Teaching International Relations Program

Dear Mike,

Thank you for participating in TIRP outreach! This folder is for your four session reports. This is a public forum and we encourage your professors and teachers to review your journal entries for feedback. Make sure your report of classroom activity is appropriate for public viewing.

Remember:
1. Each entry must be submitted within a week or before the next session, whichever comes first.
2. Entries need to be at least 500 words. It is your responsibility to save a copy of your report.
3. Your reports should focus on the content of the TIRP session. Spend no more than one paragraph discussing logistics. Include the key IR concepts and specific student responses.
4. Select "Post Reply" not "New Topic" when submitting each entry. This will ensure that all your
reports are posted in a way that will be easy for CALIS staff, professors and teachers to read.


A CALIS staff member will review your entry each week and leave a posted message approving it toward your extra credit. Thank you for your participation in TIRP!
~~~~~
Report 1 - NOT SUBMITTED as of 10/22/09 - Alex
Report 1 - NOT APPROVED 10/22/09 - Alex
Your report is not 500 words. Also, focus more on the actual session (student response, activities, etc.) rather than what the TIRP program is and what you think it should be. Please post revision by 10/28/09.
Report 2 - NOT SUBMITTED as of 10/29/09 - Alex
Report 2 - APPROVED 11/5/09 - Alex
Report 3 - APPROVED 11/5/09 - Alex
Report 4 - APPROVED 11/12/09 - Alex

For our first session looked at China’s planned economy and the measures it takes to ensure stability as well as growth. The students read an NPR interview on the subject and answered questions regarding China’s development.

It was not easy for us to foster participation in the activity. The interest level in the activity varied amongst the students but was generally unenthusiastic. A few students participated fervently while some remained aloof. This was hardly surprising. It is difficult to promote focus and participation in a high school environment when the class is getting a break from its normal learning.

The classroom had a very loose atmosphere. The students talked a lot among themselves and with the teacher. It was hard to get everyone on the same page since many saw the session as a break from regular class than as a new part of it. I don’t think it’s very difficult to see why. International relations on the surface is typically not a stimulating field for highschoolers. I know I personally wasn’t very interested in it in high school. For them, the prospect of reading information and answering questions on it (essentially our activity) is not overly exciting and I don’t think I’d be too thrilled about doing it either.

While I think it is difficult to fuse IR with interactive activities, it is the only way to get students interested in thinking about IR at that level. My experience was slightly different last year, as there was some mild interest in my class on the subject. Outside of a couple students, there were few questions asked about the material or IR in general. The goal of TIRP should not be to teach IR to students. That is akin to imposing values on a different culture. TIRP should be focused on exposing IR-related ideas to students with the aim of stimulating thought and interest. While I’m sure this is the intended goal of TIRP, most of the activities feel too much like lectures.

Perhaps other classes are more conducive to lecture-oriented activities, but I think our class is not unique. I’m not one to conjure up creative activity ideas, but I think the activities in general should be more focused on the activity process rather than information content. For example, instead of our activity simply providing information about China, it should start by getting the students to think about our own lives and values and then juxtapose them with the Chinese. Information should be presented as applicable, not in an abstract way. Some activities do this well I think, but more should because that is how TIRP can have an impact. I wish I could be more specific but for now its just a thought to ponder. I definitely feel that my interactions with the students are fun and mind-opening and I hope that we can be the same for them.

For the second session of TIRP, we did an activity about China in relation to the concepts of good governance. In particular we focused on the one child policy it has carried out and its ethical implications. To give the students an idea of the implications we provided them with competing schools of ethical thought, which included utilitarianism and deontology. We demonstrated how China’s one child policy was supported by utilitarianism while it contradicted the tenants of deontology because it is justified by the ends although the means entail compromising individual liberty. We expanded on this analysis of the one child policy by looking at the motivations for China and contrasted competing motivations for policy in general. For example, we talked about short term vs long term policy goals and the policies meant to benefit individuals and those meant to benefit the community. Of course China’s policy was very characteristic of long term goals because it’s supposed to decrease the future population and has in mind the good of the community. To illustrate this “spectrum” of goals we used an overhead display of the goals on end of a spectrum with the opposing goals on the other side. The students then placed the policy where they thought it fit best. Most of the students understood that the policy represented communal values and long term interests. Most of them also determined that the policy was fair because it was for the good of the population, which they tended to value over individual freedoms. I doubt many of them really felt so strongly about that, but they tended to understand China’s reasoning for carrying out its policies. I found this interesting, since most students in America are infused with values of liberty and choice. Again though, I wouldn’t make too much of it since the students were more or less getting by with the activity and did not seem too invested in it.
I thought the class did pretty well with this activity. There was definitely some interest in the subject matter made apparent by some of the questions we were getting. For the most part the students asked about China and what life is like for the people there. Their interest helped to secure my belief that the best way to get high school students interested in International Relations is to apply it to their own lives. When the students learn about how citizens live in other nations and then think about how it contradicts their own lives and experience, I think it resonates with them a little bit. I did my best to emphasize the contrast of life in China with America to get them thinking about this, and I believe that to some extent it worked. However, the interest is really only concentrated within a handful of students and most did not voice any opinions or contributions to the discussion. I have no problem with that. As long as they are respectful that is really all that matters. After all the experience is about teaching them about our college experiences and learning about their experiences, not IR theory and foreign policy.

For the third session of TIRP my colleagues and I did an activity about different types of governance. Basically we focused on democratic governance vs. authoritarian forms of governance. We focused on tow facets of the issue. The first was how you establish government in a state that lacks a political order. We talked about the perils in trying to impose a form of government on other states and the problems that may arise with democracy. We focused on Iraq for this of course since it is a very pertinent issue to their lives and the subject. We went over some terms with them to help them understand the issues better, such as sectarian violence which can erupt without a strong central government to keep different groups together. In this sense we tied the activity to functions of government, which we discussed in the first week.
By demonstrating the problems that come with establishing government, we tried to shed some light on why authoritarian government arises in the first place. Basically, it brings stability to states that often have histories of conflict and instability. After talking about the philosophy of authoritarianism, we gave them another radio interview, this time with a professor who talked about a “new” type of authoritarianism. Basically this new authoritarianism is a product of the end of the cold war, which forces totalitarian regimes to legitimize themselves in the eyes of the international community by posing as democratic states. States such as Russia and Venezuela achieve this by holding rigged elections that are designed to keep them in power. They also tend to be endowed with natural resource wealth and therefore keep their “constituents” happy by showering them with market distorting subsidies. The focus was on Hugo Chavez, but the author also touched on Putin, Suharto in Indonesia, and Mugabe in Zimbabwe. The students hopefully took from the case study that authoritarianism still exists in the world today but assumes a less obvious form. We also tied the activity to our talk on China last week by to illustrate how not all forms of authoritarian governance are despotic. It is capable of fulfilling most of the functions of government, though at the cost of individual liberty. Hopefully we got them thinking about the trade-offs of authoritarian and democratic governance and what it is they value.
The activity went pretty well again this week. Of the 6 groups, two did a great job, two were focused at times and not at others, and two remained pretty aloof. Some of them seemed to be interested though in these foreign leaders like Chavez and Putin that they had not heard of before. Overall though, it wasn’t the most interest-stimulating activity as much as we tried to make it that. Maybe the activity gave one or two of them some appreciation of the system of government we live under, though I’m skeptical. We hoped to achieve this since it is after all a government class and their current section is about the US constitution.

For the final session of TIRP, we did an activity to simulate foreign policy decisions made by specific countries. The point was to get the students thinking about what different factors are considered when a country formulates its foreign policy. We split them up into the countries of Brazil, the US, India, Australia, Congo, and Columbia to represent a wide spectrum of national interests. The scenarios we gave them ranged from dealing with drug trafficking, global warming, and sectarian violence in other states.
For drug trafficking, we simply demonstrated that countries with high rates of drug use and crime, such as Columbia and Brazil, would be interested in working with Interpol to crack down on international drug smuggling. The US and Australia are also interested because they have wealthy populations that produce a high demand for drugs. For the second scenario, we tried to demonstrate the issues regarding how countries respond to climate change. We focused mainly on the US and India for this one since they represent two very different viewpoints. The former is the top polluter per capita in the world and has plenty of stake in climate change becoming a reality, so it must craft policy to decrease its total pollution and mitigate the potential effects. India also has a major stake in climate change policy, since failure to do something will result in widespread famine, drought, and likely population unrest in its vast nation. However, India is young in its modernization process and does not bear the guilt for the current CO2 levels that are causing global warming. Therefore it will do what it can to push for change while deferring the costs to the rich world where it feels they belong. Basically, global warming is a global issue, but getting the entire globe to act on it is a challenging and complex endeavor. For the final scenario, we analyzed a situation where ethnic violence breaks out in a country where one of the groups wants to establish its own separate state. Countries such as India and Congo then, who have their own ethnic groups with nationalist sentiment, will want this violence to be suppressed by the state to demonstrate to their own groups that sectarian violence is not tolerated. Others may be more sympathetic to the cause of the “freedom fighters” depending on their ethnicity and relations with the host country. The point was merely to illustrate to the students that these internal conflicts have international implications.
The students definitely seemed to enjoy this activity the most which didn’t surprise us. They did not enjoy writing down answers to questions in our previous 3 activities, so they enjoyed being able to just think and discuss. Participation was not total by any measures, but almost every country at least contributed in some way to the activity. It is a good activity, though one in which the scenarios will need to be tweaked to be relevant to the various countries, otherwise some (Australia) will always be irrelevant and their group will not have as much opportunity to participate. Overall TIRP was a positive experience this semester. If any of the students got anything out of our 4 weeks of activities, I hope it was that international relations happens and has some interesting points of study. That’s all I can really expect.