ABSTRACT
One of the most significant contributions of the scholarship of teaching and learning to higher education pedagogy has been the notion that good teaching looks different across academic disciplines. This chapter discusses the idea of signature pedagogies in political science. When the scholarship of teaching and learning suggests that we transition from anecdotal accounts of student learning to rigorous, evidence-based reports, political science is poised to do so. Lecture has persisted as the empirically most common pedagogy in political science for many reasons, including inertia. As more faculty begin to explore different pedagogies, opportunities for meaningful disciplinary learning increase dramatically. These pedagogies emphasize some of the important theoretical considerations in the discipline of political science, such as the need to understand the nature of goal-driven actions by self-interested political actors, and the need to understand how actions encourage or constrain other actions.
