Which teaching program do you want to highlight to your colleagues at the faculty right now?
I would like to highlight a BA course that we are running at the Department of Political Science at the moment: STV1555 “The 2024 US Elections in a Global Context”.
This is a BA lecture that is open to all students at UiO in which we have a different lecturer each week who links the US election to her / his own area of expertise. Through this the students get a fairly broad view on what the US presidential election means for different policy areas, but also a better understanding how the election works or how prediction models work. The course ends on the day after the elections, so we will use the final session to discuss the results and we will have Hilde Restad who works at Oslo Nye H?yskole joining via Zoom while she is on her research visit in the US.
From the first sessions of the course it has become very clear that the students really like the course and teaching on an ongoing political process is something that seems to resonate very well.
- Who do you collaborate with?
For this course I am working together with many different colleagues both at the department but also from outside the Faculty of Social Sciences. Since we have a different lecturer each week, this course would not be possible without the help of all these amazing colleagues, who all bring their specific expertise to the course. Besides people from the Department of Political Science we have James Cameron from the Department of History, Guri Bang from NMBU, Hilde Restad from Oslo Nye H?yskole, and also people from the US embassy contributing to the course.
Thanks to the great support of the communication department at the Faculty of Social Sciences, the course and some of the lecturers also received a lot of media attention and could contribute to the public debate about the US elections for example at NRK.
Which, do you think, are the three most important factors for achieving good teaching in the field?
Expertise, motivation, and fun.
It all starts with the expertise and knowledgebase, one has to have a good understanding of the topic one teaches to be able to bring it across. This is why having a different person lecture each week and link the election to their area of expertise was a conscious choice when designing the course. The hope is that students realize that the person lecturing has a very deep knowledge of the topic also to highlight the importance of subject expertise. Especially when looking at the very loosely applied term of “expert” in some of the media reporting on the US elections, it was important for me to ensure that we deliver research-based teaching by having a colleague with the specific expertise deliver each lecture.
But all of this would not be possible without the intrinsic motivation of all those contributing to the course. Doing these one-off lectures usually is not the most time-efficient way of fulfilling ones teaching requirements, but as this course shows it can create something exciting. However, this means that it all hinges on the motivation of those contributing to the course and their drive to create this learning experience for the students even if it might be linked to some additional work.
Finally, it also has to be fun. There are not many things that can be as rewarding as a teaching situation in which both students and lecturers are prepared and engaged and where there is a lot of fun interaction. This is what makes teaching so exciting and entertaining, and it can really create mutually motivating circumstances.
If you were to give one piece of advice to new teachers at the SV faculty, what would it be?
Try and develop a course that sounds fun for both you and students. I had the idea for the US election course in 2020 and just asked some colleagues what they think about it and instantly many of them were very supportive and instantly excited to try out the idea to have a different lecturer each week. It is a bit of coordination work, but it is very rewarding when it works, and the students seem to like it. Both times we ran the course it was fully booked and the engagement of students in the lectures is also very high.