Dr Malcolm Harvey reflects on his teaching journey in designing two new courses at the University of Aberdeen, including a unique global classroom course co-taught with his collaborator Professor Richardson Dilworth in the United States.
I’ve always had an interest in US Politics, and so when I was asked to put together an undergraduate course in it when I started here in 2016, I was delighted to do so. I looked at how courses were structured elsewhere, what the textbooks offered, and designed a very traditional-looking course – institutions, parties and elections, and contemporary issues. So far, so normal I guess – but, of course, the context of US politics from 2016 was far from normal. It continued to interest me, pulling my attention from my UK research focus – to the point that I applied for and won a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to spend 5 months at Villanova University, just outside Philadelphia, to help me to develop my course.
I had planned to be there for the presidential election of 2020 – living and breathing a US election up close is my idea of geek-heaven – but the pandemic intervened. My Fulbright was delayed – but only until the start of 2021, and I was there in time for the Biden inauguration, the second Trump impeachment trial, and the gradual opening up of places and the US and everywhere else tried to find a new normal.
One warm May morning I met with Professor Richardson Dilworth, the department head for political science at Drexel University, with whom we already had a partnership. He was about to revise his American Government course, and was open to the idea of working together – and so we hatched a plan to co-teach our courses. We split the lectures between us, to be delivered across Zoom, adopted the same textbook, and introduced a shared assessment between our cohorts in Aberdeen and Philadelphia. It wasn’t quite Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), but the principles drew on it. We called it our ‘Global Classroom’, and we’ve run it three times in the autumn terms of 2021, 2022 and 2023.
I got the opportunity to travel to Philadelphia again in May 2022 for work (and again for a family holiday in summer 2023) and on both occasions I met with Professor Dilworth who, in turn, visited Aberdeen in February this year. Meeting in person and working through some of the challenges in our programme has allowed us to adapt the course, drawing on each of our strengths. We’ve also agreed to work the content of our lectures into book chapters, proposing a comparative US-UK politics textbook – filling a gap particularly for our students (who arrive at our course with background knowledge of one but not both systems). We’ll run our course again in September this year, with a view to using our own textbook the following year.
Like most others with a passing interest in US politics, I thoroughly enjoyed Hamilton, the Lin Manuel Miranda musical that was released on Disney+ in the summer of 2020. His source material was Ron Chernow’s terrific biography of the first Secretary of the Treasury, which I got a copy of and started reading in late 2021. Realising Chernow had also written a biography of George Washington, I picked it up when I caught COVID in April 2022. Isolation meant I also had time to watch the great mini-series John Adams, with Paul Giamatti in the title role of the second US president. This was based on David McCullough’s (highly recommended) biography of John Adams, and thus I had my next book to read.
Somewhere along the way, I started Googling ‘presidential biographies’ and found this excellent site where Stephen Floyd, an investment banker from Virginia, chronicled his journey through biographies of the (then 44) presidents. Like him, I didn’t know the ‘best’ biographies to read – but given he had rated them, with commentary and analysis, I shamelessly ‘borrowed’ his recommendations. (I’m due him a debt of gratitude for some excellent reads along the way).
When I caught COVID and started reading Chernow’s Washington: A Life it was a way to kill time in isolation, a hobby building on my interest in US political history. Two years on, I’ve worked my way through a biography of each of the 45 men that have served in the office, and the hobby has become work (but not in a bad way).
Around halfway through the process, I started to think about how I might use this reading in my teaching. It was too niche to utilise in the Global Classroom course – and in any event, we already had our content planned. Slowly, a stand-alone course on presidents started to emerge. Opening with a week on theories of leadership and general characteristics of presidents, I figured I could take the presidents chronologically, dealing with five every week over the next nine weeks, throw in a couple of assessments – a short biographic essay and a presidential campaign plan for one of the candidates – and the plan was ready to go. It’ll run for the first time in spring 2025 – just around the time of the next inauguration.
Additionally, I’ve also ended up with another historical course, on US Foreign Policy, which will form part of our new MSc programme in Strategic Studies and Diplomacy. The course will draw heavily on the role of the president, secretaries of state, presidential doctrines, personality politics and geostrategic objectives to explore successes and failures in this field. This will also start in 2025, and will feature role-playing of various actors in US foreign affairs, as well as input from contacts in the US Department of State.
In just under four years, I’ve taken what was basically a side interest and turned it into my main teaching focus, building two new courses from scratch, redeveloping a third course, and using a Fulbright Scholarship to immerse myself in the historical and contemporary politics of the US, build links with institutions and academic in the field and make connections between students studying US politics here and in Philadelphia.
In the words of the famous (fictional) President Jed Bartlet, I’m looking forward to seeing ‘What’s next?’
