This past year, I had the opportunity to serve as the Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) — the University of Michigan’s equivalent to a Teaching Assistant — for two political science courses. In the fall, I taught Southeast Asian Politics with Prof. Allen Hicken and Chinese Politics with Prof. Mary Gallagher in the winter. It was a great opportunity to teach two classes that fit quite squarely in my area of interest as a researcher focused on the Asia-Pacific region.

Something that I’ve realized, however, is that there is not a lot of written guidance on being a graduate student instructor for courses that sit at the intersection of area studies and political science. Perhaps that is for an obvious reason: it is a bit of a niche topic to write about! Aside from what is offered by campus centers on teaching, there usually isn’t a whole lot of guidance on how to teach discussion sections to begin with.

But this is a topic that is particularly close to my heart, because some of my favorite classes when I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley were these area studies classes. And more importantly, I strongly believe that area studies still deserves a significant place in an undergraduate social science education. These courses can often serve as the first gateway for many students, especially in the United States, to engage with previously unfamiliar regions. And so I thought that it would be worth sharing some of my reflections on what I’ve learned from my year of teaching Asia-related discussion sections in political science, just in case it is useful to anyone who might be assigned to teach a similar class in the future. Hopefully, by writing about some of my experiences, it can help future graduate student instructors feel less like they are reinventing the wheel.

Challenge #1: Balancing context-provision and active learning

How much knowledge about the region can you assume? When teaching about Asia in an American university, it appeared safest to assume some knowledge but not a lot (in the case of China) or essentially nothing (in the case of Southeast Asia). This presents a big tension: trying to balance the amount of time spent on providing regional context with ensuring there is sufficient time for active learning. There is a deep temptation to spend a lot of time lecturing at students when you are unable to presume any knowledge, but that would of course defeat the purpose of a discussion section. And when there is no presumed prior knowledge, it is difficult to spend time on learning activities or discussion because you suspect that students will just respond with, “I don’t know enough about X country to say anything meaningful about this issue.”

I certainly made mistakes that went both ways. Sometimes, in a bid to give enough context, my presentations would run over the anticipated time. And once, I asked students to read an excerpt from Tom Pepinsky’s piece in Vox on how life in authoritarian states is “mostly boring and tolerable” (which focuses on Malaysia) and asked students to discuss whether or not these arguments would apply in Vietnam or Laos. Major problem: we had not discussed Laos in sufficient detail for students to actually transfer knowledge and apply it in a Laotian setting.

Eventually I was able to settle on a couple of strategies that helped mitigate this challenge:

Mini-lectures in discussion sections are not a bad thing.

Yes, discussion sections are supposed to be for discussion, but taking 15-20 minutes to recap major arguments from lectures and readings and providing additional content that extends students’ understanding of the region was generally very useful. Students feel that they are on the same page, and it provides an opportunity for the course content to be digested again. I think that having good slides here is imperative, but this is probably very much up to your teaching style. There’s always opportunity to insert prompts for discussion and food for thought as well.

Pair short in-class readings with designed discussion protocols.

The traditional format of discussion section is to just talk about previously assigned course readings. Something that I found useful to do, however, was to assign very short excerpts of articles that students would read together for the first time in section and then discuss. Again, students are all on the same page. And secondly, it is a nice opportunity to dive into primary source materials. This would normally would be more appropriate for history courses, but I feel is also important for area-based political science courses since the first portion of these types of classes tend to always focus on historical background.

I paired these readings with discussion protocols or a designed activity of some sort that provide the opportunity for active learning. In one instance, I had students read an excerpt of Sun Yat-sen’s writings on the Three Principles of the People and had students analyze “four As” on the text (key assumptions, calls for action, counter-arguments, and an assessment of Sun’s vision). Another activity that worked well was an activity for students to role-play a provincial governor in China: students were given excerpts on key Xi Jinping policies such as Dual Circulation, Common Prosperity and New Productive Forces, and asked to propose some policies that would fulfill these (sometimes competing) objectives while maximizing GDP growth.

Visual analysis is great!

Asking students to interpret maps and charts together as a class is also a great way to provide both context and active learning at the same time. I particularly like maps as they also allow students to automatically look at cases in comparative perspective — this was particularly helpful in my own teaching on the middle income trap and developmental states (which I did in both courses). The more counterintuitive the chart, the more fun!

Challenge #2: Navigating the tension between conceptual understanding and area-specific knowledge

The second challenge in teaching a class that sits at the intersection of political science and area studies is balancing conceptual and regional knowledge. The goal of a good area studies class in political science should be to allow students to explore broader themes in comparative politics in addition to gaining understanding about a certain region. Class time is so limited: there’s already barely enough time to introduce a new country. Do we spend most time on history and “just the facts” and hope that students draw the connections to comparative concepts that they might have seen in other classes? (It would be far more likely that students never quite get the conceptual link).

I found that getting at the right balance required being both intentional and explicit in framing the link between regional content and broad concepts. In my Southeast Asia discussion sections, I ended up focusing on 1-2 concepts that were introduced explicitly and separately. Activities were focused on illustrating how the concept and country content were tied to each other. The following are some examples:

Country	Concept	Activity
Malaysia	Consociationalism and ethnic power-sharing	Mind-mapping key components of the Malaysian social contract
Indonesia	Industrialization strategies	Advise Suharto on pursuing import-substitution or export-oriented industrialization strategies
Philippines	State capacity, clientelism	Guided discussion on the incentives behind vote-buying
Singapore	One-party dominant regimes	Writing a stump speech for People’s Action Party/Worker’s Party candidates to illustrate incumbency benefits for the PAP

In my last Southeast Asia discussion section, I also explicitly provided a list of key concepts to students that we had covered during the entire semester and asked them to reflect as a group on what they have gained in conceptual understanding.

A note of personal reflection for myself: I found it less pressing when teaching on China to be explicit about links to broader concepts than when teaching about Southeast Asia. Part of it is perhaps the less urgent need to justify why learning about China is important; China’s importance on the global stage seems self-evident, in a way that Southeast Asia may not be, particularly to American students. This probably made me more conscious about illustrating how Southeast Asia can be a useful case for broader theory-building. If I did teach on China again, however, I would try to be more intentional in linking concepts with content there as well.

Challenge #3: Piquing student interest in distant, seemingly irrelevant regions

“The eleven countries of Southeast Asia may still seem geographically peripheral to Western eyes. No other region is so distant from both North America and Europe. Yet…Southeast Asia’s diverse political systems are far from peripheral to the most momentous global trends. It is a region that the rest of the world can ill afford to ignore or misunderstand.” (Kuhonta, Slater and Vu 2008)

While teaching a course on a seemingly distant and irrelevant region might sound like a challenge for students’ intrinsic motivation, I found that there is a very simple antidote: storytelling. Some of the best stories come out of things you previously had very little idea about previously. My students told me that some of the sections they enjoyed the most were the ones where I talked about the decades-long frenemy relationship between Anwar Ibrahim and Mahathir Mohamad in Malaysia, for example, or a mini-lecture I did on how China has tried to regulate reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism. I also love sprinkling fun facts liberally in a discussion section. The weird, wacky and wonderful aren’t a waste of time: fun facts help students grapple an unfamiliar region and it’s often the little stories that stick with them. At least that’s what I felt given the number of students who now seem to know that Pad Thai is fascist.

A potentially controversial piece of advice is to not be shy about discussing personalities. Many instructors try to shy away from the “great man” theory of history in favor of a more institutional focus. That’s probably a good thing overall. But dedicating some time in discussion sections — which would then overall account for only a small portion of time in the course — to discussions of personality is, in my experience, helpful. It is the easiest way to craft a compelling narrative. When teaching about both Southeast Asia and China, there was no shortage of colorful personalities that could help pique student interest.

And finally, I think that it’s also fun to go beyond politics and show some pop culture as well. If the course is a student’s first gateway to a new region, I would like them to leave with a more holistic perception of society outside the bubble of politics. In my China discussion sections, for example, I enjoyed showing and discussing Mandarin pop music. (It was a little bit difficult to do this for a Southeast Asia course; it’s hard to know well the pop culture of ten different countries!)

I hope that this piece was at least somewhat helpful to any political science graduate students who may teach a discussion section for an area studies course. I am not a pedagogy expert by any means, so if there is anything here that actually contravenes with best practices, or if you have any suggestions for me to improve my own teaching, I would love to hear from you as well.