Halva-Neubauer, Glen A. 1995. "Journaling: How It Can Be a More Effective Experiential Learning Technique."

Conference Papers

Halva-Neubauer, Glen A. 1995. "Journaling: How It Can Be a More Effective Experiential Learning Technique." Presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York, NY.

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Many departments offering internships for credit employ a journal exercise as the principal means of evaluation. Despite the widespread use of the journal exercise, little information is available that describes what constitutes a good journal, especially within the context of political science internships. This paper describes the efforts of the Furman University political science department to design a quality journal assignment. Furman operates two internship programs, one in Washington, D.C. and another at state and local level. The report concludes that creating a structure for journals, asking interns to link their experiences to an extant body of literature, and using internships to illustrate principles of participant observation methodology, produces the best internship journals. In addition, faculty supervisors should work diligently to ensure that internship sites provide students with duties that allow them to make inferences about political life.

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Teaching Politics is published by William J. Ball (ball@tcnj.edu)

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