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POLITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Pandemic Pedagogy
Teaching International
Relations Amid COVID-19
Edited by
Andrew A. Szarejko
 Political Pedagogies

Series Editors
Jamie Frueh, Bridgewater College, Bridgewater, VA, USA
David J Hornsby, The Norman Paterson School of International Affairs,
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
The purpose of the series is to create a new space for conversations
between scholars of political pedagogy, and between such scholars and
those looking for guidance on their teaching, and become the main recog-
nizable authority/series/conversational space in this field. The prolifera-
tion of journals, conferences, and workshops devoted to teaching attest
to the accelerating interest in the pedagogy of Political Science and
International Relations over the past two decades. While research schol-
arship remains the dominant criterion for hiring and promotion at top
tier institutions, almost all academics in these disciplines spend most of
their energy teaching, and more than two-thirds do so at institutions
where effective teaching is the primary factor in career success (Ishiyama
et al 2010). Even those at research-intensive positions benefit from more
effective classroom environments, and institutions across the world are
building centers devoted to improving teaching and learning. The chal-
lenges of teaching span sub-disciplines and connect disparate scholars in
a common conversation. Indeed, teaching may be the only focus that
academics in these disciplines truly share. Currently, most writing about
teaching politics is published in journals, and is therefore dispersed and
restricted in length. This series will provide a much needed platform for
longer, more engaged contributions on Political Pedagogies, as well as
serve to bring teaching and research in conversation with each other.

More information about this series at

https://link.springer.com/bookseries/16526
 Andrew A. Szarejko
Editor

Pandemic Pedagogy
Teaching International Relations Amid COVID-19
Editor
Andrew A. Szarejko
Monterey, CA, USA

ISSN 2662-7809 ISSN 2662-7817 (electronic)

Political Pedagogies
ISBN 978-3-030-83556-9 ISBN 978-3-030-83557-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83557-6

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Anna Babii/Alamy Stock Photo

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgments

There are only so many ways to say “thank you” to the many people
who shape a single text, but I should probably start with those who
saw promise in the proposal for this volume and who helped to make
it a reality. So to Jamie Frueh, David Hornsby, Anca Pusca, Shreenidhi
Natarajan, two anonymous reviewers, and everyone at Palgrave Macmillan
who helped to support the production of this volume, thank you.
I’m also grateful to the contributors themselves for spending some of
their scarce time working on their chapters during an unusually stressful
period. For so many colleagues to have entrusted me with the editing
of their work and with oversight of the volume as a whole is rather
humbling, and I hope I have done right by them. It is similarly humbling
to read the endorsements that other colleagues have provided for this
volume, and I’m thankful for their engagement with the collective work
this volume represents.
Of course, the reflections in this volume are the product of inter-
actions with students, and I’m grateful for the work they did in very
difficult circumstances. The pandemic presented challenges to teaching
and learning alike, but at least from my side of the (virtual) classroom,
the experience was not nearly as difficult as it could have been because of
the energy and curiosity that students at Georgetown University and the
University of Cincinnati alike brought to our classes. Moreover, in two
of those classes, I received the support of excellent teaching assistants,

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Jonathan Liu and Shea Minter, and all classes rely on a broader network
of supportive academic staff. Thank you all.
To the extent that I am interested in and any good at teaching, it
has helped to have models of effective instruction in my life from grade
school onward. From early English classes with Janet Wrassmann and
Margaret New to high school classes with Erik Krotz, Erik Lipham,
and Jon Seals, I have benefited from the labor of many who have dedi-
cated their professional lives to teaching. At the college and post-graduate
level, classes (and discussions about teaching IR) with Bradford McGuinn,
Joe Parent, Andrew Bennett, David Edelstein, Lise Morjé Howard, and
Daniel Nexon—as well as the Apprenticeship in Teaching at George-
town’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship—left an
especially large imprint on my own teaching.
Finally, I am grateful to my family and friends who have helped me
make it through the pandemic. More than anyone else, I have my wife,
Camille Balleza, to thank for that. Beyond her everyday support, she
helped me choose the cover photo for this volume—a depiction of paper
marbling that is meant to underscore the fluidity of the public health situ-
ation we have been dealing with for many months now. There’s no one I
would rather have in my pandemic bubble, and I dedicate this volume to
her.

August 2021 Andrew A. Szarejko

 Praise for Pandemic Pedagogy

“COVID-19 created numerous challenges for those of us who teach.

But it also offered opportunities, especially for those who teach about
international politics. From heightening awareness of the interconnected
nature of the world, generating the ability to experiment with new peda-
gogic approaches, and forcing a rethink of the “classroom environment,”
instructors from around the globe sought to make the best of a diffi-
cult situation. The contributions to this volume provide a treasure trove
of lessons learned from those experiences and experiments. Any and all of
them will make you a better teacher of international politics, both virtually
and in-person.”
—Paul Poast, University of Chicago, US

“This wonderful book serves several important purposes, from processing

what we have all just been through, to guiding us in our future teaching.
The chapters offer radically different but equally important contributions
to our profession and this moment. From Ettinger’s beautifully written
philosophical musing on teaching undergraduates in an “age of crisis,”
to Dayal’s real-time account from her apartment in New York (looking
down on a mobile morgue, sirens in the background as she records her
lectures), to Lemke’s how-to guide for balancing asynchronous and in-
person teaching, the book is brimming with larger insights and smaller
tips. I hope all my colleagues will read this.”
—Hilde Eliassen Restad, Bjørknes University College, Oslo, Norway

vii
viii PRAISE FOR PANDEMIC PEDAGOGY

“The global pandemic has changed our world in dramatic ways, including
how we teach. This timely volume provides a wealth of valuable and
innovative ideas. With a special eye for the student’s—rather than just
the instructor’s—experience in critical times and on virtual environments,
this excellent volume stands out for the diversity of its contributors and
compassionate approach to teaching.”
—Gregorio Bettiza, University of Exeter, UK

“There is a venerable tradition of studying dramatic political shocks

and what they mean for the international system and for international
relations. But what do political shocks in general, and the COVID-19
pandemic in particular, mean for the teaching of International Relations?
This thoughtful compilation of essays and personal reflections by scholars
from across the world does essential service by providing IR scholars—as
teachers—with tips and insights on how to be sensitive to student needs
while coping with the stresses of online and hybrid teaching. Overall,
these essays are the start of a valuable conversation on these issues that
emphasize flexibility and compassion. They will prove to be a useful
resource for established scholars as well as early career scholars as they
think through their teaching responsibilities in this era of change while
managing their other tasks, both professional and personal.”
—Manjeet Pardesi, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
 Contents

Part I Adapting to the Circumstances

1 Teaching World Politics in an Age of Crisis 3
Aaron Ettinger
2 Teaching in Critical Junctures: Challenges
to International Relations Bachelor’s Programs
in Brazil During the COVID-19 Pandemic 19
Elia Elisa Cia Alves and Marcos Alan S. V. Ferreira
3 More Than a YouTube Channel: Engaging Students
in an Online Classroom 39
Elizaveta Gaufman and Sebastian Möller
4 Interactive Learning and Participation at Zoom
University 59
Brianna Nicole Hernandez
5 How Much Zoom is Too Much? Making
Asynchronous Learning Work 73
Tobias Lemke

ix
x CONTENTS

Part II Caring for Students amid Crisis

6 Out from the Wreck: International Relations
and Pedagogies of Care 99
Anjali Kaushlesh Dayal
7 When Teaching is Impossible: A Pandemic Pedagogy
of Care 113
Oumar Ba
8 Supporting Student Learning Through Flexibility
and Transparency 127
Michelle Giacobbe Allendoerfer
9 Access is Love: Equity-Minded Pandemic Pedagogy 141
Andrew B. Jenks
10 Teaching Online During a Crisis: What Matters Most
for Students 157
Rebecca A. Glazier

Part III Preparing for Future Disruptions

11 It Takes a Village: Harnessing Institutional
and Professional Resources to Preempt and Prepare
for the Future 175
Sibel Oktay
12 Getting Our Teaching “Future Ready” 189
Sebastian Kaempf
13 Disruption in an Open-Access Institution 203
Stephanie A. Hallock
14 Pedagogy and Institutional Crisis: Higher Education
as Public Good and Scholarly Advocacy After
the Pandemic 217
Stephen Pampinella

Index 235
 Editor and Contributors

About the Editor

Andrew A. Szarejko is a Donald R. Beall Defense Fellow in the

Department of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School and a
Non-residential Fellow at the U.S. Military Academy’s Modern War Insti-
tute. He recently received his Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown
University and served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science
at the University of Cincinnati. His research focuses on the intersection of
U.S. foreign policy and Indigenous politics, and his peer-reviewed work
has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Global Security Studies,
the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, and PS: Political Science
and Politics. His public-facing work has appeared in outlets like War on
the Rocks, The Diplomat, and Indian Country Today. Since August 2019,
he has served as the teaching editor for H-Diplo, an online platform
devoted to promoting open scholarly discourse on Diplomatic History
and IR. He tweets at @szarejko.

Contributors

Michelle Giacobbe Allendoerfer joined the American Political Science

Association (APSA) in 2021 as the Director of Teaching and Learning.
At APSA, she coordinates teaching and learning and professional develop-
ment programming for APSA members. From 2010 to 2021, she was the

xi
xii EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS

Faculty Coordinator for the International Politics Cohort of the Women’s

Leadership Program at George Washington University and an Assistant
Professor of Political Science. She taught Introduction to Comparative
Politics and Introduction to International Relations in the Women’s Lead-
ership Program and also offered an upper-level course on human rights.
Her research focuses on international human rights. In addition, she is
interested in the scholarship on teaching and learning and was actively
involved with GWU’s Teaching and Learning Center. She has published
articles on active learning in international affairs and on graduate student
involvement in the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Elia Elisa Cia Alves is Assistant Professor in the Department of Inter-
national Relations at the Federal University of Paraiba—UFPB (Brazil).
She has 7 years of teaching experience in public higher education insti-
tutions in Brazil. Since 2016, she has belonged to the Mettrica Lab,
which develops work on active learning and teaching methods and tech-
niques in International Relations at https://sites.google.com/view/met
trica-lab/home and has produced publications in the Journal of Polit-
ical Science Education and Mural Internacional. Her social media activity
includes the use of Academia.edu and ResearchGate profiles and a channel
on YouTube communicating academic literature on teaching at https://
www.youtube.com/channel/UCyFKaTIm9zh4HomSKN46fzA.
Oumar Ba is an Assistant Professor of International Relations in the
Department of Government at Cornell University. He formerly taught at
Morehouse College. His research focuses primarily on the global gover-
nance of atrocity crimes, and the construction of and challenges to the
international order from Global South perspectives. He is the author of
States of Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2020). His articles have
appeared in Human Rights Quarterly and Cambridge Review of Inter-
national Affairs, among others. His research has also been featured in
public media outlets such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Monkey
Cage at the Washington Post, and the New York Review of Books. He is
an editor at the online magazine Africa Is a Country, and his personal
website is www.oumarba.com. He tweets at @oumarkba.
Anjali Kaushlesh Dayal is an Assistant Professor of International Politics
at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus and a former Research
Fellow at the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security. She
is the author of Incredible Commitments: How UN Peacekeeping Failures
 EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS xiii

Shape Peace Processes (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Her research

and writing have appeared in, among other venues, the journals Inter-
national Organization, Peace Review, and Global Governance, as well as
online in the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, the Ms. Magazine blog,
and the On Being Project. She researches peacekeeping, peace processes,
the UN Security Council, and humanitarian intervention. She holds a
Ph.D. in International Relations from Georgetown University’s Depart-
ment of Government, and at Fordham University, she teaches courses
on the United Nations, international relations, and humanitarian inter-
vention in the Political Science and International Studies programs, and
she advises students in the Master’s in International Humanitarian Affairs
program. She tweets at @anjalikdayal.
Aaron Ettinger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political
Science at Carleton University, specializing in International Relations and
U.S. foreign policy. His work on IR pedagogy has been published in
International Studies Perspectives and Politics and in an edited volume
published by University of British Columbia Press. Since 2016, he has
taught a large, introductory course on world politics in an age of crisis,
in which students grapple with the defining global problems of their
generation. His approach to teaching IR is derived from the principles of
“Global IR” and the push for greater disciplinary inclusiveness and diver-
sity. In 2021, he was awarded the Canadian Political Science Association
Prize for Teaching.
Marcos Alan S. V. Ferreira is Associate Professor in the Department
of International Relations at the Federal University of Paraiba—UFPB
(Brazil)—and Visiting Professor at Universidad Núr (Bolivia). He has 15
years of teaching experience in private and public higher education insti-
tutions in Brazil and Bolivia. He has also been a Visiting Researcher at
the University of Manchester (United Kingdom) and Uppsala University
(Sweden). Since 2012, he has conducted research on the development of
International Relations programs in Brazil, which has led to publications
in the Journal of Political Science Education and Meridiano 47 —Journal
of Global Studies. He tweets at @marcosalan, and his academic work can
be found at: https://ufpb.academia.edu/MarcosAlanFerreira.
Elizaveta Gaufman is Assistant Professor of Russian Discourse and Poli-
tics in the Department of European Languages and Cultures at the
University of Groningen (The Netherlands). Her research is situated at
xiv EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS

the intersection of political theory, international relations, and media and

cultural studies. She is the author of Security Threats and Public Percep-
tion: Digital Russia and the Ukraine Crisis (Palgrave, 2017). Her other
publications include peer-reviewed articles on nationalism, sexuality, and
social networks. Elizaveta is a permanent contributor to the “Duck of
Minerva” blog and tweets at @lisas_research.
Rebecca A. Glazier is a Political Science Professor in the School of Public
Affairs at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She is the Director
of the Little Rock Congregations Study. In addition to her research
on religion and community engagement, she studies the scholarship of
teaching and learning and is passionate about improving the quality of
online education. More information about her research is available on
her website: http://www.rebeccaglazier.net/.
Stephanie A. Hallock is a Professor of Political Science and the Coor-
dinator for Global Education and Engagement at Harford Community
College in Bel Air, Maryland. She earned her Ph.D. in International
Relations from the University of Miami and has spent over two decades
focused on teaching, learning, and expanding global education oppor-
tunities for community college students, who have very diverse needs,
abilities, and goals. In this learning environment, most of Stephanie’s
research, publications, and presentations have stemmed from classroom
experiences and student interactions, including recent work on the use
of simulation games and AI to promote active learning in the IR class-
room, the infusion of global learning across the curriculum, the impact
of citizenship and identity on political mobilization, and pedagogical tools
designed to reach first-generation college students, most notably The
World in the Twentieth Century: A Thematic Approach (Pearson, 2013).
Brianna Nicole Hernandez is a Ph.D. Candidate in International Rela-
tions at Florida International University (FIU). She joined the program
in 2018, has since received her M.A., and is pursuing her Ph.D. as well as
certificates in Women and Gender Studies and National Security Studies.
Prior to attending FIU, Brianna received her B.A. from the University of
Miami, where she double-majored in History and Political Science and
completed minors in Sociology and Philosophy. She is interested in the
role of language as a product and producer of the actors and actions that
comprise the international system and its relation to power dynamics. She
 EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS xv

has served as a Teaching Assistant for Introduction to International Rela-

tions at FIU, and her social media presence includes a Twitter account at
which she tweets about her work (@brihernandezfiu).
Andrew B. Jenks is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Polit-
ical Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware.
His research focuses on disability politics, and he has recently published
articles in Disability & Society and Critical Social Policy. His work on
teaching and learning includes a recent collaboration with the Univer-
sity of Delaware’s Center for Teaching and Assessment of Learning as an
Equity and Accessibility Consultant as well as a forthcoming chapter in a
handbook for graduate student instructors which suggests that the use of
educational technologies that are accessible to the instructor can enhance
the student learning experience. Outside of academia, Jenks competes at
the Paralympic level in the sport of goalball and has had the opportunity
to contribute to community outreach and engagement with people with
disabilities, specifically young people who are blind or visually impaired,
mostly in the U.S. Find updates at his website www.andrewjenks.net and
on Twitter (@thelifeofjenks).
Sebastian Kaempf is a Senior Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies in
the School of Political Science and International Studies at the Univer-
sity of Queensland (UQ, Australia). Since 2009, his courses have been
taught in-person and fully online. Each course differs, but they include
2-hour lectures, 1-hour seminars/tutorials, 3-hour practical MediaLabs,
and 3-hour simulation role plays. He is also the producer and convener
of “MediaWarX”, one of UQ’s Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs),
which runs several times a year (May 2017–2024), and which has
already been taken by over 13,500 learners from over 154 countries.
He has received an Australian National Award for Teaching Excellence
and the 2020 ISA Award for Teaching Innovation. His publications in
relation to teaching and education include, “Teaching International Rela-
tions through the format of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)”
(with Carrie Finn, International Studies Perspectives, 2020) and “Reimag-
ining Communities: Opening up History to the Memory of Others”
(with Jean-Louis Durand, Millennium - Journal of International Studies,
January 2014). Through his new podcast series, “HigherEd Heroes”
(co-convened with Dr Al Stark), he disseminates insights into excellent
teaching practices: https://www.buzzsprout.com/813707.
xvi EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS

Tobias Lemke is Instructor of Political Science and International Rela-

tions at the University of Delaware and the Program Coordinator for
Faculty Development and Assessment at the English Language Institute’s
Academic Transition Program. At Delaware, he received his Ph.D. in
2021, and he successfully completed two course certification programs
in the philosophies of learning and teaching through the Center for
Teaching and Assessment of Learning. He also served as the grad-
uate fellow for the University of Delaware’s Center for the Integra-
tion of Teaching, Research and Learning from 2015–2017; part of an
inter-institutional network designed to provide professional development
opportunities for graduate students and early career scholars interested
in a career in teaching. He is currently working on classroom research
that assesses student perceptions of active learning strategies and the effi-
cacy of hybrid and remote learning environments for second-language
undergraduate learners.
Sebastian Möller is a political economy research and M.A. program coor-
dinator at Cusanus University Koblenz, Germany. His interdisciplinary
work focuses on state financialization, international trade, urban political
economy, and socio-ecological transformations. He has taught a variety
of introductory classes in political science, international relations, and
international political economy as well as research seminars on finance
and trade. At Cusanus University, he also teaches graduate courses in
economics with a focus on sustainable transitions within corporations
and the wider economy. Sebastian is particularly committed to encour-
aging and facilitating transdisciplinary learning, including dialogues with
practitioners, study field trips, and transdisciplinary student research. In
his digital seminar on the global political economy of Bremen’s ports
at the University of Bremen (summer term 2020), he set up a seminar
blog (https://blogs.uni-bremen.de/hafenblog/, in German language)
where students, colleagues, and practitioners contributed to the produc-
tion and discussion of knowledges. This seminar received two teaching
awards, including one from the German Political Science Association.
Sebastian regularly tweets about higher education and political economy
(@smoeller84), and he acts as reviewer for two student journals and
publishes articles and working papers with his students.
Sibel Oktay is Associate Professor of and chair of the Political Science
Department at the University of Illinois at Springfield, and a non-resident
senior fellow of public opinion and foreign policy at the Chicago Council
 EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS xvii

on Global Affairs. Her research and teaching interests focus on interna-

tional relations and foreign policy, European and Middle Eastern politics,
and mixed-method research. Her research has been published in the
Journal of European Public Policy, European Journal of Political Research,
and British Journal of Politics and International Relations, among others.
She is the author of the forthcoming book, Governing Abroad: Coali-
tion Politics and Foreign Policy in Europe (University of Michigan Press).
Her media commentary and opinion pieces have appeared in The New
York Times, The Hill, Vox, BBC, Deutsche Welle, and The Conversation,
among others. Oktay has been teaching courses on international relations
and foreign policy analysis both face-to-face and online since 2014. She
tweets at @sibeloktay. You can find more about her research, teaching,
and public-facing work on www.sibeloktay.net.
Stephen Pampinella is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Inter-
national Relations at the State University of New York (SUNY) at New
Paltz. He specializes in U.S. foreign policy, relational social theory,
and race in international relations. His peer-reviewed publications have
appeared in Civil Wars and Small Wars and Insurgencies, while his
current research applies relational and postcolonial frameworks to analyze
governance hierarchies during U.S. military occupations. Pampinella has
10 years of political organizing experience in New York State, primarily
focusing on increasing state assistance to SUNY. With colleagues, he
is a co-founder of the Member Action Caucus with United University
Professions, the union representing SUNY faculty and staff.
 List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 Overview of course modules on Canvas 79

Fig. 5.2 Expanded view of a single Module in Canvas
(Introduction to Global Politics) 80
Fig. 5.3 Excerpt from course discussion document (Introduction
to International Relations) 82
Fig. 5.4 Excerpt from course discussion document with a focus
on course introduction and learning outcomes
(Introduction to International Relations) 83
Fig. 5.5 Detailed look at the overview page to Module 1
on Canvas (Introduction to Global Politics) 87
Fig. 5.6 Detailed look at the “To-Do” list as part of the overview
page to Module 1 on Canvas (Introduction to Global
Politics) 87
Fig. 5.7 Expanded view of Online Classroom Orientation Module
on Canvas (Introduction to Global Politics) 89
Fig. 5.8 Detailed view of the technology troubleshooting page
that is included in the Online Classroom Orientation
Module on Canvas (Introduction to Global Politics) 90
Fig. 5.9 Detailed view of the instructions for submitting a practice
assignment on Canvas (Introduction to Global Politics) 91
Fig. 5.10 Stop, Start, Continue, survey prompt for collecting
student feedback during the semester (Introduction
to International Relations) 93

xix
xx LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 12.1 Screenshot taken of the CCTV cameras of Brisbane,

crowdsourced by my students in 2020, and uploaded
onto Google Maps 198
 List of Tables

Table 2.1 Public-funded IR undergraduate programs in Brazil 23

Table 2.2 IR programs by region, demographic and economic
factors 26

xxi
 Pandemic Pedagogy: Teaching
International Relations During
(and After) COVID-19

For International Relations (IR) scholars around the world, the COVID-
19 pandemic made the second half of the 2019–2020 academic year and
the entirety of the 2020–2021 academic year unusual at best. Amid all
the human catastrophes of the pandemic and a general disruption to daily
life, we as instructors had to continue teaching our students, most of
whom had not originally registered for online or hybrid classes. Indeed, to
adapt to the circumstances and ensure that our students still had valuable
experiences in our (virtual) classrooms, many of us in higher education
have spent more time on teaching than we usually do throughout the
pandemic. This book offers a series of reflections from IR scholars on
what this experience has taught us about our teaching—the ways we can
adjust to crisis, the needs of our students, and the possibilities for greater
preparedness in the event of future disruptions.
Teaching at any level is deeply personal, but teaching amid a pandemic
is perhaps even more so. Throughout the pandemic, students have
become acquainted with our bookshelves, our plants, our pets, our chil-
dren, and the other interlopers. These are not just reminders of how
blurry the line between the home and the office can become while deliv-
ering lectures from home; they are moments that underscore to our
students that we instructors are people too. Indeed, these are the sorts of
reflections you will find in this book—quite personal ones that derive from
the particular contexts each of the contributors faced amid this pandemic.
I will continue with some reflections of my own, and I will then outline

xxiii
xxiv PANDEMIC PEDAGOGY: TEACHING INTERNATIONAL …

the individual chapters and explain how they relate to broader themes of
the volume. I will conclude with a note on how this volume builds on
the Political Pedagogies series of which it is a part.

Teaching IR During COVID-19

I have been fortunate in that neither I nor any immediate family members
have yet contracted COVID-19. While some family members of mine are
healthcare workers, the anxiety I experienced over their potential contact
with the virus faded into background noise at some point, and my own
experience of the pandemic has largely been about changes to my personal
and professional routines. While I have made slight adjustments to my
research due to the closure of archives, for example, the more substantial
professional changes came in my teaching. Prior to 2020, I had never
taught a course entirely online. Much of my early teaching experience
came as a teaching assistant for undergraduate courses at Georgetown
University, and I taught my first class as the instructor of record in the
summer of 2019. It was a five-week summer session of Introduction to
International Relations (Intro to IR), and I have not taught in a classroom
since then.
While I defended my dissertation in August 2020, I have been teaching
online since before the pandemic affected higher education in the U.S.
Luckily, my spring teaching load in 2020 consisted of only a single inde-
pendent study class with one student, and because of their schedule, we
decided from the beginning of the semester—when there was still little
public concern in the U.S. about a potential pandemic—to conduct all
our meetings online. The mid-March shift to online instruction that so
many experienced thus had little effect on how I was teaching. By the
summer, however, I had to more radically rethink how to teach online; I
had committed to teaching two summer sessions of Intro to IR.
In approaching online teaching in these circumstances, the first thing I
wanted to communicate to my students was that I was still committed to
making their experience a valuable one and that I would work with them
to tailor the class to their needs. If, as Schwartz (2019, p. 14) argues,
establishing a productive relationship with students entails “the avail-
ability of intellectual and emotional connection,” I was trying to signal
that availability with a detailed welcome email and an attached survey that
asked students whether they would prefer a synchronous or asynchronous
class (or a mix thereof), how frequently they would want me to host office
 PANDEMIC PEDAGOGY: TEACHING INTERNATIONAL … xxv

hours, what had worked well for them (or not) in other online classes, and
so on.1 Among the changes I ultimately made, however, perhaps the most
effective one was to invite guest speakers for question-and-answer sessions
with my class. I would start by asking about the speaker’s academic back-
ground and about their argument in an assigned reading before going to
the students for any questions they had. In those two summer classes,
for example, Joshua Busby, David Kang and Xinru Ma, Jon Lindsay,
Danielle Lupton, Richard Maass, Inu Manak, Joshua Shifrinson, and
Swati Srivastava all spent at least 45 minutes each discussing topics from
constructivism to U.S. –China relations with my classes.2 Students bene-
fited from being able to ask questions to subject-matter experts whose
work they had read, but this synchronous component to the class was
also helpful to me in building relationships that I have missed fostering in
classrooms and conference hotel lobbies.
The 2020–2021 academic year, however, was my first year of full-time
teaching. As a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Polit-
ical Science at the University of Cincinnati, I taught three undergraduate
classes per semester—five new preparations in total. I taught Introduction
to Comparative Politics in both semesters, and I also taught four upper-
level seminars: America and the World, War and Security, U.S. National
Security, and American Grand Strategy. (It was only that last class on
which I had some input.) I was happy not to have to move from the D.C.
area to Cincinnati for a year, and other faculty members were helpful in
easing my transition into the job, but managing this teaching load amid
everything else was not terribly easy. Similar to other contributors to this
volume (see Section 2), I ultimately arrived at a guiding principle—the
exceptional circumstances warranted exceptional compassion, even if that
meant spending an exceptional amount of time on my classes. Among
other things, I saw that as being proactive about communicating with
students throughout the semester, being relatively generous with respect
to late assignments and excused absences, and providing ample feedback
on all their written work. I did need to make time for other things—
research, job applications, and a personal life included—but I saw my

1 Emphasis in original.
2 These scholars are listed in alphabetical order by last name. Kang and Ma are listed
together as they joined my class together to discuss a coauthored article.
xxvi PANDEMIC PEDAGOGY: TEACHING INTERNATIONAL …

primary professional responsibility as making time for my students and

mitigating the pandemic’s effect on their learning experiences.3
As I write this introduction in early June 2021, I am preparing to
start teaching one more summer Intro to IR class at Georgetown next
week—in all likelihood, the last online class that I will teach for the
foreseeable future as I will then begin a post-doctoral fellowship with
no teaching obligations at the Naval Postgraduate School. (Of course,
views expressed here are my own and not those of the U.S. Navy or any
other federal entity.) Early July will thus mark the end of roughly 18
months throughout which I have been teaching continuously with only
short breaks between semesters or for holidays. That is, the impetus for
this book came from experience. I pitched the basic idea for this edited
volume to the series editors in late March of 2020 at a point when it was
clear the pandemic would have important but still uncertain effects on
higher education, and the full proposal received formal approval from the
press in October. All the while, the contributors and I were constantly
trying to make sense of and adapt to this new teaching environment.
The pandemic is ongoing. Many in the U.S., myself included, have
already received vaccinations, and it appears that the coming academic
year will be a return to “normal” for most instructors. But there are
inequalities in access to vaccines within and across states, and there
remains uncertainty as to whether new variants of the virus might prolong
the pandemic even further. That is, all the contributors to this volume
offer reflections on teaching amid a pandemic while still writing from one.
We thus do so humbly—we all know that things will change between the
time we submit this volume and the time you read it. You will therefore
not find chapters on “one simple trick to get perfect course evaluations
during a pandemic” or “three universal laws of online teaching” in this
volume. Rather, in their own ways, each author here is asking you to
join a conversation with them. They offer some reflections on their own
pedagogical practices based on their experiences of the pandemic. But
what do you think, dear reader? What changes have you made to your

3 Indeed, teaching was my sole contractual responsibility—I had no formal research

or service obligations—but as Jackson (2020, pp. 42–43) notes, the question of how
to “make time for class” will be present at any stage in an academic career given other
personal and professional responsibilities or incentives. The pandemic has made such ques-
tions of time management more pressing for many. As some of the contributors to this
volume explore, this has especially been the case for those with care-giving responsibilities.
 PANDEMIC PEDAGOGY: TEACHING INTERNATIONAL … xxvii

teaching throughout this pandemic, and what will you be taking into the
post-pandemic future?

Outline of the Volume

This volume is divided into three sections, each of which is guided by
a central question. The first two sections focus on the recent past and
the lessons we might derive from our experiences of teaching during
a pandemic. First, how should instructors adapt to different modes of
instructional continuity? Contributors will explore aspects of the quick,
unanticipated change in the means of delivering instruction due to
COVID-19 while also offering suggestions for instructors who face
similar circumstances in the future. If, for example, one seeks to make
IR “visually and affectively experienceable,” even “tangible” for students
(Rösch, 2020, p. 110), how does one do so in a virtual environment?
Second, how should instructors care for their students under such circum-
stances? That is, how should we change our pedagogical practices in
such a disruptive period to ensure that students still feel welcome and
supported in our classrooms and to reckon with the fact that students will
vary in the extent to which they are affected by the pandemic?4 Contrib-
utors here reflect on the ways they sought to meet the diverse needs of
their students, but they also emphasize the extent to which we can bring
a more compassionate pedagogy into our post-pandemic classrooms.
The third section is more explicitly forward-looking. How should we
as a discipline prepare for similar future disruptions? If COVID-19 caught
us somewhat unprepared for the switch to a long period of mostly online
teaching, how can we ensure that any future transitions occur more
smoothly? Contributors underscore the roles that various actors can play
in these preparations—individual faculty members can take action, but
departments, administrators, and professional associations can all make a
significant difference in crafting a more resilient discipline.

4 Sterling-Folker (2020, p. 89), for example, describes her role as an instructor as that
of a guide: “I facilitate the learning process by listening more carefully to what students
hope to achieve (both in the classroom and after graduation), being clear with regards to
my learning goals for them in light of their dreams, adopting a flexible attitude toward
class activities and appropriate assignments, and respecting them individually for their
unique talents and interests.” The question for contributors in Section 2 is essentially
about how to do all that in extraordinary circumstances.
xxviii PANDEMIC PEDAGOGY: TEACHING INTERNATIONAL …

Each contributor in those respective sections will thus be addressing

the same basic theme. Nonetheless, the varying perspectives these authors
bring to bear on these issues generate fruitful differentiation amid
thematic similarity.
The first section begins with Aaron Ettinger’s chapter, which situates
the reader in the “multiple, overlapping, and mutually abetting crises”
that have constituted our teaching environment—not just during the
pandemic, but in the preceding two decades. What intellectual principles
should guide teaching amid crisis? Ettinger argues that we should seek a
middle ground between presentism and historicism, between generalism
and specialism. There instructors can find a “pedagogical eclecticism”
that embraces complexity in world politics while speaking pragmatically
to present concerns.
Elia Elisa Cia Alves and Marcos Alan S. V. Ferreira continue in a
similar vein by asking how one is meant to teach during a “critical junc-
ture,” the sort of period most IR scholars would rather study. Drawing on
their experience teaching in Brazil, Alves and Ferreira explore the myriad
difficulties and creative solutions required in moving classes online in a
context of relatively constrained technological resources and a political
environment unsupportive of higher education.
Sebastian Möller and Lisa Gaufman focus on one of the key chal-
lenges that faces any instructor but that the pandemic has exacerbated.
How do we keep our students engaged? While it can be difficult to
foster interactivity in online classes—especially ones that were meant to be
in-person—Möller and Gaufman argue that active learning is worth the
effort. They explain how simulations and student-run blogs helped keep
their students engaged and fostered connections between students that
one might easily overlook in the pandemic-driven shift to online teaching.
Similarly, Brianna Nicole Hernandez considers how to maintain an
inclusive, connected teaching environment even amid the disruption of
the pandemic. Hernandez does so from the perspective of a teaching
assistant who designed her own discussion and review sessions with
those goals in mind. She outlines a number of games and activities that
she found useful in attaining those objectives, but she also highlights
the importance of treating students as “constructors of knowledge…co-
responsible for learning.”
The first section concludes with Tobias Lemke’s fine-grained discus-
sion of asynchronous and synchronous modes of teaching as well as the
many technical choices one will face along the way. Lemke argues that
 PANDEMIC PEDAGOGY: TEACHING INTERNATIONAL … xxix

neither mode is ideal on its own—a “60/40 split in favor of synchronous

instruction” is his preference—but he outlines the various stages of
designing and ultimately teaching one’s online course such that readers
obligated to teach entirely synchronously or asynchronously will nonethe-
less find much here to think about the next time they run a class online.
Regardless of the exact format an instructor chooses, Lemke concludes,
success in the online format will stem in large part from more personal
choices: “Empathy, understanding and compassion should be the guiding
principles of effective online teaching,” especially in the context of a
pandemic.
For better or worse, the subject matter of IR provides instructors with
plenty of material. Indeed, as Frueh argues, this is something of an advan-
tage for us in the field: “Most obviously, global politics courses provide
opportunities for emerging agents to practice wrestling with the kinds
of complexities they will confront in an increasingly globalized world”
(2020, p. 5). What the authors in this first section demonstrate is that the
empowerment students can experience in our classes need not be impaired
by different modes of instruction, even when such changes are forced
upon us by a pandemic.
This brings us to the second section of the book, which focuses on how
to care for students amid tumultuous circumstances and which begins
with Anjali Kaushlesh Dayal’s chapter on this subject. Teaching to
students in hard-hit New York City, Dayal describes the various ways
in which she manifested a “pedagogy of care” in her classes, and she
emphasizes three key principles that guided her pedagogical practices:
transparency, generosity, and flexibility. “But these pedagogical moves,”
she concludes, “will perhaps remain relevant past the crisis, as ways to
help transform the classroom into a caring, collaborative place for imag-
ining collective solutions to besetting problems.” Indeed, the remaining
contributors in this section continue to press this point.
Oumar Ba situates his chapter with reference to Naeem Inayatul-
lah’s (2020, p. 18) argument that, “Teaching is impossible. Learning is
unlikely… [W]e enter the classroom to encounter others. With them, we
can meditate on the possibility of our own learning.” In Ba’s courses
at Morehouse College, a historically Black institution, teaching amid the
pandemic thus entailed a focus on how the conditions were affecting “stu-
dents, their families, and their communities.” In light of those ongoing
changes, Ba sought to make adaptations throughout his courses that
would allow the (virtual) classroom to be “a living space.”
xxx PANDEMIC PEDAGOGY: TEACHING INTERNATIONAL …

Michelle Giacobbe Allendoerfer, similar to Dayal, emphasizes “flexi-

bility and transparency” in delineating her approach to pedagogical care.
Importantly, she argues that this heightened attention to the shifting
needs of our students need not come at the expense of rigor or one’s
own workload. Echoing Ettinger and Alves and Ferreira, Allendoerfer
notes that we and our students have been working through “multiple
pandemics,” and she considers how to give students “the confidence they
can succeed” even amid challenging circumstances.
Andrew B. Jenks’s chapter focuses on issues of accessibility, including
those pertaining to disability, but he argues that the pandemic has accen-
tuated the many different kinds of barriers that students face when
entering our classes. Jenks challenges the reader to go beyond the bare
minimum of meeting legal requirements for accessibility and to thereby
create more inclusive classroom environments, an effort that we would do
well to support at our respective institutions for the foreseeable future.
This second section concludes with Rebecca Glazier’s chapter on the
centrality of “making meaningful human connections” with our students.
While building rapport with students is important even in normal times,
Glazier argues that this is all the more central to student success and reten-
tion amid a crisis, and she provides numerous suggestions for facilitating
those relationships. Moreover, she concludes, we ought to bring lessons
learned from the pandemic into our future classes: “When we consider
the crises that at least some of our students are likely experiencing in any
given semester, it should spark in us a desire to continue to extend the
compassionate and understanding policies that became common during
the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Above all, the authors in this section overlap in arguing that IR class-
rooms can and should maintain this newfound focus on compassionate
pedagogy. The steps they recommend—among them, being proactive in
reaching out to struggling students, being less punitive toward late assign-
ments, and designing course materials with accessibility in mind—all take
time and energy, resources that may be scarce even in the best of times.
But making even modest commitments to the growth of our students can
have outsized rewards (Lang, 2016).
The third section turns our attention from the current pandemic and
asks how we might prepare for similar future disruptions that could affect
our teaching. The section begins with Sibel Oktay’s examination of
the ways that departments, administrators, and professional associations
might support this task. “We need to develop and sustain tools that
 PANDEMIC PEDAGOGY: TEACHING INTERNATIONAL … xxxi

harness the power and resources of the collective,” she argues, and she
outlines several ways in which we might indeed “diffuse the burden away
from the individual faculty member.” By creating accessible, digital repos-
itories of syllabi, course content, and supplementary lectures or seminars,
for example, departments and professional associations might put faculty
members in a better position to adapt to any abrupt disruptions in future.
For Sebastian Kaempf, the pandemic has provided one overarching
lesson for instructors—we need “to take seriously what learning designers
have been telling us for some time.” Whether one is teaching in-person
or online in a post-pandemic future, Kaempf argues that our teaching can
be more flexible and engaging—and, ultimately, better suited to weath-
ering short- or long-term disruptions. Kaempf outlines several practices
one might bring into future classes, including a variety of active learning
exercises, but he also stresses the value of bringing student voices into the
redesign of courses. After all, as the second section in this volume makes
clear, resiliency in academia is not just about instructors or administrators
but is also about students.
For Stephanie A. Hallock, the pandemic exacerbated two of the
main challenges that students face at her open-access community college:
unequal access to technology and competing demands associated with
care responsibilities and/or employment. She outlines some of the steps
her institution took in the short term to meet those needs as well as
some of the ways that faculties, institutions, and professional associations
can prepare for future disruptions. With respect to professional associ-
ations, for example, she argues that rather than privileging a return to
in-person events, a more robust schedule of “year-round virtual opportu-
nities for faculty to interact with one another” could promote professional
development in pedagogy that would keep us well-prepared for future
disruptions.
This section concludes with a call from Stephen Pampinella for a
more activist academia—one that focuses on the budgetary pressures that
have become increasingly salient amid the pandemic. Writing from the
New Paltz campus of the State University of New York, he argues that
we must be advocates for our students, and that includes pushing back
against state-driven layoffs and cuts to public funding for higher educa-
tion. As other contributors in this section note, there are many things we
can do to prepare for future disruptions so long as we have the neces-
sary resources, but many individuals and institutions will need to wage
xxxii PANDEMIC PEDAGOGY: TEACHING INTERNATIONAL …

political fights in the coming years to retain or increase access to those

resources.
As the contributors to this final section make clear, the task of
preparing academia—or at least our corner of it—for future disruptions is
a difficult one. It will involve more than one person’s efforts, more than
one meeting, more than one email. This is especially the case because this
task is not entirely about pedagogy or anything else entirely within our
control as instructors. It is also about politics, a domain that demands
the “strong and slow boring of hard boards” if we are to have any long-
term effect (Weber, 1998 [1948], p. 128). Drudgery that may be, but
the tedium makes it no less important.

Conclusion
This book is meant to stand on its own, but it is also the fourth entry in
a series. The Political Pedagogies series of which it is a part is currently
constituted by three other edited volumes—Jamie Frueh’s Pedagogical
Journeys Through World Politics, Heather A. Smith and David J. Horns-
by’s Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption, and Daniel
J. Mallinson, Julia Marin Hellwege, and Eric Loepp’s forthcoming The
Palgrave Handbook of Political Research Pedagogy. The present volume
begins most directly where Smith and Hornsby concluded. While their
volume focuses on a variety of ways that teaching can be disrupted and can
serve as a disruption in itself by breaking students away from the familiar,
the pandemic primarily emerges in Smith and Hornsby’s conclusion. “As
a community,” they urge, “let’s come out of this pandemic with more
collaboration and a pandemic pedagogy that is inclusive, innovative, and
based on care” (Smith & Hornsby, 2021, p. 160). Indeed, the contribu-
tors to this volume mirror that call while providing sustained examinations
of the ways future instructors might modify their teaching during similar
disruptions, care for their students, and build a more resilient discipline.
In so doing, this volume supports the overarching goal of the series—
to create a space for conversations about pedagogy in Political Science. I
look forward to the continuing discussion.

Andrew A. Szarejko
Naval Postgraduate School
Monterey, CA, USA
 PANDEMIC PEDAGOGY: TEACHING INTERNATIONAL … xxxiii

References
Frueh, J. (2020). Introduction. In J. Frueh (Ed.), Pedagogical journeys through
world politics (pp. 1–15). Palgrave Macmillan.
Inayatullah, N. (2020). Teaching is Impossible: A Polemic. In J. Frueh (Ed.),
Pedagogical journeys through world politics (pp. 17–26). Palgrave Macmillan.
Jackson, P. T. (2020). In J. Frueh (Ed.), Pedagogical journeys through world
politics (pp. 41–53). Palgrave Macmillan.
Lang, J. M. (2016). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning.
Jossey-Bass.
Rösch, F. (2020). Pedagogies of discomfort: Teaching international relations as
Humanitas in Times of Brexit. In J. Frueh (Ed.), Pedagogical journeys through
world politics (pp. 103–113). Palgrave Macmillan.
Schwartz, H. L. (2019). Connected Teaching: Relationships, power, and mattering
in higher education. Stylus Publishing.
Smith, H. A., & Hornsby, D. J. (2021). Conclusion: Pandemic pedagogy. In H.
A. Smith & D. J. Hornsby (Eds.), Teaching international relations in a time
of disruption (pp. 159–165). Palgrave Macmillan.
Sterling-Folker, J. (2020). Confessions of a teaching malcontent: Learning to like
what you do. In J. Frueh (Ed.), Pedagogical journeys through world politics
(pp. 77–90). Palgrave Macmillan.
Weber, M. (1998 [1948]). Politics as a vocation. In H. H. Garth & C. W. Mills
(Eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in sociology (pp. 77–148). Routledge.
 PART I

Adapting to the Circumstances

 CHAPTER 1

Teaching World Politics in an Age of Crisis

Aaron Ettinger

In Elena Ferrante’s novel My Brilliant Friend, we hear tell of a psychic

state of distress in which “the outlines of people and things suddenly
dissolved, disappeared…” where “unknown entities…broke down the
outline of the world and demonstrated its terrifying nature” (Ferrante,
2006, pp. 89–91). “Dissolving margins”—the psychological unease in
which things once hard and fast become uncertain—is a befitting
descriptor of life in COVID times. For many, outlines were rubbed out
that once distinguished order from disorder, work from home, reality
from unreality. In universities around the world, instructors experienced
their own peculiar dissolutions, beginning with the mad scramble online
in March 2020, and perhaps a more orderly transition in subsequent
terms. “Pandemic pedagogy”—the subject of this volume—confronted
the educator with a suite of practical and philosophical problems that
remain unresolved. As the world shut down, reflections on the pandemic’s
long-term effect on the intellectual content of political science were a
luxury. It was hard enough to remember to unmute yourself.

A. Ettinger (B)
Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 3

Switzerland AG 2022
A. A. Szarejko (eds.), Pandemic Pedagogy, Political Pedagogies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83557-6_1
4 A. ETTINGER

This chapter is a theoretical inquiry into pandemic pedagogy and the

content of IR scholarship, an underexplored intersection in the intel-
lectual life of the field (Ettinger, 2020). The pandemic crisis is an
opportunity to understand and mitigate this imbalance. Exploring the
theoretical implications of integrating the COVID-19 into the IR class-
room reveals the ways that knowledge about world politics is generated
and disseminated under conditions of grave personal and political uncer-
tainty. The question at hand is the following: How, and to what extent,
should the COVID-19 pandemic be incorporated into the permanent
curriculum of world politics? Naturally, there is a temptation to make
room in the syllabus for the latest global political developments. While
this impulse is correct, it must be acted upon with care. There are distinct
pedagogical, professional, and intellectual challenges to teaching world
politics in an age of crisis require deep reflection on the part of the
instructor.
Accounting for the pandemic-era political upheavals presents its own
intellectual challenge for the classroom instructor. The short-term effect
of the pandemic on the International Relations (IR) curriculum was clear
enough. By September 2020, global health politics got a more prominent
place on the syllabus; everyone found a pandemic angle on their own areas
of instruction. It only made sense; academic fashions often follow events
in the real world. But the pandemic’s imprint on the intellectual content
of the IR discipline is less certain. COVID did not take place in a political
vacuum; it unfolded within the context of global political transformations
that are dissolving previously stable patterns of world order. Essentially,
we are teaching world politics in an age of crisis—a dispositive moment
on the threshold of world-historical change. I am interested in the peda-
gogical implications of multiple, overlapping, and mutually abetting crises
in world politics. I argue that this critical juncture in world politics should
prompt instructors to re-evaluate the conceptual and empirical founda-
tions of undergraduate IR classes. Our audiences, undergraduate students
born in the early years of the twenty-first century, have really only known
a world in the throes of crisis. Making sense of world politics in an age of
crisis is a pedagogical and intellectual challenge, not just for teachers but
also for IR itself.
To be clear, this essay is about teaching, not about classroom tech-
niques. These matters are capably addressed by other contributors to this
volume. Rather, it is a conceptual inquiry into the relationship between
undergraduate teaching and the wider intellectual life of International
 1 TEACHING WORLD POLITICS … 5

Relations at a critical juncture in current history. On a personal note,

I am extraordinarily fortunate to be in a position to think about abstrac-
tions. I teach in Canada which, in the grand scheme of things, enjoys
the blessings of “peace, order and good government,” outlined in the
country’s constitution. A safe and productive educational environment
is enabled by political stability, social solidarity, and well-financed public
university system. For the most part, the crises of world politics happen
beyond Canada’s borders (see chapters by Alves and Ferreira, and Dayal
for different perspectives). But the coronavirus pandemic dissolved those
boundaries. For the first time, for many, world politics was knocking at
the door. It is from this standpoint that these observations arise.
This chapter draws on my experiences teaching IR at the undergrad-
uate level in Canadian universities, and, in particular, a large first-year
introductory class on global politics. Since taking on that assignment in
2015, my class has been framed by different variations transformative
change in world politics. In essence, the class is a big history of “right
now” and is meant to help young undergraduates understand the crisis-
laden period in political history in which they live. Here, I explore the
implications of “teaching world politics in an age of crisis.” First, I estab-
lish a conceptual understanding of the term “crisis” and its pedagogical
significance to undergraduate teaching. Second, I address two challenges
of crisis-era teaching and explore what they demand of the instructor:
striking a balance between presentism and historicism, and generalism
and specialist teaching in the IR classroom. I argue that the resolution
to these challenges is rooted in pedagogical variations on current trends
in IR thinking: “global IR” and “analytic eclecticism.” The pluralism of
those two programs can be applied in equal measure to the classroom
and, I propose, to great effect.

Teaching the Age of Crisis

In November 2009, Time Magazine published a retrospective of the
preceding ten-year period calling it “the decade from hell” (Serwer,
2009). The cover featured a wailing Baby New Year sitting amid the
detritus of last night’s party. Since I started teaching, the Time cover has
served me well as compelling visual and a final exam question prompt.
It also is cause for constant reflection on the way I frame twenty-first-
century world politics for my students. Intuitively “crisis” seems to fit the
first twenty-one years of the twenty-first century, and using “age of crisis”
6 A. ETTINGER

as an overarching concept is an engaging way to frame an introductory

world politics class. But conceptual intuition and a great hook are no
substitutes for rigor. So, we must set the terms of the debate.
In common parlance, “crisis” is a catch-all word for any bad situation.
This fuzzy colloquial usage is understandable but unfortunate. Writing
one half century ago, the historian Randolph Starn (1971, pp. 14–15)
captured this sentiment well: “every editor and politician knows in the age
of mass media, ‘crisis’ is good copy…one wonders how often ‘crisis’ has
flown off historians’ pens or into their titles with little more than the force
of fad.” In the classroom, terms like “crisis,” “tragedy,” or “failure” may
also present as faddish, but they have a powerful focusing effect. Class-
room instructors, however, are not advertisers and have a responsibility
to be more precise and transparent with these “inescapable, irreplaceable
parts of the political and social vocabulary” (Richter & Richter, 2006,
p. 345). This goes double in periods of political confrontation in which
the boundaries of common language and order dissolve, and where basic
concepts “evoke complex, conflicting reactions and expectations” (ibid.).
Reinhart Koselleck (2006), German theorist of history and historiog-
raphy provides a rich insight into the meaning of crisis and its evolution.
Etymologically, the root of crisis derives from the Greek verb “to sepa-
rate” which in the ancient context was a necessary feature of citizenship,
relating to “choosing,” “deciding,” and “judging” in civic life. It also
applied to medicine, articulating the cognitive co-mingling of diagnosis
and prognosis. Over time, “crisis” has been used to describe something
dispositive; a contingent moment in which something—history, illness,
war, revolution, and judgment—breaks toward a certain resolution. That
ancient Greek conception embodies a double meaning that is still implicit
in modern language. At once, “crisis” describes an objective set of condi-
tions and critical juncture in which a previous state of being is restored or
not (Koselleck, 2006, p. 361).
Between the 1500s and 1800s, “crisis” expanded into areas of secular
life, like foreign affairs and economics, as a metaphor. By the nineteenth
century, intellectual usage of “crisis” converged around four general
meanings: (1) a chain of events leading to a decisive moment; (2) a theo-
logically inflected final judgment day in which history changes forever;
(3) a permanent or conditional category of reoccurring crisis; and (4) a
historically imminent transitional phase (Koselleck, 2006, pp. 371–372).
To these general meanings a fifth consideration was added: deliberate
management. If a crisis could be anticipated, it could be managed through
 1 TEACHING WORLD POLITICS … 7

the instruments of positive knowledge (Koselleck, 2006, p. 377). Such

thinking certainly proved its worth in the scientific and industrial revolu-
tions. Outfitted with the newfound technical virtuosity, crisis now carried
“the cachet of a scientific-seeming organicism with an invitation to a sense
of historical drama; it was a way of connecting quantity and quality”
(Starn, 1971, p. 10). Following their economist cousins, philosophers of
history and ideology, political scientists, organizational theorists, sociol-
ogists, and others absorbed these notions of crisis into their disciplines
(Koselleck, 2006, pp. 392–393). By the late twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, “crisis” has proliferated in application and meaning, and has
lost any analytical precision it once had.
Convincingly, Starn (1971, pp. 17–18) allows for a Kuhnian possibility
to defining the term. As we know, paradigms in science rupture when
what is regarded as “normal” breaks down under the cumulative weight
of anomalies and exceptions. In this sense, “crisis” applies to any paradigm
on the threshold of change. To Starn, this meaning captures the real-
world dissonance and contingency associated with crisis, without resort to
grand theories of history. However, in the absence of shared conceptual
meaning, common criteria for evidence, and agenda-driven use, “crisis”
has lost its precision. The colloquial use seems to have prevailed. Phillip
Y. Lipscy (2020, p. 99) makes an important point that not all is lost.
Scholarship on crisis, and the concomitant vocabulary, is well developed
in different issue areas within political science. He argues that a closer
treatment of “crisis” as an ontological category unto itself presents oppor-
tunities for theoretical synthesis across different research communities and
can restore crisis as a central research agenda in IR. I concur and suggest
that the same can be said for teaching in IR.
Is “crisis” an appropriate characterization of first twenty years of the
twenty-first century? Three inflection points stand out as the benchmark
dates of this era of crisis: the advent of the sprawling war on terror begin-
ning in 2001, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and 2020 pandemic.
At the same time, anomalies and exceptions are accumulating in world
politics and “order inducing institutions cease to function” (Boin &
T’Hart, 2007, p. 44). The age of crisis has seen a loss of confidence
in the ideational pillars of post-World War II global order—liberalism,
democracy, and market capitalism. The dysfunctional pandemic response
of many highly functional states in 2020 did not help and undercut
public confidence in governments’ abilities to respond to grave public
threats. Geopolitically, the rapid rise of China represents a serious Great
8 A. ETTINGER

Power challenge to the USA. Simultaneously, there is the concomitant

erosion of the US-led system of international order that served as the
infrastructure of post-World War II stability and cooperation. Layered on
top are era-defining challenges with migration, racism, democratic retreat,
authoritarianism, and, of course, anthropogenic climate change that is
incrementally bringing humanity (or parts of it, at least) to the threshold
of catastrophe.
The first decade of the twenty-first century was certainly bad. The
second may have outdone the first. The third decade beat them both
in its first year alone. If these multiple, overlapping, and reinforcing issues
are not crises, then what is? Well, that is exactly the point. If this is an era
of crisis, the next question is “compared to what?” An evergreen exercise
for teachers is the interrogation of rhetorical commonplaces in popular
discourse. Did “everything change” with COVID-19? Are we living in
“unprecedented times?” Of course, this is not just a pandemic-era ques-
tion. How many “once in a generation” events have marked the first two
decades of the twenty-first century, the full lifetimes of our undergrad-
uate students? Or, put differently, what are the closest analogies to the
present era of crisis? The world has seen pandemic, revolution, refugees,
depressions, insurrection, democratic decline, and hegemonic transitions
before. Except for world war (so far), the current era has seen them all
unfold, all at once. They are escalating processes that are undermining the
global order’s capacity to cope with disturbances and return to previous
conditions of stability (Boin & T’Hart, 2007, p. 46). And they require
explaining. Teaching global crises from within the dissolving margins of
world order is thus a profoundly important challenge and the way instruc-
tors respond in the classroom has significant effects on the students,
especially for young undergraduates. An instructor’s response helps bring
conceptual order to a disorienting era for students, at the outset of their
adult lives (Westheimer et al., 2017, p. 1043).
Boin and T’Hart (2007, pp. 43–46) note three interrelated compo-
nents of crisis that should prompt reflection among instructors about the
importance of teaching: threat, urgency, and uncertainty. When the 2020
pandemic broke out, it altered the basic threat calculations of daily life for
all students, though not evenly or equitably. The pandemic’s urgency and
immediacy, along with the cascading crises it set off, called upon instruc-
tors to become translators of world events in real-time. Engaging with
imminence puts the instructor in a position to bring to bear the histor-
ical depth of the discipline to contextualize the immediate moment for
 1 TEACHING WORLD POLITICS … 9

students in need of trustworthy intellectual guidance. Third, and most

important, a crisis entails a considerable degree of uncertainty about
the causes and implications of these events. Here, the instructor’s role
is clear. To establish what we know and what we do not. The instruc-
tor’s role is to ask the right question, to provide tentative answers, and
open avenues for what to ask next. This approach converts what is uncer-
tain and unknown into something calculable and knowable through the
simple process of thinking things through. From the perspective of early
undergraduate students of world politics, these three conditions of crisis—
threat, urgency, and uncertainty—are all crying out for conceptual order.
Boin and T’Hart also discuss a fourth component of crisis: its subjective
nature. In an information ecosystem polluted with self-serving misinfor-
mation, the problem is all the more acute (Brühwiler & Okayama, 2020,
p. 335). The classroom instructor can create conditions of trust that can
help students re-establish stable outlines of the world such that conceptual
order might be restored.

Pedagogical Challenges
Establishing conceptual order for students is a great responsibility and
no small task. This second section outlines two major intellectual chal-
lenges to adapting an undergraduate world politics curriculum in an
age of crisis. First, I address the epistemic and methodological tug-of-
war between presentism and historicism in the world politics classroom.
Second, I discuss another tug-of-war between generalist and specialist
types of teaching. In neither case do I advocate for firm boundaries
between them. Rather, here is where “dissolving boundaries” between
firmly maintained distinctions can expand the parameters of possibility of
IR teaching, an argument I ground in pedagogical variations on “global
IR” and analytic eclecticism (Acharya & Buzan, 2019; Sil & Katzenstein,
2010).

Presentism and Historicism

Teaching world politics in this age of crisis requires a commitment to
instruction on the present. That is a justifiable choice and, given the argu-
ments made in the previous section, makes perfect sense. But too much
focus on any one time period can both obscure and clarify. The intel-
lectual threats in this case are availability and recency bias; the cognitive
10 A. ETTINGER

disposition to place outsized emphasis on what is new, newly learned, or

what can be immediately recalled. Pay too much heed to the headlines
(or, smartphone alerts) and it is easy to elide the historical context. Focus
on the deep backstory and the significance of current ruptures may be
dulled. Indeed, one does not want to be overwhelmed by the drama of
events, nor be obtusely unaffected by them. To some degree, these are
straw men positions. The greater challenge for the instructor is estab-
lishing the correct balance of what is immediate and what is context, and
how it can be purposefully presented to students craving insight.
The methodological debates between presentism and historicism
are well-established in historiographic and philosophical literatures
(Armitage, Forthcoming; Walsham, 2017). So too have the great word-
smiths given us plenty of pith. “What’s past is prologue,” Shakespeare
reminds us in The Tempest. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”
wrote Faulkner in As I Lay Dying. Eminently quotable, of course, but
these are not much help in a pedagogical sense. Historically minded IR
scholars are also alert to the epistemological and ontological shadows cast
by history (Lawson, 2012; Lemke & Szarejko, Forthcoming). But what
these, and many other disciplinary analysts forget to address, is how this
historical epistemology influences the classroom. The work of scholar-
ship is not only research; it is also teaching, and teaching entails different
genres of communication, presentation, argumentation, evidence, and
purpose. So how does the balance of presentism and historicism play
out in the classroom where the audience is less sophisticated than the
disciplinary meta-commentators and more vulnerable to historical fallacy?
When I speak of presentism versus history, I speak of a methodolog-
ical commitment that instructors must confront, especially instructors
working in historically minded fields like IR. In the classroom, what is
the correct balance between a pedagogy focused on what is current and
what is context?
Answering this question is a challenge when considering both the
audience and the instructor. As a rule, young undergraduate students
are especially are prone to presentism. Growing up with world crises
unfolding all around them, students can be forgiven for internalizing
crisis as the ordinary state of affairs. It is not their fault; they haven’t
been around long enough to know much better and may only have
working knowledge of events from last five or seven years (Ettinger, 2016,
p. 200). This is not much to work with and, in the absence of greater
 1 TEACHING WORLD POLITICS … 11

context, it anchors their perceptions to a narrow band of history. Instruc-

tors must remember, as I’ve argued elsewhere, “to adjust our expectations
of undergraduates to the time horizons within their lifetimes – not ours”
(Ettinger, 2016, p. 201). Compounding the difficulty is the sheer speed
of events. Things happen fast. They may not always fundamentally change
the world, but they can disorient, distract, and draw outsized attention.
This is made worse by the hyperactive news environment that militates
against reflection (Litfin, 2020, p. 59). Instructors are also vulnerable
to an availability bias that anchors perceptions of what is important to
the landmark events of their generation (Bow & Lane, 2017). Here, the
formative political events of one instructor’s lifetime are merely sections
in a textbook for younger generations. This generates an expectations
gap between what the instructor knows and what the instructor expects
students to know. Ultimately, managing the generational evolution, the
speed of events, and the uncertainties they entail is both a matter of
pedagogical concern and psychological worry.1
In this age of crisis, the duty of the classroom instructor is, at very least,
to provide historical and comparative context. It demands wide-ranging
historical context and the ability to explain it to students. It is a daunting
prospect but, it would seem, that an instructor trained in IR is up for the
task. The stuff of the discipline is deeply inscribed by historical content,
perhaps more than any other empirical branch of political science. For the
historically minded IR instructor, the past exerts even greater influence.
In this context, it is easy to overdo the history. Just as an instructor must
avoid excessive focus on the present, so too must they avoid getting lost in
historicism. Deep historical knowledge, however, can be combined with a
productive pedagogical way to mobilize some of the virtues of presentism.
How can these two things—presentism and history—be reconciled
in the classroom? Unlike many historians who regard presentism as an
unforgivable intellectual sin, the IR instructor should not socially distance
from pedagogical presentism. Its possibilities should be embraced with
due regard for intellectual habits it can impart to students. Pedagogical
presentism is, in short, an opportunity to ingrain in students the habit of
asking the contextualizing question: “what do we know” and “to what
does this compare?” It is a question that by necessity projects backward
and forward in history in order to think through the political present

1 The emotional and psychological aspects of teaching are covered later in this volume.
12 A. ETTINGER

in a systematic way. Historian David Armitage (Forthcoming) summa-

rizes eight types of presentism that are useful ways of thinking through
teaching. Two are particularly helpful in this context. The first is narrative
presentism, which holds that the past is the cause of the present. It is a
common-sense assumption that the present did not come out of nowhere
that allows the possibility of a causal account of the origins of the present.
Of course, there are methodological worries to this with respect to the
ambiguities of causal explanation, of falling into an inevitability narrative,
of over-determination. But in the classroom, simple and well-established
qualitative methods like process tracing and historical sequencing provide
theoretically informed and empirically sensitive tools for connecting the
immediate present with the past (Mahoney et al., 2009; Pierson, 2000).
A related method is “strategic presentism, which helps “understand and
address the way that the past is at work in the present” (quoted in
Armitage, Forthcoming). Its interpretive logic permits the analysis of
cultural and ideational considerations that shape the worldviews of polit-
ical subjects. The point is not to retreat from causal explanation nor to fear
explanatory overdetermination. Rather the point is to ingrain the habit of
historical analysis before deciding on how much weight to ascribe to the
present. Ultimately, teaching students about the crises of world politics
must integrate concerns with the present with context from the past.

The Generalist and the Specialist

Within political science, teaching IR is uniquely difficult. It demands the
abilities of a specialist in order to speak to specific topics, and the breadth
of a generalist who can cogently weave together empirical and theoretical
content that is global and transhistorical in scope. Who but the rare poly-
math can claim such abilities? This is why most scholars focus on their
strengths and teach their special niche in world politics. Compounding
the problem is the pandemic, which forced classes online, adding technical
complications to the mix. Teaching classes on world politics in an age of
crisis takes the challenge one step further, seeking to alloy the intellec-
tual demands of broad and deep content, with the speed of fast-moving
events. Pulling together the capabilities of the specialist and the generalist,
and the cogence of an effective instructor is hard. For faculty, especially
early career faculty, it pits the very different imperatives of research and
teaching against each other. This is a straightforward reality of academic
work that is probably well-understood but goes largely unremarked. The
 1 TEACHING WORLD POLITICS … 13

source of the difficulty is in the diametrically opposed places of specialism

and generalism in political science. For researchers, being a “specialist”
or an “expert” reaps great professional rewards. Being a “generalist” is
career suicide.
The interplay of generalism and specialism is almost completely over-
looked in the intellectual and professional life of political science schol-
arship. This is all very unfortunate. At once, a scholar ought to be
a generalist and specialist with the ability to deploy each skill set in
the right circumstances. Consider the differences between the work of
academic teaching and research. The audience is entirely different, as
are the objectives and the style of communication. The purpose of the
researcher is discovery and dissemination of new knowledge, ultimately
in published formats, to an audience of mostly academic peers. For
researchers, the communication style is predominantly the long-form
essay or monograph that adheres to dense scholarly writing conventions
which are impenetrable to non-experts. The purpose and style of the
classroom instructor are entirely different. Here, the objective is student
engagement, interest, and ultimately learning—first the basics, then more
sophisticated matters. The instructor lays out foundations, communicates
established knowledge simply, develops technical skills, and cultivates
young minds for futures in academia and (mostly) beyond. The mark
of a good researcher is originality, innovation, contribution to a body of
literature, and leading insight. In the classroom, substantive originality
is not a necessary condition of good pedagogy. Neither is contribution
to the field. No undergraduate student rejects a lecture because it does
not make an original contribution or advance the literature. Intellectual
commitments to theoretical traditions or methods of research do not have
nearly the significance they do in the published discipline. Ultimately, the
classroom is a venue with much more flexible and pluralistic possibilities
than the constrained and “disciplined” strictures of the research side of
the profession (Ettinger, 2020, p. 346). A scholar trying to publish on
twelve or sixteen different topics in a single year would be dismissed as
a dilettante by a desk editor or a hiring committee. However, speaking
to disparate topics is exactly what the classroom instructor does, multiple
times per term, as an essential aspect of the work. Combining the virtues
of the generalist and the specialist might be the greatest intellectual
challenge inside the classroom for the professor.
This call for combination is well grounded in recent intellectual trends
in IR and methodological literature. Recently, prominent scholars have
14 A. ETTINGER

theorized a “global IR” research agenda with the aim of unseating the
Euro-Atlantic from its position at the center of IR scholarship. Amitav
Acharya and Barry Buzan (2019, pp. 300–308) theorize the parame-
ters of a global IR that is rooted in, among other things, pluralistic
universalism, world history beyond only Euro-Atlantic history, regional
dynamics, and expanded notions of agency. Taking “global IR” to the
classroom represents a parallel teaching agenda that is equally important
to the diversification of the discipline. Recent work in IR methodology
has laid the conceptual foundations for this kind of intellectually pluralistic
agenda. Global IR teaching is also more inclusive teaching. By necessity,
broad and diverse subject matter will appeal to diverse student audiences
who may not see themselves or issues that are important to them repre-
sented in the world politics curriculum. Global IR, as conceptualized by
Acharya and Buzan (2019), is intended to inform the research work of IR
scholars but it has pedagogical lessons as well. Global IR, they say, gives
“due recognition to the places, roles, and contributions of non-Western
peoples and societies,” which entails pluralism in both theory and empir-
ical content. From my position, teaching in Canada to a student body
that includes new Canadians, those whose ancestors have been here since
time immemorial, and everyone in between, the motivating and moral
force behind an inclusive Global IR is sitting right there in front of me.
Combining generalist and specialist teaching finds intellectual foun-
dations in analytic eclecticism (Sil & Katzenstein, 2010). In its research
configuration, analytic eclecticism is a curiosity-driven and pluralistic
approach to inquiry that eschews strict paradigm-bound or method-
ologically bound engagement with the world. It is a flexible approach
to developing knowledge through open-ended problem formulation,
middle-range causal explanation, and attentiveness to both academic and
practical dilemmas. A full rehearsal of analytic eclecticism’s merits is not
necessary here except to point out its three principal benefits. First, it
articulates problems that reflect complexity, rather than simplifies. Second,
it is attentive to multiplicity, heterogeneity, and multi-causality. Third, it
encourages “pragmatic engagement” with the political world with a keen
eye on both scholarly and political implications. In short, it is an excellent
intellectual basis for the blend of generalist and specialist teaching I have
described here. Moreover, it is especially well-equipped for substantive
engagement with the multiple and overlapping crises of world politics in
the third decade of the twenty-first century.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The naval cadet: A
story of adventures on land and sea
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The naval cadet: A story of adventures on land and sea

Author: Gordon Stables

Illustrator: W. Rainey

Release date: July 9, 2022 [eBook #68480]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Blackie and Son, 1898

Credits: Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NAVAL

CADET: A STORY OF ADVENTURES ON LAND AND SEA ***
 The Naval Cadet
A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea

BY

DR. GORDON STABLES

Author of "In the Great White Land" &c.

ILLUSTRATED BY WILLIAM RAINEY, R.I.

BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED

LONDON GLASGOW AND BOMBAY
 Printed in Great Britain by
Blackie & Son, Limited, Glasgow

CONTENTS.

Chap.

I. The Hermit of Kilmara

II. The Night came on before its Time
III. The Storm
IV. Story of the Skye Clearings
V. A Terrible Adventure
VI. In Search of Adventure
VII. Lost in a Highland Mist
VIII. Creggan and Oscar
IX. On Board the Gunboat Rattler
X. War Ahead!
XI. The City of Blood
XII. Capture of the City of Benin
XIII. In a Wild and Lovely Mountain-land
XIV. A Fearful Night
XV. Welcome Back to Skye
XVI. Life on the Good Ship Osprey
XVII. Mess-room Fun
XVIII. St. Elmo's Fire
XIX. The Burning Ship
XX. Gun-room Fun
XXI. Jacko Steals the Captain's Pudding
XXII. In the Wilds of Venezuela
XXIII. Dolce Far Niente
XXIV. On the Lonesome Llanos
XXV. Promotion
XXVI. Adventure in a Papuan Lake-Village
XXVII. A Terrible Tragedy
XXVIII. "The Battle rages Loud and Long"
XXIX. Like a Battle of Olden Times
XXX. Court-martialed
XXXI. Safely Home at Last

ILLUSTRATIONS

The Ju-Ju king sprang up ... Frontispiece [Missing from source book]

Creggan kept the boat head-on to each threatening wave

"Well, my lad, you're one of the 'Rattler's' middies, aren't you?"

Just in the nick of time, Creggan fires [Missing from source book]

"Antoine was in a state of mesmeric fascination, and pale as death"

 THE NAVAL CADET.

CHAPTER I.

THE HERMIT OF KILMARA.

There was something in the reply given by young Creggan M'Vayne to

Elliott Nugent, Esq., that this gentleman did not altogether relish. He could
not have complained of any want of respect in the boy's utterance or in his
manner, but there was an air of independence about the lad that jarred
against his feelings, and made him a trifle cross—for the time being, that is.

For Nugent was a great man,—in his own country at all events. He was
an ex-secretary from one of the Colonies, and at home in Australia he had
been like the centurion we read of in the New Testament, and had had many
men under him to whom he could say "Do this" with the certainty of finding
it done, for in his own great office his word had been law.

But here stood this kilted ghillie with his collie dog by his side—stay,
though, till I present my young hero to you, reader. You will then know a
little more of the merits of the case.

Than young Creggan M'Vayne, then, no boy was better known on land
or at sea, all along the wild rocky shores that stretch from Loch Snizort to
the very northernmost cape of Skye, well-named in the Gaelic "The Island
of Wings". At any time of the day or by moonlight his little skiff of a boat
might be met by sturdy fishermen speeding over the waves of the blue
Minch, or lazily floating in some rock-guarded bay, while its solitary
occupant lured from the dark, deep water many a silvery dancing fish. But
inland, too, he was well-known, on lonely moor and on mountain brow.
 And Creggan was welcome wherever he went. Welcome when he
appeared at the doors of the rude huts that were huddled along the sea-
shore, welcome in the shepherd's shieling far away on the hills, and
welcome even at the firesides of gamekeepers themselves.

Up to the present time, at all events, Creggan's life had been a half-wild
one, to say the least of it. Though tall for his years, which barely numbered
fourteen, he was as strong and well-knit as the sinewy deer of the
mountains. Good-looking he certainly was, with a depth of chin that
pronounced him more English than Scotch; the bluest of eyes, a sun-kissed
face, and fair, curly hair of so self-assertive a nature that Creggan's
Highland bonnet never by any chance got within three inches of his brow.

From that same bonnet, then, down to his boots, or rather brogues, the
lad looked every inch a gentleman. He was just a trifle shy in presence of
his elders and those who moved in a superior walk of life to him; but every
really good honest-hearted lad is so. Among the peasantry, however, he was
always his own manly self.

There was one thing concerning Creggan's wild life that he did not care
for anyone to know, not even his best friend, M'Ian the minister. And it was
this: he was kind to the very poor. The fact is, that the lad was always either
in pursuit of game, as he chose to call even rabbits, or fishing from his skiff
or from the rocks, so that he had generally more than sufficed for his own
needs and those of his guardian, whom I shall presently introduce to you.
So when he appeared at the door of widow M'Donald, M'Leod, or M'Rae, as
the case might be—for they were nearly all Macs thereabout,—you couldn't
have guessed that he was carrying a beautiful string of codling or a "sonsy"
rabbit, so carefully was it concealed in his well-worn and somewhat tattered
plaid.

I am quite sure that Creggan's faithful collie, whose name was Oscar,
quite approved of what his master did; he always looked so pleased, and
sometimes even barked for joy, when Creggan presented those welcome
gifts, and while the recipients called blessings down from heaven on the
boy's curly head.
 But not only did the poorest among the crofters, or squatters as they
might have been called, love the winsome, happy-visaged boy, but many of
them looked upon him with a strange mixture of superstition and awe. He
was supposed to bear a kind of charmed life, because a mystery hung over
his advent which might never, never be cleared up. For Creggan was an
ocean-child in the truest sense of the word. When a mere infant he had been
found in a small boat which was stranded on the rock-bound Isle of
Kilmara, off the shores of Skye, one morning after a gale of wind. In this
islet, which indeed is but little more than a sea-girt rock, he had dwelt for
many years with the strange being who had picked him up half-frozen, and
had wooed him back to life, and became not only a father to him but a tutor
as well.

A strange being indeed was old Tomnahurich, the Hermit of Kilmara, the
name by which he was generally known. Only old people could remember
his coming to and taking possession of the island, which probably belonged
to no one in particular, although in summer-time a few sheep used to be sent
to crop the scanty herbage that grew thereon. But one beautiful spring
morning,—with snow-white cloudlets in the blue sky, and a light breeze
rippling the Minch, till from the mainland of Skye it looked like some
mighty river rolling onwards and north 'twixt the Outer and Inner Hebrides,
—some fisher-lads on landing were confronted by a tall, brown-bearded
stranger, dressed in seaman's clothes, and with a cast of countenance and
bearing that showed he was every inch a sailor. He had come out from a
cave, and into this, with smiles and nods and talking in the purest of Gaelic,
he had invited the young fellows. They found a fire burning here, and fish
boiling; there was a rude bench, several stools, and various articles of
culinary utility, to say nothing of a row of brown stone bottles, the contents
of one of which he begged them to taste.

But where the hermit had come from, or how or why he had come,
nobody could tell, and he never even referred to his own history.

He had ceased to dwell in the cave after a time, and with wood from a
shipwrecked barque he had built himself, in a sheltered corner, a most
substantial though very uncouth kind of a dwelling-hut. As the time went
on, silver threads had begun to appear in the brown of the hermit's beard;
and now it was nearly white. He was apparently as strong and sturdy as
ever, notwithstanding the wintryness of his hair, and the boy loved his
strange guardian far more than any friend he had, and was never so happy
anywhere as at the rude fireside of his island home.

We never think of what Fate may have in store for us, especially when
we are young, nor at what particular date fortune's tide may be going to
flow for us.

This morning, for instance, when Creggan came on shore with Oscar, he
had no idea that anything particular was going to happen. He had first and
foremost drawn up his little boat—the very skiff it was in which he had
been cradled on the billowy ocean,—then gone straight away up to the
manse. Here he was a great favourite, and M'Ian, the kind-hearted minister,
had for years been his teacher, educating the boy with his own two children,
Rory and Maggie, both his juniors.

I am not going to say that Creggan was more clever than children of his
age usually are, but as the instruction he received was given gratuitously or
for love, he felt it to be his bounden duty to learn all he could so as to
gratify his teacher.

His English was therefore exceptionally good already, and he had made
good progress in geography, history, arithmetic, and knew the first two
books of Euclid; and he could even prattle in French, which he had learned
from the hermit. It was usual for Creggan to spend an hour or two playing
with Rory and little winsome Maggie, after lessons, but to-day they were
going with their father to the distant town of Portree, so, after bidding them
good-bye he shouldered his little gun, a gift from M'Ian, and, whistling for
Oscar, went off to the cairns to find a rabbit or two.

The cairns where the rabbits dwelt were small rounded hills about a
quarter of a mile inland from the wild cliffs that frowned over the deep,
dark sea. These knolls were everywhere covered with stones, and hundreds
of wild rabbits played about among these. But no sooner had Creggan shot
just one than the rest disappeared into their burrows as if by magic. The boy
had plenty of patience, however, so he simply lay down and began to read.
Not to study, though. His school-books he had left in the graveyard on an
old tombstone, and near to the last resting-place of the romantic Flora
M'Donald, the lady who had saved the unfortunate Prince Charlie Stuart.

After half an hour he secured two more rabbits, and as the sun began to
wester, he strolled slowly backwards towards the spot where he had
beached his boat, with no intention, however, of putting out to sea for some
little time.

With the exception of his school-books poor Creggan's library was

wonderfully small, and his literature was nearly always borrowed or given
to him. For instance, even in the most squalid huts he had often found
books that gave him no end of pleasure. They were mostly in the grand old
Gaelic; but Creggan could read the language well, and in the long dark
forenights of winter he used to delight the old hermit by trotting out the
mysterious and Homeric-like lines of Ossian's poems. Then tourists, to
whom he acted in the capacity of guide in summer-time, sometimes gave
him a book, and M'Ian's library was always at his service.

So to-day he had thrown himself on his face on the green cliff-top, and
had commenced to read his Ossian.

What a glorious summer afternoon! There was the blue Minch asleep in
the sunshine, and stretching away and away far over to the hazy hills of
Harris and Lewis. White gulls were floating on its billows close inshore, or
wheeling high in air around the stupendous cliffs, where their nests were,—
their plaintive, melancholy notes mingling with the song of the lark, the
mavis, and the merle, while the solemn boom of the breaking waves made a
sweet but awful diapason.

The air all around was warm and balmy, and laden with the sweet breath
of wild thyme.

And Creggan M'Vayne was just reading one of his favourite, because
most romantic passages, when the dry and business-like tones of Elliott
Nugent fell upon his ear. Beautiful, indeed, did the boy consider every line
of that wild and weird poem Carric-Thura. The ghost scene therein made
him shudder; but it was the death of the lovers on the field of battle—the
death of Connal and Crimora that affected him most. She had given him his
arms with sad and woesome foreboding, but at the same time had
determined to follow him into the fight.

Here was the din of arms; here the groans of the dying. Bloody are the
wars of Fingal, O Connal, and it was here thou didst fall! Thine arm was
like a storm; thy sword a beam of the sky; thy height a rock upon the plain;
thine eyes a furnace of fire. Warriors fell by thy sword as the thistles by the
staff of a boy. Then Dargo the mighty came on, darkening in his wrath.

Bright rose their swords on each side; loud was the clang of their steel.

But Crimora was near, bright in the armour of man. Her yellow hair is
loose behind, her bow is in her hand.

She drew the string on Dargo; but—erring—she pierced her Connal. He

falls like an oak on the plain; like a rock from the shaggy hill. What now
can she do, O hapless maiden? See how he bleeds, her Connal dies!

All night long she weeps and all the livelong day. O Connal, O Connal,
my love and my friend!

But with grief the maiden dies, and in the same grave they sleep.
Undisturbed they now sleep together; in the tomb on the mountain they rest
alone, and the wind sighs through the long green grass that grows twixt the
stones of the grave.

Autumn is dark on the mountains; gray mists rest on the hills. Dark rolls
the river through the narrow plain. A tree stands alone on the hill and
marks the slumbering Connal. The leaves whirl round in the wind and strew
the grave of the dead. Soft be their rest, hapless children of streamy Loda.

Here Creggan had closed the book with a sigh.

"Boy, are you willing to earn an honest shilling? Keep back that dog,
please!"

The boy had sprung to his feet and seized the all-too-impetuous Oscar by
the collar.
 Nugent's appearance was somewhat out of keeping with the grandeur of
the scenery around him. Thin and wan he was, with close-trimmed whiskers
turning to gray, a London coat, and a soft felt hat.

"Earn a shilling, sir?"

"I said earn a shilling, an honest shilling. But perhaps you are above that
sort of thing. You Skye Highlanders are, as a rule, so lazy."

"Thank you, sir, but I am not a Skyeman, though I should not be

ashamed to be. I was born on the high seas, and I have neither mother nor
father."

Nugent's voice softened at once. His whole bearing was altered.

"Poor boy!" he said. "I fear I talked harshly. But come, we were directed
here by an old man who told us you could guide us over the mountains
inland. My wife is an artist, and wants to make a sketch or two. See, yonder
she comes, and my little daughter, Matty. Come, you seem to be a superior
sort of lad, you shall have half a crown."

"I don't want your money. I sha'n't touch it. But if you wait a few
minutes I will guide you to a strange land far away among the hills. There
will just be time to return before sunset."

"And you will take no reward?"

"Oh yes, sir, I will. I love books. I would have a book if you could lend it
to me."

"That we will, with pleasure. I have a boy just about your age—sixteen,
and he lives in books. You are a little over sixteen, perhaps?"

Creggan smiled.

"No, sir," he replied, taking off his bonnet now, for Mrs. Nugent and
Matty had come up; "I want some months of fourteen."
 "You are a very beautiful Highland boy," said Matty, gazing up at
Creggan with innocent admiration; "and if you is good, mamma will paint
you."

"Hush, dear, hush!" cried the stately mother.

Creggan looked at the child. He had never seen anyone so lovely before,
not even in Portree. But there was a little green knoll high up in a glen that
he knew of, on which, as the old people told him, fairies danced and played
in the moonlight. He had never seen any of these, though many times and
oft he had watched for them. But he thought now that Matty must just be
like one.

I must confess that there was a small hole in each of the elbows of
Creggan's tweed jacket, but nevertheless when he stepped right up, as if
moved by some sudden impulse and shook Matty's tiny hand, his bearing
was in keeping with the action, and even Nugent himself admitted
afterwards that he looked a perfect little gentleman.

"I wish you were my sister."

That is all he said.

But for the next few minutes very busy was Creggan indeed.

First and foremost he made a flag of his handkerchief and hoisted it on

the end of his gun. This he waved in the air, until presently an answering
signal could be seen on the distant island.

Then to right and to left, alow and aloft, he made signals with the flag,
much to the delight of little blue-eyed Matty, ending all by holding his gun
perpendicularly and high in air, after which he turned to his new
acquaintances.

"I'm quite ready," he said.

The march towards the mountains was now commenced. But the road
led past the manse, and thither ran Creggan, returning almost immediately
with a tiny Shetland pony. This consequential little fellow was fully
caparisoned, with not only a child's saddle but saddle-bags. Into the latter
Mrs. Nugent's sketching-gear was put, and then Creggan picked Matty up
and placed her on the saddle. Oscar barked, and the child screamed with
joy, as off they headed for the wild mountains.

***********

High above the blue-gray hills of Harris lay streak on streak of carmine
clouds, with saffron all between, as Creggan's skiff went dancing over the
waves that evening, towards his little island home. But the boy saw them
not, saw nothing in fact till his boat's keel rasped upon the beach, where his
foster-father stood, ready to haul her up.

For Creggan's thoughts were all with his newly-found friends and the
doings of this eventful day.

CHAPTER II.

THE NIGHT CAME ON BEFORE ITS TIME.

The home of Hermit M'Vayne, which was Creggan's foster-father's real

name, was indeed a strange one. Situated under the south-western side of a
rock, partly leaning against it, in fact, stood the strong and sturdy hut. The
sides, and even the roof, were of timber, the latter thatched with heather and
grass; though only one gable was of stone, and here was the chimney that
conducted the smoke from the low hearth upwards and outwards to the sky.

And night and day around this log-house moaned the wind, for even
when almost calm on the mainland a breeze was blowing here, and ever and
aye on the dark cliff-foot beneath broke and boomed the waves of the
restless Minch. But when the storm-king rose in his wrath and went
shrieking across the bleak island, the spray from the breakers was dashed
high and white, far over the hut, and would have found its way down the
chimney itself had this not been protected by a moving cowl.

But I really think that the higher the wind blew, and the louder it howled,
while the waves sullenly boomed and thundered on the rocks below, the
cosier and happier did the hermit and his foster-child feel within.

Although, strangely enough, the hermit had never as yet told Creggan
the story of his own past life, nor his reasons for settling down on this sea-
girdled little morsel of rock and moorland, still he never seemed to tire of
telling the boy about his adventures on many lands and many seas, nor did
the lad ever weary of listening to these. And the wilder they were the better
he liked them.

It was on stormy nights, especially in winter, that Creggan's strange

foster-father became most communicative. But on such nights, before even
the frugal supper was placed upon the board, the hermit felt he had a duty to
perform, and he never neglected it. For high on a rock on the centre of the
island he had erected a little hollow tower of stone. It was in reality a kind
of slow-combustion stove filled with peats and chunks of wood, and with
pieces of sea-weed over all. It was lit from below, and when the wind blew
through the chinks and crannies, it sent forth a glare that could be seen far
and high over the storm-tossed ocean. Many a brave brig or barque
staggering up the Minch, and many a fisherman's boat also, on dark and
windy nights had to thank the hermit's beacon-light that warned them off
the Whaleback rocks.

Having set fire to his storm-signal, the old man's work was done for the
day. Supper finished, a chapter from the Book of Books was read, then a
prayer was prayed—not read from a printed book,—and after this the
inmates of this rude but cosy hut drew their stools more closely to the fire.
No light was lit if not needed, and indeed it was seldom necessary, the
blazing peats and the crackling logs gave forth a glare that, though fitful,
was far more pleasant to talk by than any lamp could have been.

Now, Mr. Nugent and his wife had promised to visit Creggan some
evening on his lonely island, and not only Matty but her brother also were
to accompany them. They did not say when the visit would be made. Their
lives were as unlike Creggan's as one could possibly imagine. They were
spending the summer here in Skye, living in a rough sort of a shanty, which,
however, they had furnished themselves and made exceedingly
comfortable; and every day brought them some new pleasure: boating
parties, long journeys over the mountains, painting, botanizing, or
collecting specimens and even fossils, for on no island in all our
possessions, does nature display her stores on a more liberal scale than in
this same wildly romantic Skye.

The afternoon's outing for which they were indebted to young Creggan
Ogg M'Vayne had been pronounced delightful beyond compare. It was
indeed a strange land they had reached at last, pastoral and poetic as well.
Bonnie green valleys, watered by many a rippling burn, and little waterfalls
that came trickling down from the rocks, and studded over with lazy, well-
fed cattle and a few sheep. There were but two huts here, near-by the banks
of a little stream, that went singing onwards till its brown waters were
swallowed up in a small lake, the surface of which was everywhere
wrinkled by sportive trout, leaping high to catch gnats or midges even in the
air.

The Nugents were surprised, but charmed to find that the tiny
encampment was inhabited only by sturdy bare-footed, bare-headed lassies,
who were here to tend the cows, and to make butter and cheese, which
would afterwards be sold at the distant market town of Portree.

Creggan had to be interpreter, for never a word of English had these girls
to bless themselves in.

And Mrs. Nugent stayed long enough to make several delightful

sketches in water-colours, over which the lassies went into raptures. The
clouds in the blue sky, the distant peeps of ocean, with here and there a little
sail, the darkling rocks, the mountain peaks, and nearer still in the
foreground, the foaming linns, the green braes, and the beautiful cows, with
their attendants, all came out on the paper by the magic touch of the artist's
brush.
 Long before they had once more reached the cliffs by the sea that night,
Matty and Creggan seemed to have established a friendship as frank and
free as if they had known each other for many and many a year. Then good-
byes had been said, and the promise given by Mr. Nugent to come out to the
island some afternoon, or to take it in their way home from the far-off
island of Harris. But a fortnight passed by and they had not yet appeared.
Nor, although he thought about them, and especially about Matty, times
without number, had Creggan seen them even at a distance.

One afternoon, the boy in his skiff returned home much sooner than
usual.

It is not in winter only that wild storms sweep up or down or across the
Minch, for even in summer, and suddenly too, gales arise, and while, as far
as eye can see, the Atlantic is one wide chaos of broken and foaming water,
the cliffs and hills seem shaken to their rude foundations by wind and wave.
Yet speedily as such tempests come, there are generally indications
beforehand that tell the fishermen abroad in their open boats that they must
run quickly for the nearest shelter, if dear life itself is to be saved.

"Right glad to see you, lad," said the hermit, as he helped Creggan to
secure his boat high and dry behind a rock, where, blow as it might, nothing
could damage her.

"You think it is going to blow, Daddy?"

"Aye, sonny, that it is. Night will come on, too, long hours before its
time. Ah, boy, we'll have to pray for those at sea to-night! I hope your
friends will not think of leaving Lewis."

"You have seen them, father?"

"Aye, boy, aye. They passed the island almost within hail of me, in a
half-deck boat, which I think must have been hired at Portree."

"And was little Matty there?"

 "Yes, lad, and her father and mother, and a boy older than you—though
not so brave-looking."

The old hermit put his hand fondly on young Creggan's curly head as he
spoke. No father could have been fonder of a son than was he of this
motherless bairn.

"But, dear boy, you haven't come empty-handed, I see."

"No; I never had a better forenoon among the trout. Look!"

From under a thwart of the boat forward, Creggan lugged forth and held
up for admiration, a string of crimson-spotted mountain trout that would
have caused many a Cockney sportsman to bite his lips with envy.

The old man smiled, patted the boy once again, then hand in hand—such
was their habit—they took their way along the winding path which led to
the hut.

Oscar had been at home all day, but he now came bounding out with
many a joyous bark, to welcome his master back. More quietly, too, though
none the less sincerely did Gilbert, a huge, red tabby cat, bid the boy
welcome, rubbing his great head against Creggan's stocking and purring
loudly, while from the inner recesses of the hut a voice could be heard
shouting:

"Come in, Creggan! Come in, come in!"

It was the voice of no human being, however, but that of a beautiful gray
parrot, who had been the hermit's companion since ever he had taken up his
residence on this little isle of the ocean.

The afternoon wore away quickly enough, as afternoons always do when

one is busy. And Creggan had hooks to busk, and his foster-father was busy
mending nets.

But the sun set at last, in lurid fiery clouds, over the hills of Harris, and
soon after those very clouds, dark and threatening now, began to bank up