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Peter White, associate professor of political science, has a clear origin story for the Honors Seminar that made him a past winner of the Honors College Professor of the Year award. “I was playing a game of Risk with my sons (they beat me), and we started talking about how it made sense for two weaker players to combine their forces to protect each other against the stronger player. This is a core concept in international relations theory called ‘balancing,’” he said.

Realizing that the game had provided an occasion for teaching, White began to consider whether he could use games in actual international relations classes. The Honors College, with its small classes and focus on interdisciplinary and innovative teaching, provided an ideal place to explore this possibility. “There was a great opportunity to take this approach—using this and more advanced concepts—to Honors undergrads.”

looking over a table where a group of students are playing a colorful and newly created game.

interactive pedagogy

The result has been HONR 3007: Games of International Relations, which uses commercial games such as Risk and Catan, along with games students design during the semester, to teach principles of strategic interaction and international relations. Rather than lecturing, White observes students as they play—or joins the games himself—while discussing the key concepts the students are enacting.

This interactive pedagogy has proven highly popular with Honors students. Cameron Brooks, a senior majoring in public administration who will graduate this spring as a University Honors Scholar, said the class “was the most engaging method of communicating the principles and invisible pressures which underlie the decisions made by diplomats, politicians and heads of state.” Brooks felt confident he learned more through playing and discussing the games than he would have through more traditional, “disengaging” approaches such as lectures.

a group of female presenting students are sitting around a table playing a newly developed game. There are water bottles and bookbags everywhere

a new approach

Ainsley Braswell, a senior political science major with a minor in philosophy who is also on track to graduate this spring as a University Honors Scholar, found the interactions with classmates from many majors to be especially valuable. “Part of the draw of this class is how it is open to all Honors students,” she said. “Collaborating with students from other majors such as mathematics and biomedical sciences has allowed for fresher perspectives on ideas that may have previously been black and white to me.”

Both students also noted how White’s “innovative approach” helped them learn through empathy for individuals making difficult decisions in international affairs. “It was a unique opportunity to put ourselves in the shoes of both policymakers and leaders,” Brooks said, “and then through the game to see the consequences that could ripple from the decisions we made.” In the debriefing sessions that concluded each class, students worked through sequences of cause and effect to better understand the stakes of each decision.

White described the class as one of the most fulfilling of his teaching career, in part because students emerge with “an intuitive grasp of core concepts in international relations and game theory” that is not as evident at the end of a more traditional course. The course, he added, has been fulfilling for him personally. “I love teaching Honors students. The level of engagement and the back-and-forth between myself and the students—and between the students—is thrilling and, honestly, life-giving for a professor. I learn a lot from the process.”