The APSA Award for Teaching Innovation honors a wide range of new directions in teaching by recognizing a political scientist who has developed an effective new approach to teaching in the discipline.
Citation from the Award Committee:
Dr. Shamira Gelbman’s commitment to centering how students engage with the subject matter appears across her teaching in the variety of assignments and experiential learning embedded throughout her courses. Her innovation in teaching is exemplified in her Caught Up in a Crisis of Victory Project with students in her Politics of the Civil Rights Movement course. The Caught Up in a Crisis of Victory Project started with Dr. Gelbman’s own research at the Library of Congress where she found a program and participant list for a conference of 45 Black leaders in January 1965 – after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. From this beginning, and additional archival documents, such as A. Philip Randolph’s calls for meetings of Black leaders to plan a course forward at the risk of losing momentum to the victory of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (or being “caught up in a crisis of victory,” in Randolph’s words), Dr. Gelbman created an in-depth process of preparation, simulation, and debrief that saw students deeply engage with the material. The depth of the activity went beyond most simulations, took students on a deep dive of the material, and helped them see the full complexity of a period in the movement history – and understand the full complexity of political movements that occur across people, organizations, and conflicting priorities. This in-depth project is a creative way of engaging students in the political and organizing aspects of the civil rights movement specific to the time period, but also illuminates for students what political processes look like on the part of political advocates. This deep exploration was made possible by the amount of work Dr. Gelbman took to develop materials for the Caught Up in a Crisis of Victory Project. The Project connected students to archival work as a source of political science research and learning, and helped students have an engaged stake in learning more. This building and reinforcement of intellectual curiosity first modeled for students what active political science research can look like, and got students engaged in a way that permitted deep learning of political processes. The innovation of this approach illuminated the best of what political science education can do for students as learners and as engaged community members. It is a fantastic example of what political science can offer to undergraduate education broadly.
Shamira Gelbman is a Professor of Political Science at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. She teaches a wide range of American politics courses, including Politics of the Civil Rights Movement, Election Polling & Public Opinion, and Sociology & Politics of Health. Her research focuses on American political development, social movements, interest groups and lobbying, and civil rights policy. Her work has appeared in Polity and the Journal of Political Science Education, and she is the author of The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Second Reconstruction (Temple University Press, 2021).
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Laura Roost (Chair) of Creighton University, Charles Turner of California State University, Chico, and Liz Norell of the University of Mississippi.