Name: Alistair McCulloch
Field or discipline: Politics/Public Management
Program: BA in Public Administration
Course: Political Analysis
Year level: 2
Class size: 50+
Activity type: Using Utopian fiction as a source of case studies in teaching political analysis
Aim: To have students read at least one book during the academic year and to have them explore, and to facilitate the academic assessment of their understanding of and ability to use, concepts and theories.
Description: Asking students to assess the distribution of power and critique a set of sound relations in an ‘extant’ society is problematic because the undergraduate textbooks (sociology and politics) provide ‘potted’ descriptions which effectively answer the questions and encourage plagiarism. It is better to ask students to undertake the exercise in the context of a society with which they are unfamiliar and about which there are few available analyses. Real-world cases which students could become familiar with quickly are rare, but utopian novels such as 1984, Brave New World, Island and Ecotopia provide just such a comprehensive social system which can act as the basis for the assessment of student understanding. Some even enjoy it.
Further Reading: A. McCulloch (1997). ‘Seeking the Holy Grail? Utopian Novels as an Aid to Teaching and Assessing Political Analysis Courses’, Teaching Public Administration, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 73-78.
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