My teaching interests and experiences reflect my broader theoretical interests in globalization and methodology. At Old Dominion University I enjoy teaching a variety of courses in international political economy and research methods to both graduate and undergraduate student as well as the introduction to international politics course for undergraduates. These courses have ranged widely in content and format, from small seminars on advanced statistical techniques to lecture-format classes with 35 or more undergraduates. I particularly enjoy teaching methodology courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels; I have taught regression and maximum likelihood statistical techniques to master's and doctoral students as well as basic inferential statistics to undergraduates majoring in political science. Given this variety of subjects and formats, my course designs follow no one template. Generally, however, I seek to emphasize writing in both undergraduate and graduate seminars on international relations and IPE, while undergraduate and graduate methods courses combine intensive statistical exercises and exams with practical hands-on learning of statistical software (either Stata or SPSS).

In general, four principles guide my course design and instruction. First, students need to integrate their classroom learning with their observations of everyday international politics. In my theory classes, I have a weekly exercise called “Of What Is This an Instance?” which I have borrowed from James N. Rosenau. As part of their course participation grade, I require students every week to submit a newspaper article about a current issue in global politics. From their submissions I cull one which I then distribute to all students via Blackboard and ask them to read. In our classroom discussion I encourage students to consider how the news item may pertain to conceptual issues we have discussed. I have been pleased to discover how skilled my students have become at integrating classroom concepts into our discussion—often in perceptive ways that I had not anticipated. Students have argued, for example, that the recent decline in the value of the dollar and the collapse of the Doha Round of WTO negotiations reflect the decline of hegemony. Others have found evidence of a reaction to the Washington Consensus in the recent electoral success of populist leftists in Latin America, or a Gramscian counter-hegemony in the failure of the constitutional referenda in France and the Netherlands in 2005. Likewise, I seek to make my methods courses relevant and practical. In my undergraduate methods course, I regularly used contemporary polling data or news articles to discuss issues of research design, measurement and sampling. For the graduate students, I have designed problem sets that require them to apply statistical models using empirical data collected by other researchers. This allows students to test extant hypotheses about international affairs using empirical data and statistical techniques we have learned in class. In my undergraduate theory class I use a presentation to communicate to students Appadurai's five "scapes" of globalization. I think students gain a greater appreciation for the ironies and contradictions of globalization when they see a visual juxtaposition of the foulard controversy in France with the popularity of “Iron Chefs” in the United States. These exercises and instructional techniques reflect my philosophical commitment to grounding each student’s education in the observation and appreciation of everyday international politics that they observe when they open the newspaper, read a journal article, or browse a blog.

Second, my instruction needs to reach both auditory and visual learners. Instructional media is an invaluable tool to reach students of all cognitive styles. This is particularly true in the methods courses I teach. I have sought to use PowerPoint as a tool to integrate materials from textbooks, statistical distributions, and graphical and formulaic representations of important concepts. I have found PowerPoint to be quite useful for illustrating, for example, the concept of a confidence interval—it allows me to represent graphically the five percent of a distribution that falls outside of two standard deviations from the mean of a normally distributed variable. At the graduate level, I have sought to design presentations that interpret the formal representation of concepts in the textbook into the language of the layperson: it is easier to understand heteroscedasticity when one can see it on a graph. I have also used Blackboard to distribute course materials to students. It is an invaluable tool to make all slideshow presentations and answer keys to problem sets available to the students, who can download copies for review and study. This allows students to concentrate on my lectures and presentations in class without worrying about copying down all the information I provide. Thus Blackboard is an invaluable complement to my classroom use of instructional media. Finally, in both my graduate and undergraduate methods courses I instruct the students in the use of SPSS (even though I prefer Stata). I spend a week in the computer instructional lab to teach undergraduates the basics in SPSS. In my graduate methods seminar, I use in-class projection to illustrate in real time how to use SPSS for a range of methods, from cross-tabulations to the implementation of a fixed-effects model that corrects for panel heteroscedasticity.

Third, students need to learn outside of the classroom as well as in it. To do so, however, an instructor needs to be available to students. I have found this availability to be particularly important for students in both the undergraduate and graduate methods courses. Two aspects of my course designs require me to meet regularly with students. In my theory courses and seminars, students must compose research papers to grapple with important theoretical and empirical issues in international relations. I require students to meet with me to discuss their paper topics and sources. I have found this requirement results in student papers that have appropriate topics and more thorough research. Likewise, my emphasis on problem sets in my methods courses requires me to avail myself to students. Particularly when dealing with SPSS, students often encounter frustrations when completing their problem sets. I try to make time for students to sit down with me, either in my office or in a computer lab, to show them how to use SPSS to solve the problem sets I provide. I take this availability seriously. I am always concerned that a student may have mastered the course materials but not SPSS, creating the risk of a pedagogical “false negative.” I consider the one-on-one instruction in SPSS a necessary safeguard against this unfortunately possibility.

Finally, lectures and seminars should be fun as well as informative. In both graduate and undergraduate methods courses, for example, we have fun with the well-known “M&M” exercise. Students enjoy counting the number of red M&Ms in a bag and seeing how repeated sampling produces the normal distribution (as well as expanding waistlines—I think they also enjoyed the chocolate). I also conduct a “craps” experiment with two dice to illustrate the same principle, and why the house always wins. On occasion I’ll even throw in a cartoon to break up the monotony of graphs, charts and formulae in a slide show. While these activities are no substitute for an iPad, I think they ease the unavoidable tension of higher education, particularly in methods courses.