Many recent reports have voiced alarm at the decline of international and area studies in the United States. Symptomatic of this problem is the disturbing fact that only 15 percent of American high school students study a foreign language. This inadequate background is also apparent among students in introductory international politics courses. Few have traveled or lived overseas. Most have only a nodding acquaintance with foreign opinion garnered secondhand from newspapers and news weeklies — and not all can be supposed even to read these regularly. In this situation, the results obtained by assigning research papers are likely to be disappointing: many students simply lack the background to do a credible job. They feel put upon by the paper, postpone it until the last minute, and then cobble together a hasty paraphrase of a few stories and articles.

My classroom experience over the past seven years has convinced me that teaching does indeed offer a special opportunity for learning. Obviously this conclusion has been reached by a countless number of instructors who have taken a serious approach to their teaching. A special understanding and confidence in one's knowledge of the subject-matter comes through the preparation and presentation of a course or even a singular class lecture.

I have attempted to provide undergraduate students with the opportunity for this type of learning experience. A method employed by many instructors is to have students present research projects/papers in class. Although this exercise does approximate the teaching experience, many times the session degenerates into the mere reading of a prepared research paper.

After years of teaching Development Administration for, our Master of International Agriculture program at California Polytechnic, I worked for two years directly with subsistence farmers in Africa. That experience forced me to conclude that this generation of Cal Poly graduates must learn how they, acting with others, can alleviate hunger in the late-developing countries, especially in Agriculture, Architecture and Engineering. New knowledge about available resources, about people and their natural increase, and about production and distribution of food combine to show that starvation is not necessary. Like slavery and smallpox, hunger can be eliminated from the face of the earth.

The Socratic method was the major pedagogic tool at the first great Western university, Plato's Academy, and continues to be respected, at least in theory, by teachers at our institutions of higher learning. Yet today many of Plato's heirs in the university community seem to hold several perhaps innocent but nonetheless serious misconceptions concerning the Socratic technique. As a political scientist interested in the history of political philosophy, I have developed some thoughts on this subject in response to repeated inquiries by colleagues and students alike.

One popular inaccuracy describes the Socratic method as an openended question and answer process. Actually, the Socratic approach has a singular purpose, namely the search for truth, and it is this explicit goal rather than an informal procedure of give and take which distinguishes the Socratic method from other teaching techniques.

According to the syllabus of “Civil Rights and the Constitution“—an undergraduate public law course at the University of Maryland—we study Supreme Court cases, and we “do constitutional law.” The phrase—“doing law“—is intended to capture Sheldon Wolin's notion of “doing political theory.” That is, public law, like political theory, should be an active pursuit, not a passive process of ingestion. Law and theory are rich in pedagogical opportunities to involve students with issues of recurrent public importance, and to do so in a creative manner that develops critical, principled, analytical skills. In public law, this can be done by reliance on structured role-playing, involving judicial problem solving, and focusing on a normatively exciting hypothetical issue over which participants might reasonably differ.

Our course differs from most comparable courses in ethics and public policy because we attract students from widely disparate programs. at the university of rochester, we put into the same small seminar master's students in a very quantitative public policy program dominated by microeconomics, community medicine students from the preventive medicine department's master's program in the medical school, selected undergraduate upperclassmen, and nursing students in nurse-clinician master's programs.

The faculty also have different backgrounds. One has taught politica philosophy in the Political Science Department for many years; the other (who had a primary appointment in the Preventive Medicine Department and a joint appointment in Political Science) taught health politics and policy, but had previously completed considerable training in philosophy and political theory.

Teaching through simulation is one of the most innovative and interesting methods available. Many educators, however, are reluctant to utilize this technique. Some of the reasons for this are understandable. Setting up a simulation is somewhat time consuming and involves more than the usual amount of paperwork. Secondly, the educator may be unfamiliar with organizing a flexible, people- integrating simulation. Third, grading criteria may be a bit more difficult to develop. In spite of these facts, the strengths of using simulation far outweigh the difficulties, and it is the intention of this article to help overcome such problems.

Although setting up a simulation is time consuming, once accomplished, the teacher's job becomes easier because the students will begin to “learn by doing”.