Reflections on Asia: Borrowing Lessons from the Humanities in Social Science Coursework

Howard Sanborn is Associate Professor of International Studies and Political Science at the Virginia Military Institute and served, from 2012-2014, as Director of the VMI ePortfolio Project. His research focuses on popular support for democratic institutions, the role of education in cultivating liberal values, and reflective pedagogy with eportfolios and their use in teaching about Asia. His work has been featured in the British Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, European Political Science Review, and Washington Post. He was awarded a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Iowa in 2009. What lessons can political science classes borrow from the humanities? This paper presents the results of a multi-year study on teaching about Asia as part of a general education program. Given the challenges of meeting common learning outcomes while also teaching discipline-specific lessons, political science courses often underperformed in assessments when compared to benchmark expectations. While our initial conclusion—that a greater focus on multimodal assignments would promote deeper learning and reflection—proved unfounded, explicitly emphasizing students’ reflection on their own process of democratic engagement, in comparison to that of their counterparts in Asia, did seem to address the shortcomings of the previous approaches by giving students context and guidance in their understanding of how democracy works at home and abroad. Data from reflective essays, collected over two years, provide evidence for this finding.