142 W Web developer, 4 White-collar job, 3 Widening participation, 50 Work environment, 19, 47, 48, 168, 173 Workplace, 1, 9, 76, 93, 112, 167, 173 Work placement, 49 Writer’s block, 155 Writing essays, 33, 155, 158, 160, 172 Written feedback, 52 Y Youtube, 80, 81, 130 Z Zoom, 6, 11, 80, 93, 94

195