Search

What are the qualities of the "now" that make teaching and learning an urgent, if not a moral, imperative? A group of faculty, administrators, and educational developers respond to this question with individual narratives bound together by a common theme of reflective practice in times of crises to help faculty become more resilient in preparing for ongoing upheavals and unexpected crises while pursuing more inclusive communities. Our personal narratives reflect on the subjects of flexibility in the face of crises, technology and ethics, study abroad exposure to ethical challenges, students' growing anxiety and mental health, modeling metacognition with peers and students, and considerations of pedagogy in uncertain times. Our individual stories of practice will be helpful to teaching and learning center colleagues who work with faculty and to faculty themselves as they operate in times of crises.

This paper argues for a reimagining of education abroad that fuses short-term programming with some kind of experiential research component led by home campus disciplinary faculty, especially those in the sciences, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, in order to better integrate the study abroad program into the core undergraduate curriculum. To show how this could be done, this paper: (1) provides a brief background on study abroad; (2) reviews the relevant literature on the learning goals, program assessment, and faculty engagement in education abroad programs; (3) examines the current state of academic integration within study abroad; (4) explores the growth in undergraduate research at both home and overseas; and (5) identifies the unique opportunities represented in the extensive patterns of international faculty research collaborations, and explains how these patterns could be leveraged into new kinds of study abroad programs. The argument is supported with evidence of innovative programs at several American universities. A bibliography is included.

Given the realities of external pressures on our daily lives, work-life balance is important now more than ever. Although we often advocate for work-life balance, are we equipped with the appropriate tools and an adequate support network to handle what life might throw at us? How do we continue to be productive when dealing with distressing matters that we seemingly have little control over? Contributors from different areas of the world, with a diversity of voices, offer their perspectives on how to navigate life's obstacles while continuing to meet the expectations of departments, universities, and the profession to achieve career success and fulfillment. This forum highlights authors at different career stages, who have lived through a myriad of experiences including singleness/dating, marriage, pregnancy, parenting, serving as a caretaker, the death of a loved one, toxic work environment, and personal health to share their experiences and provide insights on how to cope with adversity at any point in one's academic career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the challenges of teaching Cold War politics to the twenty-first-century student? How might the millennial generation be educated about the political science theories and concepts associated with this period in history? A college student today, who grew up in the post-Cold War era with the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, smart phones, laptops, and tablets, demonstrates a learning style that responds better to interaction and the use of multimedia in the classroom. What is an innovative teaching technique to accommodate this active-learning style? How might college professors teach undergraduates about a significant historical event such as the Cold War, when most were born after it ended? We argue that for the millennial generation Hollywood blockbusters, when used in an engaging manner beyond merely showing clips, are effective pedagogical tools that make abstract Cold War theories and concepts more understandable, identifiable, and still relevant. Our findings reveal that engaging the Millennials with "big" post-Cold War entertaining movies like "Crimson Tide" and "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country", in two undergraduate international relations courses, not only increased student comprehension and knowledge about the Cold War but also enhanced their ability to relate the era to world politics today.

This forum explores how societal contexts affect how instructors teach introductory undergraduate courses in international relations (IR), global politics, and international studies. Contributors teach at universities in China, Ecuador, India, Morocco, South Africa, the United Kingdom–Scotland, and the United States. Because instructors vary the structure, content, and pedagogical approaches in their courses (and perhaps most in their introductory courses) to account for their students' backgrounds, conditions, and paradigms, the discipline can learn about contemporary global patterns by putting regionally diverse pedagogical approaches in conversation with each other. A concluding essay explores emergent patterns of a global IR and sets up points for further conversation. The authors hope sharing their pedagogical strategies will inspire instructors to devote the creativity necessary to improve how they teach introductory IR courses in their own societal contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the existing literature in the FDI-political risk nexus has focused on the creation of economic models to assess foreign investment decisions in the presence of political risk. This is entirely legitimate and valuable as foreign investors are interested in assessing the political risk climate of their investment location. However, not much research has been done to assess how FDI could affect political risk. Globalization implies an increasing amount of cross-border investment and trade flows. For some countries, FDI is a huge component of their GDP. Since FDI is a composite bundle of capital stock, knowledge and technology (Balasubramanyam et al, 1996) and represents "International investment made with the objective of obtaining a lasting interest, by a resident entity in one economy in an enterprise resident in another economy" (OECD, 2000), we postulate that because of this stakeholder commitment, FDI could affect a country's political risk level. The management literature has it that political risk measures the stability of individual countries based on factors grounded in government, society, security, and the economy (Bremmer, 2005). We expand on this notion to investigate whether, and if so, how FDI affects political risk? We believe that the contribution of our study is specifically in examining this reverse relationship running from FDI to political risk. In this preliminary paper we test this hypothesis for a sample of thirty countries in various stages of economic development and regime types over the 1984-2012 period. Preliminary results indicate that countries with increased FDI inflows demonstrate decreased levels of political risk. Although there are variations across countries, country groups that are considered developed and full democracies tend to exhibit the lowest levels of political risk. Our ongoing research is examining a sample of 140 countries using both time series and panel data techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the lack of participation of sciences, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) studying students from U.S. colleges and universities in study abroad programs. The article also mentions that the students’ decline in participation is due to reduced STEM field faculty’s motivation and their interest in the university’s curriculum internationalization.