Bann Seng’s new course is based on his book International Aid and Democracy Promotion: Liberalization at the Margins, published in 2020.

The Department of Political Science at Ashoka is expanding. As part of the expansion, we want new people to offer the core courses. This means a course I routinely teach, Introduction to Comparative Politics, had to be replaced by a new course of my devising. In academia, the process of preparing a new course from scratch is called ‘prep’. In this piece, I share some of the considerations that typically underlie course prep.

Preps can be time consuming. I could invest all my time, say the whole of this summer, into perfecting the new syllabus. That time has an opportunity cost. It could have been invested into research. You may have heard of the cliché, popular with Western academics, that summers are for research. As a junior professor on the tenure track, we are socialised since graduate school to prioritise and protect our research time.

Preps also suffer from diminishing returns. I could come up with a syllabus that looks good on paper. But until you teach that course to actual students, it is hard to know, a priori, whether a given syllabus is viable. Furthermore, student cohorts can be idiosyncratic. A syllabus that works on one batch can fall flat with another. I highlight this because this pandemic, with its many disruptions – including the rapid and forced transition to online teaching – introduced more variations than usual. What this means is that the perfection of a syllabus – one that works on average with multiple cohorts of students – is a long process. It may take up to three semesters to end up with a syllabus I am comfortable with. Junior professors do not have the luxury of time. Instead of perfection, it is more efficient to prep with the goal of a working syllabus.

I recall a saying of the late Professor Asher Arian at City University New York, to “research what you already know but teach what you seek to know.” I think what he meant is that research for publication is no time to be finding out answers to new questions; and that reading assignments for the classroom should double up as research work for the benefit of the teacher. Respectfully, I disagree with that advice. To be sure, I can see situations where his advice is sage; for instance, after earning tenure where one has the luxury to pursue research avenues that does not guarantee quick publication payoffs. In the context of teaching, research papers that are cutting edge are

frequently too esoteric for the typical undergraduate class. If the assigned readings are too difficult for the students, the resultant impact on teaching evaluations are predictable. As before, there is a trade-off.

My strategy is to assign readings from my research on a given theme. That way, most readings are already done, and the tinkering is at the edges. I based the course on my recent book which looks at the strategic use of foreign aid in democracy promotion. The book is on open access so it is effectively free for students (no conflict of interest here!). It has both statistical chapters and case studies. I dropped two statistical chapters – despite statistics being a key part of my book – because they are difficult for students with no prior background in the subject. The statistical chapters may be suitable for a method-heavy course but for a substantive course like this, they are optional. On the other hand, the case studies of the aid relations of Egypt, Fiji, and Myanmar are easy to convert into lesson plans. For each lesson plan, I assign the relevant book chapter and a couple of background readings that I consulted when I wrote the chapter. Assigning the background articles also means that students get exposure to the book writing process. They should understand that what we see in the end product, a published chapter, is but a tiny fraction of the research readings that underpin it. It was challenging to decide which background article to leave out!

A typical semester has two lessons per week for 13 weeks yielding a total of 26 lesson plans. Assigning the book covers around six lesson plans. What about the remaining 20 lesson plans? My book is at the intersection of two literatures, one on foreign aid and the other on democracy promotion. I assign approximately 10 lessons to each of the literature. This means my course doubles up as a stylised introduction to issues and background of two literatures. Therefore, I named the course, “Democratization and Foreign Aid”. I insert an opening paragraph that explains in a catchy way why this theme is important. Voila, a framework of the course emerges! You can get a preview of it here.

Bann Seng Tan is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations. His research primarily revolves around the causes and effects of democratisation.