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Welcome to the Winter 2007 Issue
Like many of you, as I straggle back to campus for the Spring semester, I am preparing to teach a media & politics course. I have taught some version of this class for over a decade. When I began, one of my tasks was to jolt students out of thinking that the news was simply a mirror of the world; to convince them that the news, to use the academic term, was socially constructed. Today, I have to work very hard to convince them that the news isn't an outright lie. Given the explosion of news outlets in the last decade, it isn't surprising that students today are far more savvy about the news. But the ubiquity of news, and commentary about the news, has also made them vastly more cynical. They are ready to ascribe just about every aspect of the news to partisan hackery or personal malfeasance.
Writing in PS: Political Science last summer (volume 39, no. 3, pp. 495-501), April Kelly-Woessner and Matthew C. Woessner largely confirmed my suspicions. In a survey of students in political science classes, the authors found that students' ideological predispositions affect how they view their courses. Moreover, student impressions of professor's political views also impact their educational experience. In short, partisanship has entered the classroom. Students are more ready to bring their ideological leanings to bear on their learning experience, and to assess their professors' comments through the filter created by these leanings. As I read this piece, I thought that, if anything, this ideological effect must be intensified in media & politics classes—a subject that occupies a prominent position in ideological debates in the United States.
All of this made me wonder whether other instructors were having similar experiences, and if so, whether they had changed their teaching practices in response. I put out a call a few months ago asking division members to write back. Frankly, I was overwhelmed by the response. Given heightened levels of partisanship in the United States, I had an inkling that instructors here would respond with great zeal. They did. But I had little idea that similar trends were occurring in other places--like Australia and Great Britain and Poland. Moreover, I had not thought at all about what it must be like for people born and raised in other countries to teach media & politics courses in the United States, or for European instructors to teach American alongside European students in such courses in Europe. I have learned that the topic resonates in all sorts of ways.
It has also made for a great roundtable discussion for this issue of PCR! April Kelly-Woessner's commentary, in which she summarizes her findings in the PS article and suggests some potential responses by instructors, rounds out an insightful and fruitful discussion of an important topic.
I also have the pleasure of publishing a response to a prior roundtable discussion—last issue's discussion of the role of emotion in political decision-making. I have never included a response of this kind before in my time as editor of PCR—not because I have an official policy against it, but because no one before has taken the time to write such a thoughtful commentary on the topic. Erik Bucy has done just that. Professor Bucy adds a great deal of insight to the subject. I only wish I had the forethought to include his essay in the original roundtable. I make up for that oversight by including it here.
You will also find the usual wealth of resources in links to the left: lists of recent books, grants, calls for papers and upcoming meetings, as well as the meeting minutes of the APSA division meeting last August.
As always, I appreciate any and all feedback and suggestions for future roundtables.
David Ryfe
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