Teaching Statement
In this summary, I first describe my teaching philosophy, which I have developed over the time I have been intensely involved in Higher Education. Second, I summarize the fields where I have mainly developed my teaching activity in both Graduate and Postgraduate levels of study. Thirdly, I present my experience in supervision and my courses’ responsibilities. Finally, I briefly review the activities I have developed in the field of ‘teaching innovation ’.
1) TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
I have a respectful attitude towards both the students and the learning process at the University level. Beyond the fundamental concepts, theories or methodological tools I provide students in my classes, it is my goal to facilitate the students’ acquisition of life-long skills in Political Science. Accessibility is one way to achieve this goal. By being accessible both in the classes and through pastoral care, I aim at helping students develop problem-solving and mature attitudes in order to prepare them for the tasks they will face as professionals, whether in the public or private enterprise. I believe the time at the University must be enriching in several ways, so I also try to engage students in the overall academic life of the Faculty and the University. I try to invite guest lecturers to my classes, inform students of activities taking place in the University and motivate them to search for their own natural interests and find activities that would reward them.
My usual dynamic in the classroom is to assume the responsibility of lecturing together with the development of participatory and stimulating strategies in order to create a sense of common, collective, learning process. I most enjoy teaching when I feel students are truly engaged with the ongoing debates in the discipline, and when I see they are developing a clear and well-argued position taking.
When I design course syllabi, I try to include a varied range of evaluation criteria so that students train the several capabilities that will be demanded from them in the labor market. I treat students as soon-to-become strong professionals with mature and responsible attitudes towards their work. This attitude is to be trained in the context of University education, and it derives naturally by establishing a mutual respectful relationship with the students. I also strongly value the development of the students’ communication capabilities, so I systematically include as one of my evaluation criteria the exercise of public presentations, debates and seminar-like sessions. Often, some students need to overcome shyness or stress when facing the task of speaking in public. I offer special training time to these students in my office hours and help them develop self-confidence and the feeling of being capable, as I believe these are very important competences, highly valued in the job market.
Preparation is key to a successful lecturing, so I devote time and effort to the elaboration of teaching materials. Besides including new materials coming from recently published articles or new data becoming available, I typically try to share my enthusiasm and passion for research-based, evidence grounded, knowledge. In this line, I usually tell them about the research projects where I am involved and I find genuine interest from the students. This act of sharing practical experience with the students is likely to contribute to inspire the students about how they see themselves developing a career profile, thereby enhancing their educational experience.
I have learned to develop a good classroom management both from my teachers throughout my trajectory in several institutions and from my own experience as Lecturer. I believe each class has its own pace of learning and this must be respected. While I systematically plan the schedule of the sessions devoted to each subject of the program, I let the students’ real-time reactions determine how fast to proceed. Sometimes, it is worthwhile spending a longer time rethinking of a concept that was assessed in a previous lesson and train the ability of students to make connections across themes. The skills involved in developing a relational comprehension are thereafter related to the capacity to convey knowledge synthetically and to grasp detail within a broader framework.
Finally, I have taught in a variety of settings – small and large college classrooms, but also to secondary education teachers and to elder students in Continuing Education Programs – and to varied audiences, from more specialized seminars to more introductory, and even generalist, courses. I have been challenged by each new situation and I have enjoyed them all. I plan to maintain this attitude as I advance in the profession.
2) FIELDS OF TEACHING AND CONTENTS – TEACHING SCOPE
I have taught in the fields of: Comparative Politics; Political Theory; Methodology and Techniques for Research in Political Science; Legislative Politics; Public Policy and Governance; Introduction to Political Science; Latin American Politics; Political Sociology; International Cooperation for Development, and EU Politics, and a number of specialized seminars on Spanish Politics, Central American Politics, Regression Analysis, Comparative Committee Systems, Electoral Behavior and How Design a Research Project.
My first teaching experience was on the field of METHODS. I assisted the main Professors in courses of Introduction to Regression and Theory of Regression in the Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis, during the summers through 2003-2005. Since 2005 on, I have always taught at least one course on methodology per academic year. Although I have a more consistent expertise on quantitative techniques, I have also taught (and applied in my research) qualitative techniques, such as focus groups, open and semi-structured interviews, organizational analysis, discourse and content analysis. I have taught quantitative techniques at the University of Essex, University of Burgos, UCA in El Salvador and the GIGA in Hamburg, in both Graduate and Postgraduate programmes. My syllabi in Methods have included descriptive, exploratory and inferential statistics for univariate, bivariate and multivariate specifications, types of data matrices; sources of data, types of models (from data to model, OLS, vs. from model to data, or maximum likelihood models), linear and non-linear specifications, observed vs. latent models, and strategies for combining quantitative-qualitative techniques (“triangulation”). I give emphasis to the key role of research design for developing a successful research project.
In COMPARATIVE POLITICS, I have taught Undergraduate students in Political Science at the University of Burgos during the years 2005-2013. I have also taught short Comparative Politics courses to post-graduates in other Universities and Research Centers. Particularly, I have taught courses to Post-graduates in Comparative Institutional Design at the UCA, El Salvador, in Agenda-setting at the University of La Republica in Montevideo, Uruguay, and in Forms of Government and Institutional Performance in UAM, Mexico. One of my key focus of interest in this field has been to study the Theory of Democracy. My courses thus included topics such as varieties of democratic regimes, the core aspects where these differ and how, measuring democracy, measuring constitutional and procedural rules, indexing types of regime, the electoral and party systems, the evolution of civil liberties, political rights, media and expression rights, transitions from authoritarian regimes, comparing democratic and non-democratic regimes, and varieties within and across forms of government.
In LEGISLATIVE POLITICS, I have experience in teaching courses in an intensive- seminar format to post-graduates in several institutions. The seminars had a specialized nature, developing each a specific topic of legislative politics. These seminars are the following: Comparative Legislative Committee Systems (at University Torcuato di Tella, Argentina), Central American Politics [Executive- Legislative Relations] (at University La Rabida, Spain), Forms of Government (“parliamentarism vs. presidentialism”), Agenda-setting: Concepts and Measurement (at University de la Republica, Uruguay). In Legislative Politics I adopt neo-institutional approach, covering its main variants, namely, historical institutionalism, sociological institutionalism and game-theoretic applications to Legislative Politics.
In POLITICAL THEORY, my courses focused on contemporary approaches in the field, including three blocs of theories: normative, empirical and current political phenomena addressed by different political theories. Within the normative approach I include the topics of Utilitariansm (Bentham, Mill), Liberalism (Rawls, and responses to Rawls, such as Nozick, Sen, Dworkin, Walzer), Comunitarianism (Sandel, Taylor, Walzer), and Marxist Theory. The empirical section covers Behavioralism, Political Culture, Old and New Institutionalism, and Game Theory. Within the last set of theories, I include Feminism, Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Ethnical Diversity, Post-modernism, and Globalization. A key objective of the courses and the evaluation exercises was to address the issue of the boundaries between the different approaches, taking up the question about how to establish a dialogue between the normative and empirical theories in Political Science.
In LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS, SPANISH POLITICS, EU POLITICS, CENTRAL AMERICAN POLITICS, I have offered specialized courses mostly in postgraduate programmes, and also to Continuing Education Programmes (designed for elder than 45 years who wanted to engage in Higher Education). In these fields I have designed both introductory courses – such as explaining the differences among the forms of government from the constitutional rules – and advanced courses – assessing data analyses of comparative presidential and parliamentary patterns of decision-making, themes of agenda-setting and applied, empirical works. An exception in this regard is the course in EU politics, which focused on the lack of a European Party System.
In INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL SCIENCE, which I taught through 2005-2011 at the Undergraduate Degree at the University of Burgos, my approach has basically been conceptual, starting with the concepts of power, State, sovereignty, legitimacy, authority, and constitutional design. A second bloc addresses the theme of the varieties of political regimes, drawing on the distinction between authoritarian and democratic regimes, and the internal varieties of each. A third bloc of topics covers the varieties of political institutions in democratic regimes. A final bloc includes the topics of political culture, forms of political participation, and degrees of activism, citizens’ attitudes toward the political system, including the understanding and basic use of surveys.
3) COURSES’ RESPONSIBILITIES AND SUPERVISION EXPERIENCE
In my activity as a Lecturer I have assumed all responsibilities of teaching: the design of syllabi, the design of evaluation criteria, the elaboration of materials and management of online contents, the grading, and the tutorship of students.
In the design of syllabi, each academic course, my programs keep a core of constant material, which gives a necessary stability to the course. This is combined with the inclusion of new reading material and new evaluation criteria. This systematic revision and updating of my programs has the objective of providing a set of recent publications in the reading materials, which reflect advancements in the field. I have also shared my research activity with my students, using in the classroom original data from primary sources, as well as brand new published or work-in-progress articles. This revision is, I believe, fundamental in enhancing my teaching capacity, as well as the competences and critical thinking of the students.
In the design of evaluation criteria, I also modify the number and type of activities to be graded on a yearly basis. I typically include a wide range of activities, both individual and involving teamwork. The individual activities are the exam, as well as written assignments of varying length (essays, research project, applied research, book review, theme-based critical comment). The collective activities are more varied, including debates, assessment of scholarly arguments and data, literature reviews, and group presentations. I also include assignments that directly refer to political phenomena currently taking place and that are both scholarly relevant and prone of awaking the students’ interests.
One of my key objectives in teaching is to promote an international approach to the discipline. I thus familiarize students with three main sources of internationalization of our discipline: first, the websites and events of the main professional associations (ECPR, APSA, IPSA); second, the Summer Schools of the discipline (Essex, Michigan, and Ljubljana, for Methods; the Oslo program on Comparative Politics; the summer school of the Standing Group on Parliaments of the ECPR; the ECPR Political Parties Summer School; EUI Summer programs on immigration and Comparative Law; the EITM programs in the US); third, with information on post-graduate programs, with different focuses of specialization.
The tutorship and supervision of students in their assignments and research projects has been one fundamental part of my teaching. With respect to office hours, I am available on a weekly basis for attending students’ needs in fixed slots, but I give students the opportunity to arrange more meetings if necessary. My supervision to postgraduate students have included the supervision of Master’s theses, PhD project’s candidates, and have been member of four thesis’ juries.
4) ACTIVITIES IN TEACHING INNOVATION
I have taught eight courses dealing with pedagogical approaches in teaching, directed a Research Project on ‘Teaching Innovation’ for Methodological Subjects in Political Science”, and participated in designing the reform of the University of Burgos’ B.A. in Political Science in order to comply with the Bologna Conventions of the EU. I have also been member of the “Committee of Teachers’ Training and Pedagogical Innovation” of the University of Burgos to design and give formal accreditation in teaching-related pedagogical formation (2006-2011). In the academic year 2012-13, I also held Head of Studies position for the Undergraduate Programme in Political Science at the University of Burgos.
1) TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
I have a respectful attitude towards both the students and the learning process at the University level. Beyond the fundamental concepts, theories or methodological tools I provide students in my classes, it is my goal to facilitate the students’ acquisition of life-long skills in Political Science. Accessibility is one way to achieve this goal. By being accessible both in the classes and through pastoral care, I aim at helping students develop problem-solving and mature attitudes in order to prepare them for the tasks they will face as professionals, whether in the public or private enterprise. I believe the time at the University must be enriching in several ways, so I also try to engage students in the overall academic life of the Faculty and the University. I try to invite guest lecturers to my classes, inform students of activities taking place in the University and motivate them to search for their own natural interests and find activities that would reward them.
My usual dynamic in the classroom is to assume the responsibility of lecturing together with the development of participatory and stimulating strategies in order to create a sense of common, collective, learning process. I most enjoy teaching when I feel students are truly engaged with the ongoing debates in the discipline, and when I see they are developing a clear and well-argued position taking.
When I design course syllabi, I try to include a varied range of evaluation criteria so that students train the several capabilities that will be demanded from them in the labor market. I treat students as soon-to-become strong professionals with mature and responsible attitudes towards their work. This attitude is to be trained in the context of University education, and it derives naturally by establishing a mutual respectful relationship with the students. I also strongly value the development of the students’ communication capabilities, so I systematically include as one of my evaluation criteria the exercise of public presentations, debates and seminar-like sessions. Often, some students need to overcome shyness or stress when facing the task of speaking in public. I offer special training time to these students in my office hours and help them develop self-confidence and the feeling of being capable, as I believe these are very important competences, highly valued in the job market.
Preparation is key to a successful lecturing, so I devote time and effort to the elaboration of teaching materials. Besides including new materials coming from recently published articles or new data becoming available, I typically try to share my enthusiasm and passion for research-based, evidence grounded, knowledge. In this line, I usually tell them about the research projects where I am involved and I find genuine interest from the students. This act of sharing practical experience with the students is likely to contribute to inspire the students about how they see themselves developing a career profile, thereby enhancing their educational experience.
I have learned to develop a good classroom management both from my teachers throughout my trajectory in several institutions and from my own experience as Lecturer. I believe each class has its own pace of learning and this must be respected. While I systematically plan the schedule of the sessions devoted to each subject of the program, I let the students’ real-time reactions determine how fast to proceed. Sometimes, it is worthwhile spending a longer time rethinking of a concept that was assessed in a previous lesson and train the ability of students to make connections across themes. The skills involved in developing a relational comprehension are thereafter related to the capacity to convey knowledge synthetically and to grasp detail within a broader framework.
Finally, I have taught in a variety of settings – small and large college classrooms, but also to secondary education teachers and to elder students in Continuing Education Programs – and to varied audiences, from more specialized seminars to more introductory, and even generalist, courses. I have been challenged by each new situation and I have enjoyed them all. I plan to maintain this attitude as I advance in the profession.
2) FIELDS OF TEACHING AND CONTENTS – TEACHING SCOPE
I have taught in the fields of: Comparative Politics; Political Theory; Methodology and Techniques for Research in Political Science; Legislative Politics; Public Policy and Governance; Introduction to Political Science; Latin American Politics; Political Sociology; International Cooperation for Development, and EU Politics, and a number of specialized seminars on Spanish Politics, Central American Politics, Regression Analysis, Comparative Committee Systems, Electoral Behavior and How Design a Research Project.
My first teaching experience was on the field of METHODS. I assisted the main Professors in courses of Introduction to Regression and Theory of Regression in the Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis, during the summers through 2003-2005. Since 2005 on, I have always taught at least one course on methodology per academic year. Although I have a more consistent expertise on quantitative techniques, I have also taught (and applied in my research) qualitative techniques, such as focus groups, open and semi-structured interviews, organizational analysis, discourse and content analysis. I have taught quantitative techniques at the University of Essex, University of Burgos, UCA in El Salvador and the GIGA in Hamburg, in both Graduate and Postgraduate programmes. My syllabi in Methods have included descriptive, exploratory and inferential statistics for univariate, bivariate and multivariate specifications, types of data matrices; sources of data, types of models (from data to model, OLS, vs. from model to data, or maximum likelihood models), linear and non-linear specifications, observed vs. latent models, and strategies for combining quantitative-qualitative techniques (“triangulation”). I give emphasis to the key role of research design for developing a successful research project.
In COMPARATIVE POLITICS, I have taught Undergraduate students in Political Science at the University of Burgos during the years 2005-2013. I have also taught short Comparative Politics courses to post-graduates in other Universities and Research Centers. Particularly, I have taught courses to Post-graduates in Comparative Institutional Design at the UCA, El Salvador, in Agenda-setting at the University of La Republica in Montevideo, Uruguay, and in Forms of Government and Institutional Performance in UAM, Mexico. One of my key focus of interest in this field has been to study the Theory of Democracy. My courses thus included topics such as varieties of democratic regimes, the core aspects where these differ and how, measuring democracy, measuring constitutional and procedural rules, indexing types of regime, the electoral and party systems, the evolution of civil liberties, political rights, media and expression rights, transitions from authoritarian regimes, comparing democratic and non-democratic regimes, and varieties within and across forms of government.
In LEGISLATIVE POLITICS, I have experience in teaching courses in an intensive- seminar format to post-graduates in several institutions. The seminars had a specialized nature, developing each a specific topic of legislative politics. These seminars are the following: Comparative Legislative Committee Systems (at University Torcuato di Tella, Argentina), Central American Politics [Executive- Legislative Relations] (at University La Rabida, Spain), Forms of Government (“parliamentarism vs. presidentialism”), Agenda-setting: Concepts and Measurement (at University de la Republica, Uruguay). In Legislative Politics I adopt neo-institutional approach, covering its main variants, namely, historical institutionalism, sociological institutionalism and game-theoretic applications to Legislative Politics.
In POLITICAL THEORY, my courses focused on contemporary approaches in the field, including three blocs of theories: normative, empirical and current political phenomena addressed by different political theories. Within the normative approach I include the topics of Utilitariansm (Bentham, Mill), Liberalism (Rawls, and responses to Rawls, such as Nozick, Sen, Dworkin, Walzer), Comunitarianism (Sandel, Taylor, Walzer), and Marxist Theory. The empirical section covers Behavioralism, Political Culture, Old and New Institutionalism, and Game Theory. Within the last set of theories, I include Feminism, Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Ethnical Diversity, Post-modernism, and Globalization. A key objective of the courses and the evaluation exercises was to address the issue of the boundaries between the different approaches, taking up the question about how to establish a dialogue between the normative and empirical theories in Political Science.
In LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS, SPANISH POLITICS, EU POLITICS, CENTRAL AMERICAN POLITICS, I have offered specialized courses mostly in postgraduate programmes, and also to Continuing Education Programmes (designed for elder than 45 years who wanted to engage in Higher Education). In these fields I have designed both introductory courses – such as explaining the differences among the forms of government from the constitutional rules – and advanced courses – assessing data analyses of comparative presidential and parliamentary patterns of decision-making, themes of agenda-setting and applied, empirical works. An exception in this regard is the course in EU politics, which focused on the lack of a European Party System.
In INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL SCIENCE, which I taught through 2005-2011 at the Undergraduate Degree at the University of Burgos, my approach has basically been conceptual, starting with the concepts of power, State, sovereignty, legitimacy, authority, and constitutional design. A second bloc addresses the theme of the varieties of political regimes, drawing on the distinction between authoritarian and democratic regimes, and the internal varieties of each. A third bloc of topics covers the varieties of political institutions in democratic regimes. A final bloc includes the topics of political culture, forms of political participation, and degrees of activism, citizens’ attitudes toward the political system, including the understanding and basic use of surveys.
3) COURSES’ RESPONSIBILITIES AND SUPERVISION EXPERIENCE
In my activity as a Lecturer I have assumed all responsibilities of teaching: the design of syllabi, the design of evaluation criteria, the elaboration of materials and management of online contents, the grading, and the tutorship of students.
In the design of syllabi, each academic course, my programs keep a core of constant material, which gives a necessary stability to the course. This is combined with the inclusion of new reading material and new evaluation criteria. This systematic revision and updating of my programs has the objective of providing a set of recent publications in the reading materials, which reflect advancements in the field. I have also shared my research activity with my students, using in the classroom original data from primary sources, as well as brand new published or work-in-progress articles. This revision is, I believe, fundamental in enhancing my teaching capacity, as well as the competences and critical thinking of the students.
In the design of evaluation criteria, I also modify the number and type of activities to be graded on a yearly basis. I typically include a wide range of activities, both individual and involving teamwork. The individual activities are the exam, as well as written assignments of varying length (essays, research project, applied research, book review, theme-based critical comment). The collective activities are more varied, including debates, assessment of scholarly arguments and data, literature reviews, and group presentations. I also include assignments that directly refer to political phenomena currently taking place and that are both scholarly relevant and prone of awaking the students’ interests.
One of my key objectives in teaching is to promote an international approach to the discipline. I thus familiarize students with three main sources of internationalization of our discipline: first, the websites and events of the main professional associations (ECPR, APSA, IPSA); second, the Summer Schools of the discipline (Essex, Michigan, and Ljubljana, for Methods; the Oslo program on Comparative Politics; the summer school of the Standing Group on Parliaments of the ECPR; the ECPR Political Parties Summer School; EUI Summer programs on immigration and Comparative Law; the EITM programs in the US); third, with information on post-graduate programs, with different focuses of specialization.
The tutorship and supervision of students in their assignments and research projects has been one fundamental part of my teaching. With respect to office hours, I am available on a weekly basis for attending students’ needs in fixed slots, but I give students the opportunity to arrange more meetings if necessary. My supervision to postgraduate students have included the supervision of Master’s theses, PhD project’s candidates, and have been member of four thesis’ juries.
4) ACTIVITIES IN TEACHING INNOVATION
I have taught eight courses dealing with pedagogical approaches in teaching, directed a Research Project on ‘Teaching Innovation’ for Methodological Subjects in Political Science”, and participated in designing the reform of the University of Burgos’ B.A. in Political Science in order to comply with the Bologna Conventions of the EU. I have also been member of the “Committee of Teachers’ Training and Pedagogical Innovation” of the University of Burgos to design and give formal accreditation in teaching-related pedagogical formation (2006-2011). In the academic year 2012-13, I also held Head of Studies position for the Undergraduate Programme in Political Science at the University of Burgos.