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Review of Political Science Pedagogy: A Critical, Radical, and Utopian Perspective

In the world of global pandemic, instructors are doing a lot of thinking and talking about our pedagogy. William W. Sokoloff’s book challenges us to think and talk about why we became teachers in the first place, and what we are hoping to accomplish by teaching. Sokoloff believes that political science educators have lost sight of what our mission should be, and his book is an attempt to help us recover that mission. As he writes, “My goal is to re-politicize political science via radical pedagogy” (3). His argument is that political science education should be founded on the principle of preparing students for active and critical civic engagement so that they can work to restore a fuller democracy. Instead of claiming to objectively teach facts about the political world, Sokoloff’s position is that “Political science pedagogy should play a bigger role in the struggle to make the world a better place” (viii). As political scientists, we ought to be committed to preparing our students to take an active role as citizens–and not just any citizens, but citizens who actively question and challenge existing systems of power and oppression: “Pedagogy [is] the premier site for the production of skeptical, innovative, activist, and intellectual citizens” (5). In Sokoloff’s view, political science pedagogy as it is currently practiced fails to produce such citizens, and in fact supports the oppressive status quo by its failure to help students understand how their lives are shaped by the world of politics they inhabit. His book presents an alternative model of political science pedagogy, one which is “critical, radical, and utopian” (3). This kind of pedagogy breaks the bonds between authority, hierarchy, and knowledge, and is instead a “practice of equality and freedom for everyone, not just the privileged” (21). The classroom environment should not be one in which students absorb knowledge from teachers, but a collective search for meaning in which everyone (including the teachers) learns from everyone else in a shared quest for understanding. The book has two kinds of chapters: theoretical ones, in which he explores the ideas and pedagogy of Wolin, Strauss, Socrates, Fanon, and Friere as examples (some good, some bad, and some mixed) of how to properly educate ourselves and others; and practical ones, in which he describes some of his own teaching experiences (including teaching online and taking his students on a field trip to a prison) in order to give examples of how he puts his own ideas into practice. Many of his students are nontraditional