Call for Proposals: Teaching Introduction to American Politics in Times of Uncertainty | Deadline: June 8, 2025

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Call for Proposals
APSA Virtual Teaching & Learning Symposium: Teaching Introduction to American Politics in Times of Uncertainty

Application Deadline: June 8, 2025  | Submit Your Proposals Here

The American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Teaching and Learning Program is pleased to announce a call for proposals for a small cohort of political scientists to participate in a virtual teaching and learning symposium that will meet on Zoom between July 21-25, 2025. APSA’s teaching and learning symposia provide a workshop environment where scholar-educators with similar goals can come together to share their own practices and research related to teaching and create new teaching resources for their courses. Led by Michelle D. Deardorff (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga) and Allison Rank (University of Northern Iowa), the theme of this symposium is Teaching Introduction to American Politics in Times of Uncertainty.

Workshop Details

Symposium Theme

Political science instructors, especially those who are teaching Introduction to American Politics/Government and other American Politics courses, are facing challenges to the traditional or textbook approaches to these classes as the current political environment in the United States is ever-changing.  This symposium seeks to bring together a small cohort of political science scholar-educators to workshop, co-create, and discuss teaching resources, techniques, and strategies for teaching American Politics in times of political uncertainty and change.

This symposium is particularly interested in answering questions related to teaching the Introduction to American Politics Course in the current political environment including, but not limited to:

  • How are you changing the approach/structure of your course?
  • What are the assumptions underlying the course? How have these changed over time?
  • How do we help students distinguish between policies they disagree with and actual threats to democratic processes and structures?
  • How do you respond to current political events in meaningful ways without letting it drive your course?
  • Have you incorporated historical or comparative insights into your course?

The goals of the symposium are three-fold:

  1. To provide an inclusive space where participants can build supportive relationships with other scholar-educators who teach courses on American Politics, with a particular focus on the introductory-level course.
  2. To present, discuss, and co-create innovative class activities, readings, or assignments for the Introduction to American Politics/Government class that help students understand the changing US political landscape.
  3. To contribute teaching materials to an APSA Educate resource collection on American Politics.

Your teaching resource need not be publication ready, only something you have found useful in the introductory class and are interested in developing and sharing. The final resource collection will be shared on APSA Educate in advance of the fall 2025 semester for other faculty to browse and use in their own classes.

Possible resources/techniques include but are not limited to:

  • simulations/games/active learning exercises
  • readings and how you incorporate them (readings can include: open educational resources, multimedia sources, public scholarship, blog posts, etc.)
  • online tools and activities
  • techniques/tools that support an inclusive classroom
  • approaches to facilitating civic dialogue and discourse
  • activities and assignments focusing on media literacy

We encourage applications from political science faculty at all stages of their careers, from a range of institutions, including universities and two- and four-year colleges. Advanced graduate students are also encouraged to apply.

Applicants should have experience teaching on issues related to American Politics and be active APSA members at the time of the symposium.

Schedule

This workshop will meet virtually for three sessions, and participants should expect to work with their small groups outside of these sessions during the week of July 21-25.

  • Monday, July 21 and Tuesday, July 22 from 11 am ET- 5 pm ET: Participants present their own pedagogical techniques related to teaching the Introduction to American Politics course. Presentations are short, allowing for significant discussion from the group, in a workshop-style atmosphere.
  • Wednesday, July 23 and Thursday, July 24: Small groups determine their own schedule to meet and work on team-based collaborations, developing new resources to innovate the introduction to American Politics/Government classroom. Teams are constructed during the symposium based on participants’ interests. Each team then decides what kind of resource(s) they want to produce (e.g. in-class exercise, simulation, social media project).
  • Friday, July 25 from 11 am ET- 5 pm ET: Full symposium will meet again to share team-based collaborations, wrap-up discussion, and discuss next steps.
  • Monday, August 4: Due date for APSA Educate resources.  The resultant teaching resources are disseminated through APSA Educate, political science’s virtual teaching resource library. In addition, participants who present on substantive research issues will be able to submit blog posts to be featured in APSA Educate regarding their contributions to the symposium and what they learned and developed from interacting with other participants. Symposium participants come away from the event with new insights into teaching and research in their area, with concrete teaching resources that they can use in their own courses.

How to Apply

Proposals should be submitted online here and include:

  • Recent CV, including detailed information on teaching experience
  • 250-word abstract summarizing the resource or topic you plan to present at the symposium
  • 250-word description of your motivation and goals for participating in the symposium
  • Brief description of your institution and how American Politics fits into your department’s curriculum.

The application deadline is Sunday, June 8, 2025. Successful applicants will be notified by June 16, 2025. Course registration fees ($35) may be paid online in advance of the symposium. Please note that symposium participants do need to be active APSA members. For more information, visit the Teaching and Learning Symposia website and/or contact teaching@apsanet.org.

Meet the Co-Facilitators

Michelle D. Deardorff is the Adolph S. Ochs Professor of Government at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC). In addition to her traditional research, she is a co-author of Constitutional Law in Contemporary America (3E Cambridge UP) and American Democracy Now (9E McGraw Hill), and sole author of a new text, Race and the Law in the US  (Cambridge UP 2025). Before coming to UTC in 2013, Deardorff spent a decade teaching at Jackson State, a historic black university in Mississippi, and another 12 years at Millikin University, a small private college in Illinois. She is a founding faculty member of the Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy, a coalition of academics who promote civic engagement and popular sovereignty through the study of the struggle for civil rights in the United States. Her twenty-year engagement (1997-2017) with these colleagues resulted in the provision of pedagogical resources, workshops, tours, and two museums designed to aid educators, students, and community members in understanding the promise of democracy. Most recently, Deardorff co-chaired the APSA Ishiyama Presidential Taskforce on Rethinking Political Science Education; its final report was delivered to the discipline in 2024. 

Allison Rank is the inaugural Director of the Center for Civic Education at the University of Northern Iowa. Her research agenda focuses on political science pedagogy, campus-based civic engagement, and pop culture & politics. Before moving to the University of Northern Iowa, Rank spent eleven years at SUNY Oswego. While there, she co-created an undergraduate curriculum centered on American Political Development, managed the campus-wide voter mobilization program Vote Oswego, and coordinated SUNY Oswego’s broader civic engagement efforts. Recent publications include Civic Pedagogies: Teaching Engagement in an Era of Divisive Politics (Palgrave 2024) for which she served as co-editor along with Lauren C. Bell and Carah Ong Whaley. She is the recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (May 2024) as well as the Barbara Burch Award for Faculty Leadership in Civic Engagement (AASCU’s American Democracy Project, June 2024). 

Visit APSA’s Teaching Symposia page for information about this program and to view past events.