Workshop 3 - Teaching In Context: Why And How Location Matters (Presented by the Teaching Section)

W318 - Teaching through Fractious Elections and Contentious Policies

Date: Jun 5 | Time: 12:00pm to 01:30pm | Location: SJA-252E

Chair/Président/Présidente : Leah Levac (University of Guelph)

Participants:
Rebecca Major (Yukon University)
Heather Millar (University of New Brunswick)
Laura Pin (Wilfrid Laurier University)

In each of the 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 academic years, there will be no less than seven elections across jurisdictions in present-day Canada, as well as many elections of both local and regional First Nation, Inuit, and Métis governments and political organizations. With these – alongside other elections around the world – come upticks in policy announcements and debates. These debates point to pressing challenges and can be both punctuated by extreme levels of rhetoric and stripped of nuance. At the same time, and through increasingly fragmented media access, it can be difficult to know which versions of ‘news’ students are accessing, if they are accessing any at all. This roundtable brings together scholars who teach about elections, and about contentious current policy/political issues, including housing/homelessness, climate change, and Indigenous-colonial state relations. Roundtable participants will discuss how they design their classes to respond to fractious election campaigns and contentious policy debates, including different assignment designs and assessment formats they use. We will discuss questions such as, “How do you teach about fractious elections and contentious policies?”, “How/do you use these to teach about core ideas in political science?”, “What opportunities do you offer students to grapple with these issues through course assignments?” and “Do you use intersectionality in this teaching and if so, how”? Our goal is for panelists to seed the conversation while inviting open discussion from everyone attending the workshop.