Joe
Pika, political science, and Ralph Begleiter, communication, are team-teaching
a course entitled “The Road to the Presidency.”
They decided
that teaching a course about presidential politics in an election year
offered a terrific opportunity for their students.
“We
wanted the students to begin their analysis of events by actively monitoring
a major campaign,” Pika said.
So on Super
Tuesday, Pika and Begleiter had the class meet as if they were a working
national newsroom.
They’ve
also incorporated student involvement into the entire semester.
They worked
with staff in the PRESENT to add interactive components to their class
web page.
Students
use a fill-in-the-blank web form to submit annotations for, and links
to, web sites as part of a series of “watches” on advertising,
political conventions, the
media’s coverage of the campaign, polling and campaign-related
web sites.
“We
have the students ‘bird-dogging’ several different areas,”
Begleiter said, “so it’s not just the two of us searching
for relevant material. The students have broadened the search for information.”
“We
use the material the students post to prompt class discussions, and
some students are browsing the entire archive, not just the one ‘watch’
they’ve been assigned,” Begleiter said.
“In
some sense,” said Pika, “we’ve shifted more of the learning
burden on to the students—the newsroom, the ‘watches’
and the supplemental material.” “The course has been a great
experiment. “It has been a team effort, combining our academic
goals and the skills of the staff in the PRESENT to develop and polish
the technology we used.
“We
think we’ve exposed students to things to which they’d otherwise
not be exposed,” Begleiter said.
Joe Pika and Ralph Begleiter