Generations of teachers have sought to educate new generations of Americans about the basic workings of their government. Their collective efforts have yielded a vast body of pedagogical materials, traditions, and textbooks which reflect the advancing understanding of political science regarding how the US government functions. There are few other topics in political science with such an immense body of pedagogical resources available. Yet when I began teaching American National Government in 2018, the insufficiency of that body of work became painfully apparent.
All the textbooks told us American government worked one way, and the headlines every day from 2017 on told us it worked differently. Every lesson—whether about the Constitution, the courts, Congress, the media, etc.—required supplementation and indeed outright revision. How things worked in American government circa 2018, and the years after, was simply not how the textbooks said it did.
Over the following five years (2018-2023), I experimented with formats and pedagogical materials for teaching American National Government (of which I taught two sections each semester at Murray State University) that would address the unprecedented times the country was living through. I redesigned the course top to bottom twice and tried devoting considerable class-time to discussion of the news, using political science concepts to contextualize and explain the day’s events. In that process, I found concepts from comparative politics more and more useful in that task, and that led me to incorporate more comparative politics content into the formal curriculum.
The most important contribution to this effort was my adoption of A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective, by Steven L. Taylor, Matthew Soberg Shugart, Arend Lijphart and Bernard Grofman, as the main textbook for American National Government. The book echoes the structure of conventional American government textbooks, but in place of a chapter on Congress in its peculiarities, for instance, it includes a chapter on Legislative branches across different kinds of democracies and situates Congress in relation to them. The text thus describes America’s institutions in detail, but always in comparison to those of other democracies.
I share here some of the pedagogical materials I developed for that class in hope that others approaching this task might benefit from them. They’re available for personal and non-profit use only. I hope to make additions as conditions allow.
Slides:
Topic 1: Democracy, American Style
Topic 2: The Constitution
Topic 3: Federalism
Topic 4: Civil Rights
Topic 4: Civil Rights
Topic 5: Civil Liberties
Topic 6: Public Opinion
Topic 7: The Media
Topic 8: Elections, Campaigns, & Participation
Topic 9: Political Parties & Interest Groups
Topic 10: Congress
Topic 11: The Presidency
Topic 12: The Federal Judiciary
Exercises:
What is Politics? (Exercise for Topic 1: Democracy, American Style)
This is meant to be an in-class activity illustrating for students what politics is, what politics can be, and what politics can sound like. The activity assumes that politics can occur in at least three different basic modes, and that each of these is unique.
First, students are divided into groups or pairs and each one is given the task of reading and then analyzing one of the three passages on page 1. They use the first three questions on page 2 to aid analysis in their small group discussion. Second, the instructor should ask the group(s) of each passage to provide their answers to the questions, in a class discussion. Finally, the instructor would facilitate a comparative discussion of the passages. (There is a table in the lecture slides summarizing the three modes of politics which is helpful for this final comparative discussion).
Editable Word version:
January 6th Committee Assignment (Exercise for Topic 1: Democracy, American Style)
This assignment was designed to get students to engage with the substance of the January 6th Committee hearings. It had them watch one day of the committee’s proceedings, of their choice, and then answer a series of simple reflective questions. The assignment is summarized below:
Kevin J. Elliott 