Jamie Frueh and Jeremy Youde
Constructivism is not simply a tool for research. It is also a vital element of critical pedagogy in an undergraduate International Relations classroom. Taking a constructivist approach to teaching is not about presenting only one perspective or making all of our students acolytes of Onuf, Wendt and Finnemore. Instead, tactical Constructivism in the classroom focuses on providing students with both a holistic introduction to International Relations and an opportunity for them to reflect deeply on why they believe what they believe about the world and its dynamics.
We are both active scholars (who first met over their shared interests in how Constructivism provided an invaluable tool for understanding South African politics and health policies), but we are also engaged teachers. We have taught at very different types of institutions; Frueh (JF) has taught at selective mid-sized universities in the nation’s capital and an 1800-student liberal arts college in a small community two hours outside Washington, DC, while Youde’s (JY) teaching experience ranges from a selective liberal arts college in Iowa to a regional comprehensive university in Minnesota to his current position at a national flagship institution in the Australian capital city. In these environments in which we teach, we do our best to reach out to students and engage them in the material – and do so by employing constructivist tactics. This reflects both our own theoretical predilections and our observed experience about the methods that interest and excite students in the classroom.
When we sat down to think about how best to explain how and why we use Constructivism as a tactic in our International Relations classrooms, we concluded that the creativity and dynamics of a constructivist pedagogy were not well suited to a traditional research chapter format. The best way for us to explain what we do and how it can be used by others is to talk about it. What follows comes from a conversation we had with each other (edited for clarity) about teaching and Constructivism – a conversation that helped both of us clarify our own approaches and learn from each other.
In our conversation, we focus on five key themes: how we came to Constructivism; how constructivist tactics affect student development; the tools and techniques we use in the classroom; grading and assessment; and constructivist pedagogy in teaching and research.
JY: The first exposure I had to International Relations, I hated it. It was counting guns, bombs and planes – very numerical. “Look, we have more bombs than this other country, so this is why we are on top.” It wasn’t until another teacher raised the idea of thinking about what those guns and bombs actually mean that things started to click for me. Why does this country have so many weapons, and who are they worried about? Why is North Korea’s nuclear weapon program so controversial when Israel also has nuclear weapons? If we are looking straight at a material sense, they are both in contravention of international law – but only one of these programs raises concerns for the United States. That class, that approach, was the first time that I realized that International Relations isn’t just about raw numbers or some objective standard, that it’s about the meaning behind these numbers that give them any sort of explanatory power. This is what got me into International Relations, and it’s this same sort of “a-ha” moment that I want to provide to my students. I didn’t necessarily know at the time that this was Constructivism, but this approach to understanding the world spoke to me. Why are we counting things? Why are we prioritizing issues? Who do we consider friends? Those are the important questions that resonated with my undergraduate self, and I think they resonate with students in general. Context matters.
JF: Because my research uses political identity to explore social and political dynamics, it would be reasonable to think that I came to Constructivism because it handles identity well. But the reason I became a constructivist is more fundamental. When I first encountered it in grad school, Constructivism hit a tuning fork inside me. I felt like its social paradigm of reality articulated these amorphous truths I had been carrying around but had been unable to able to explain. Constructivists directed my attention in new ways and pushed me to frame what I was interested in exploring as political identity. But, really, I gravitated toward Constructivism because I think it’s an accurate description of how societies work. I think the epistemological and ontological assumptions in Constructivism make me a better researcher and a better teacher.
If I approach the world as an epistemological agnostic, meaning I can’t know what’s true, in effect I live as if some things are true, which means I base my research and teaching in a contingent ontology. How does that play out? I would argue that the word reality should apply not to those things that exist, but to those things society designates as important. If society says something is important, then it functions as “real” for people embedded in that society. Societies ignore lots of things that exist, and they pay a lot of attention to some things that may or may not exist. Instead of spending our time arguing about existence, let’s focus on what societies designate as important to them.
If that’s the case, then what we’re doing as educators is bringing students into the surrounding contextual reality. We live in a liberal democracy, which means the individuals are supposed to participate in politics in an explicit way. As teachers, we are essentially authorizing our students to be participants in the larger system by giving them practice sorting through complex ideas and working through problems with other people. That is what I think I should be doing as a constructivist educator. My students are going to go out and participate in the construction of that reality, and I want them to be good at it.
JY: Right, and this translates to the international level, too. A lot of students may be vaguely interested in other countries, but they haven’t had a chance to travel extensively or experience other countries directly. Even if we can’t actually physically take students and give them those sorts of experiences, we can help them to develop the sort of mindset that allows them to understand the different issues and ideas that societies see as important. We can give them the tools to see how these other identities are valid and make sense. That takes them a long way. I can apply Constructivism in the classroom so students can start to understand the world around them and how they are going to play a part in that world.
Constructivism is also an incredibly handy tool for helping students get past the idea that other countries make irrational decisions. Other countries do things that may not make sense to a student sitting in a classroom in the United States and who hasn’t had the chance to move past her or his own sense of what is important. It’s our job to help those students understand the realities and identities that resonate for other countries. Instead of thinking that another country is crazy, let’s use Constructivism as a way to get inside the heads of the leaders of those countries. Let’s say, this is a different sort of experience, and it comes with a different sort of history, a different sort of culture, and a different sort of context. If I can’t understand those underlying dynamics and how those affect how a state gets to this point in time, then I am going to have a really hard time trying to understand the sort of policy decisions that they are making now or the future trajectories that they might pursue. It’s not about validating or invalidating the decisions states are making; it’s about using Constructivism in order to understand what is happening and why.
JF: Exactly. I try to create classroom environments in which my students take the question, “How can they think that?” seriously and sincerely instead of as a way to dismiss others. The project becomes exploring why others see the world so differently and why it seems completely rational to them. It’s about opening them up and confusing their understanding of the world they were born into. We’re all born into a society whose purpose is to get everybody to line up in a more or less coherent way to move forward on some broad goals. In order to do that, there are these guardrails and rules and people enforcing how you are supposed to do things and think about things. Part of my job in teaching world politics is to point out that not everybody in this world lives by our rules and our values. In a perfect world, students would already have this sort of understanding and experience before they get to college, but that unfortunately isn’t often the case.
JY: If it is not happening earlier in their educational experiences, it’s incumbent upon us to make sure that experience does happen.
JF: Right. It complicates this idea that there is truth with a capital T. For a lot of students, they have people warning them to be careful of coming to college because it will “change” them in bad ways. But we should “change” students. It’s part of the mission of the undergraduate education. Our job is to teach them how to think and what thinking feels like. If social reality is constructed, it’s good to question why things are done, even if you end up agreeing with your original position in the end.
JY: It’s not that you are wrong or that the ideas that you come to college with are bad. It’s not telling students that you have to change. It’s just getting them to understand where their ideas are coming from and why.
JF: It’s part of being an adult. There’s this process of understanding that what we consider “knowledge” is a contingent decision. That’s just the first step, and that’s usually enough for many students in their first year. Over the course of their undergraduate careers, I want to get them to understand the process so that, by the time they graduate, they can participate in that process of creating knowledge claims. They can go out into the world, be part of the system of knowledge, and add to what we consider knowledge.
JY: That’s precisely why I put so much emphasis on teaching theory, even in introductory courses. Students get so intimidated by it precisely because of these ideas about knowledge and received wisdom. There’s this assumption that, because so many of the pieces were written so long ago, they must be right. They start thinking, “Who am I to decide if this is right or wrong?” No, no – you are exactly the right people to be questioning this. Don’t worry about the specific language, but go with your gut level instinct. How are these writers coming to their understandings, what sort of context is it coming out of, and how does that affect the sort of decisions that result? At a certain point, students get it. The light switches on. They use these constructivist means – even though they don’t necessarily lead to constructivist ends – and they engage. It’s fascinating to see when they realize that they can and should.
JF: You get some students who come to college and are totally ready for this for whatever reason. Maybe they had some high school teacher who engaged them, or they come from a family that always watched the news and talked about it. There are people ready to talk about politics and think in that way.
But I get a lot of students who are taking my classes simply for general education credit who don’t want to engage. They’ve developed a habit from high school where they expect professors to tell them what they need to know. Education becomes about knowing the right formula to solve for a specific, known, pre-determined answer. In my classes, I treat politics as the stuff that’s not settled yet. We get to hash through these kinds of issues, and we get to participate in the process by which some of this stuff might get settled in their lifetimes. Our society settled whether slavery is a good thing or not. That was politics, and we went through a terrible, difficult process to sort through it and now the country has decided that it’s not OK. Historical examples are helpful, but sometimes students can see this process better with examples from global politics, when the issues don’t feel quite so close to home and they don’t start by getting defensive. So, should antiretroviral drugs be given away at generic prices even thought their patents haven’t run out yet? Smart people disagree about that, and we can participate in the process of sorting through this kind of thorny issue.
This means part of my job is to confuse students. If they are confused, they are uncomfortable. If they are uncomfortable, they are going to work to become less uncomfortable and so practice the processes to try to figure these things out for themselves. That is a very different model of pedagogy from telling students the meaning of something or asking them to memorize how many nuclear warheads each side has.
JY: In some ways, it’s like the agent-structure debate at the class level, because we are trying to empower students to become agents. There’s this structure in place, and it can have an effect on you, but you can have an effect on it, too. We want you to have that sense of agency. We want to make you uncomfortable, but then also give you the implements to resettle yourself.
There’s a nuance that has to go into this process, too. I want students to critique arguments and ideas, and I think that is absolutely valuable for them – but sometimes students will equate the idea of critiquing an argument with hating it. They will assume that a critique is inherently negative, so they either go overboard with the vitriol or they resist saying anything that could potentially look negative. Just because we are critiquing something doesn’t mean that we hate it.
JF: Yes, I’m trying to shake my students from that kind of complacency and give them the mechanisms and tools to live in that space where systems are negotiated. I tell them they should treat every person they encounter in class – authors, me, classmates – as if they are a used car dealer trying to sell them something. I want them to step back from the normal pedagogical process. If politics is the process of settling things, we authorize them to be participants in the negotiations. To be a full participant in a late-modern, liberal democracy, you are supposed to help sort good from bad through evaluating and expressing your opinions. That’s not really what most professors are teaching them to do. It can be hard to justify a liberal arts education in an environment where the primary question seems to be how will this class help me get a job? The answer, I think, is practicing these processes should help with any kind of job because these are transferable competencies that you’ll be able to go in to an employer and say, “I’ll be able to help figure that out.”
JY: Building off of that, part of what I find is fun and fascinating about teaching something like global health politics is that often times, students will approach the course thinking that that we know what causes diseases and we can count how many people get sick. They think that this is a technocratic issue, and I use these constructivist tactics to get them to dig into the subject matter. I want them to see how counting the number of sick people, for example, comes with all these other sort of assumptions. How are we counting? Who are we counting? What does this tell us about the global health agenda? Which issues are being prioritized, and who is prioritizing them? Once we start to dig in, we can see that this is all inherently a political process even though it’s got this veneer of objectivity. And this process, recognizing the political processes that go into all of these decisions within the international community, is not unique to global health.
JF: Do you think that our topics are what make your courses constructivist, or is it more about particular pedagogical tactics? For example, I use a lot of discussions in groups of three or four because I believe students should interact with people with different ideas and should have practice articulating their perspectives. Some groups are consistent throughout the semester. Other times they are just people sitting close by. But I frame the conversations as practice working with others to sort through complex problems, and tell them it is OK to revise their opinions based on the conversation. These small groups get everyone talking, hearing their own voices bouncing off the wall in an environment in which they are authorized to try out ideas. This is different from a large group discussion because everyone, not just a select few brave ones, experience themselves as authors of ideas that get inserted into the conversation. I’m willing to sacrifice time in front of the classroom to let them practice this.
JY: This is where I find simulations really useful – get students to adopt roles, defend those ideas, and try to come to some sort of agreement, but only by remaining true to the worldviews of the actors they are representing. It’s not about me preordaining the outcome; it’s about trying to provide that opportunity for students to try things out and get inside other people’s heads to try to understand these other sorts of contexts. You have to assume this worldview, assume these identities, assume this understanding of the issue – and recognize that we may not succeed in this, which is totally fine because that’s also a feature of the international community. I don’t want you to go for harmony for the sake of harmony because that’s not how the international system operates. Be consistent with those sorts of positions, and I think students really get into that, and really respond to that. In a way, it’s a useful tool for crushing their dreams. That sounds meaner than it probably is, but a lot of times they’ll come to me with some idealistic notion about how the world works. It’s not that I want to completely tell them that the world is a horrible, horrible place or anything like that, but I want them to understand that it’s not necessarily the case that anyone is acting in good faith. These worldviews, these identities – they matter for understanding success and failure in the international community, and we can’t understand those processes without understanding those worldviews and identities. I want students to see that realism or liberalism isn’t necessarily right, and that those theories come with their own ideas about how states act and the identities and ideas from which they are operating.
I don’t think this is about me trying to push my worldview and theoretical foundations on students. I think it’s more about me wanting to develop their own worldviews and theoretical foundations. How do you come to understand the world that is around you and these topics we discuss? I care less about the specific worldview than the process of coming to one. I want to give you the tools to try and come to some sort of understanding. I want to provide you with a lot of different avenues for doing that. Simulations are one technique for doing that, and some students really respond to that, but it’s not the only tool to use. For some students, simulations really aren’t going to work for them for whatever reasons, but if we’re also doing reflection papers and small group discussions, we’re also building these other sorts of pedagogical tools into the classroom. Hopefully, something is going to resonate with the students and they’re going to be able to think these ideas and how they can inform their worldviews and processes for arriving at those worldviews.
JF: One of the things that I do – and it didn’t really occur to me that it was based on using Constructivism as a tactic until just now – is I tell my students that I want them to use “I” in their papers. For the most part, their high school teachers beat the idea of using “I” out of them because a paper should be all about the writer telling the reader everything “we” know about the topic. Their arguments need to be supported by research, but the arguments and knowledge claims are theirs and they should take ownership of them. Many of my students find that to be a relief because they don’t need to pretend to know everything about a topic. They need to say what they found and what they think about it. Using “I” implies that others may see it differently, and even that their own perspectives might change if more research revealed more complexity.
JY: Like you said, students should take some sort of ownership. I keep telling my students, when you’re making an argument, I want you to take a stand on this issue and make this your own. Show me how you’re getting there. I may not necessarily agree with you, but I need to know how you got there because I can’t be inside your brain. I can’t know everything that you have been reading. What I can see is what you’ve put on the page here. So own up to this argument and provide me with something so that I can trace those steps of how you got from the prompt I gave you to the argument that you submitted. Take me through your process.
JF: I think the common thread about these tactics is that they are very student-centered approaches to the classroom, as opposed to being knowledge-centered or professor-centered approaches. It’s not that students won’t get knowledge or that I don’t play a role, but these constructivist tactics make students more responsible for their own learning. In some ways, professors have to give up a level of control for a lot of this stuff to work.
JY: What’s always troubling and fascinating about that for me is that, I can tell you when the Cold War ended, but it makes no sense outside of any context. Actually, one of the things I like to use when we are talking about the end of the Cold War is this video of David Hasselhoff singing at the Berlin Wall and the whole argument that he helped bring it down. On the one hand, it’s fun because it’s David Hasselhoff and it’s slightly absurd. More importantly, though, I like it because it’s a fascinating way for showing just how much was going on at the time. It gets into this idea that there’s something going into the psychology and the mindsets of the people in East Germany – something that isn’t captured by any sort of document. It’s not about a specific date; it’s about questions of legitimacy that existed within the populace. I can give you the facts about the collapse of the Berlin Wall, but those facts don’t mean anything unless we can give them some context to identify why those are the “important” facts.
JF: I teach in a small department of history and political science, so when I first got to Bridgewater, I had to teach World History since 1500. While I was definitely out of my depth, I liked the class because it let me teach what I got into this profession to do – talk about how we confront difference and what happens when those who are different encounter each other. For most of them, high school history meant memorizing names and dates. Rather than teaching them “the past”, I got to teach history as a story about the past told to make sense of something in the present. History shows what a society thinks is important, but what’s important keeps changing. So we get to think about why some events make it into the current story and others don’t. We get to think about how stories are used to make sense of the political project of determining society’s systems, values and trajectory.
JF: How about evaluations? Do you think that being a constructivist changes the way that you build assessment tools or the way that you grade?
JY: Yes, in a few ways. When I taught Introduction to IR, the first exam was always a big in-class essay exam. They have 75 minutes or so to write this one overarching essay, and they would grumble immensely. For the second exam, I’d say, alright, we’ll do a multiple choice one. Students would get all excited because they figured they knew how to do that. Invariably, scores would always go down on the second exam. Students would ask why. I’d tell them that they got so focused on names and dates and facts in isolation. The first exam made you write more, but it gave you the chance to build up that narrative to put these ideas into your own words, to provide this sort of evidence to show me how you got from point A to point B to point C. You guys are actually a lot more empowered in this thing than you realize, but if you’re focused more on how this event take place or how many of this thing have happened or whatever the multiple choice is, then you’re missing out on this big picture. You’re focusing on the trees and missing out on the forest, but you all actually really seem to enjoy the forest.
How about for you, does it affect things?
JF: I still do some multiple choice questions in lower-level courses, but for all of my exams most of the points come from essays. They’re all take-home, and I grade based on how well students use ideas from the course to build arguments. I see a tie to Constructivism because I’m asking them to hone the skills that will help them participate in the processes our society uses to settle arguments and negotiate social structures. If what “counts” is determined by what society finds important, and if what’s important is determined by what the audience finds convincing, then rhetoric matters, building an argument matters. To participate in the conversation, students need to share some vocabulary with the people involved in the negotiations. To focus attention on that vocabulary, I use strategies like multiple choice questions and identification terms to incentivize reading assignments and focusing in class. But the point is whether students can build an argument using ideas from the class. In my upper-level courses, it’s all identifications and take-home essays because I want them to be able to have the vocabulary and to use that vocabulary to build arguments.
JF: This gets at a point about teaching at a small school. I teach some students three, four, sometimes five times before they graduate, which allows me to watch them develop through the whole four-year project. I think part of my job as a professor is to explain, often and explicitly, how my assignments fit into the four-year project of getting a bachelor’s degree. It is easy for all of us to get our noses so close to the grindstone that we lose sight of the broader goals of an undergraduate education. This is even more true for students who are bouncing from world politics to math to Spanish in a few short minutes between classes. So I try to remind students about how my assignments fit into their larger goals. For example I have them express their own ideas and hash through complex topics in small groups because we think practicing those things will make them better citizens, employees and parents. I don’t think being a constructivist means I have to include small groups in my teaching, but I do think my Constructivism helps me focus on the agency of my students, as you mentioned earlier. It means I try to build a classroom environment that respects each student as a potential contributor to our liberal society, a society based on the premise that each one has a unique and creative mind. I’ve seen those assumptions about agency come to life in my own research, so I have no problem building pedagogies based on that understanding of how the world works.
JY: And it’s something that applies at any type of institution. If you’re at an institution that does have a focus on teaching, that doesn’t mean that theory goes to the wayside. If Constructivism becomes part of your practice, that’s a way of engaging with those sorts of ideas and theoretical foundations that you are coming out of graduate school with. You can still integrate this into dissolving this divide between teaching and research, and you can see that these do integrate together in a really nice way.
JF: At my institution, we just did some hiring, so we have to explain to people what the expectations are within that tripartite system of teaching, research and service. At my institution, two-thirds of the tenure decision is about your teaching and one-third scholarship and service. When I’m trying to explain what scholarship is, we say scholarship is something that should animate your classroom. At R1 institutions, research is judged on its impact on the discipline. At an institution like mine, the more important standard for scholarship is whether it is engaging you as a curious person. It is about professors modeling for students what it’s like to ask questions in a systematic rigorous way and come back with answers that can be shared with others. It’s the same research practices, but the college doesn’t judge me on how many citations I have. They judge me on whether I’m an engaged active person in my discipline and in the research that I do. My real-life research models what it means to be a participant in public discourse about knowledge.
JY: Coming out of grad school, so many people assume that if they are going into a teaching institution, their intellectual life is essentially over. They fear that it’ll just be teaching with no time to engage the research. To some degree, that may be true; you’re not going to have the same sort of time to sit in the library or to read the articles that are coming out of the journals, and there may be different pressures on your time, but it doesn’t mean that everything is just going to the wayside. This is a way of bringing those ideas that animated your research into the classroom and staying engaged. You know when you have to put together those teaching statement when you are applying for jobs? Using constructivist tactics is a way of going beyond saying that my teaching informs my research and my research informs my teaching to really set yourself apart and think critically about what you want students to get at the end of their time in your classroom.