Theme Panel: Teaching Political Communication in Crisis Times

September 5, 2025 APSA Annual Meeting, Theme Panels Comments Off on Theme Panel: Teaching Political Communication in Crisis Times

Co-sponsored by Division 38: Political Communication

In-Person Roundtable

Participants:

  • (Chair) Michael Bossetta, Lund University, Sweden
  • (Presenter) M. Brielle Harbin, United States Naval Academy
  • (Presenter) Danielle K Brown, Michigan State University
  • (Presenter) Ben Epstein, DePaul University
  • (Presenter) Katherine Haenschen, Northeastern University
  • (Presenter) Daniel Kreiss, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • (Presenter) Lindsay Hoffman, University of Delaware
  • (Presenter) Ashley Muddiman, University of Kansas

Session Description:
As political communication scholars, one of the primary ways we address global democratic threats is through our teaching. How and what we teach influences the next generation of citizens and equips them to become change agents in society. However, we currently lack a common platform to share, discuss, and develop best practices for teaching our discipline. In this roundtable discussion, we reflect upon the key challenges in teaching political communication, share our experiences from diverse courses and classrooms, and invite a broader discussion of how we might foster an inclusive and impactful teaching network for political communication.

A specific focus on teaching political communication is especially important during times of anti-democratic extremism, polarization, and global crises, where broader societal divisions over race, class, gender, religion, and citizenship status are reflected in our classrooms. In addition, the course material we teach is often highly salient in public discourse and requires regular updating to keep pace with rapid developments in the field and politics. These developments include ongoing changes in the ways that political messages are communicated and the need to develop digital media literacy skills specifically tailored to help navigate the media and political worlds of today and tomorrow. Worryingly, right wing attacks that increasingly politicize higher education threaten not only academic freedom but also our ability to facilitate critical debates in the classroom. These challenges are best addressed through a diverse range of perspectives that our global community of scholars can provide.

Therefore, this roundtable addresses the following questions:

1) What are the discipline-specific challenges we face in teaching political communication? How can we address these challenges as a community?
2) What best practices can we observe in designing course themes, learning outcomes, and teaching methods in political communication?
3) How can we design and share teaching materials that are informed by, and contribute to, the scholarship of teaching and learning?
4) What teaching practices can we foster to better align our teaching with APSA’s mission of diversity, equity, and inclusion on a global scale?
5) What concrete initiatives can we take to increase the effectiveness and impact of our teaching in addressing global crises?

Roundtable participants bring novel perspectives to these questions from a wide range of teaching experiences. Participants’ teaching expertise covers a wide range of political communication courses (theory, method, and supervision), levels of instruction (high school, Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD), and institutional contexts (US and EU).