Teaching American Government and Politics

Teaching American Government and Politics proposes a radically different orientation to teaching in this field, moving away from the dominant focus on political knowledge and turning towards an understanding of what students as political citizens should be able to do. A. Lanethea Mathews-Schultz and Jennie Sweet-Cushman introduce five citizenship competencies for successful political engagement, providing constructive teaching strategies for each. These include the skills to navigate and hold institutions accountable (institutional competency); the propensity to act strategically with different political tools (participatory competency); the willingness to talk to others about politics (deliberative competency); the confidence to discern the trustworthiness of political information and to use media responsibly (informational competency); and the ability to recognize the affective dimensions of politics and to take care of one's own emotional health as a citizen (emotional competency).

Pairing teaching scholarship with practical tools and guidance, this book will be invaluable for instructors of American government courses, alongside broader courses on politics and government, democracy studies, and governance and the political process. Political scientists whose research interests include the scholarship of teaching will also find this book highly informative.

?Mathews-Schultz and Sweet-Cushman offer a refreshing take on the seminal introductory course in American politics and government that serves as a gateway to the discipline at many institutions. Reacting to a widely-felt but not always widely acknowledged frustration with the practical limitations of the traditional, knowledge-oriented approach to the course, Teaching American Government and Politics serves as an effective guide for cultivating students? capacity for civic action now, instead of merely (and only potentially) in the future.?