Teaching
Statement on Teaching – November 2019
Leslie Elliott Armijo
I am an international relations theorist and political economist. My teaching engages with core governance topics of the 21st century, which I take to include public ethics, liberal democracy, and global cooperation around economic growth, reducing inequality, and mitigating climate destruction.
My teaching philosophy is to allow, inspire, cajole, upend, delight, and sometimes gently intimidate students, including international ones, into reading, writing, and speaking with sufficient knowledge, analytical rigor, and self-confidence so that they deepen into credible civic leaders. I wish to enable competent, consistent, and effective builders and sustainers of liberal democracy.
I have taught a number of standard politics courses, including International Relations Theory, International Political Economy, Comparative Politics of Developing Areas, Latin American Politics, and Latin American International Relations. Over the past 5 years, I’ve also had the opportunity to design a number of courses in the “Development” and “Governance and Civil Society” tracks of an interdisciplinary School for International Studies offering the B.A. and M.A. degrees.
Full recent syllabi are available on request for:
IS 101 – Introduction to International Studies (introduces alternative levels & foci of social science analysis of international affairs)
IS 220 – The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (introduces the development studies track)
IS 329 – Special Topics: Power and Money, the Politics of Credit, Currency, and Finance (international and comparative political economy of finance)
IS 410/801 – Politics, Institutions, and Development (combines fundamental theories of comparative politics of development with core concepts, models, and assumptions drawn from macro, development, and international economics, and basic game theory)
IS 427 – Globalization, Poverty, and Inequality (analyses both scholarly and policy debates over the causes and consequences of each of these three outcomes)
IS 450W – Core Problems in International Studies (following a common theoretical introduction to international relations theory and global policy analysis, students become nascent experts in two of five broad issue arenas, currently climate change, refugees/migrants, regulation of multinational investment, human rights/humanitarian intervention, and sovereign debt restructuring)
IS 800 – International Policy and Practice (introduces key aspects of research design and methods; prepares Master’s students in Comparative Public Policy for writing analytical policy histories, executive summaries, and position papers for different audiences)
Every term I receive emails from students telling me how important my class was to them and how it helped them integrate their prior knowledge. My mean scores across all of the above courses (scale 0 to 4) are high: 3.45 for the course (Q#9) and 3.57 for the instructor (Q#22). Course by course printouts available on request.