Jonathan Floyd shares key lessons from prize-winning teaching

29 June 2021

Since winning this year’s Jennie Lee Prize from the Political Studies Association (PSA), a major career award given in recognition of his ‘outstanding contribution to the teaching of politics in higher education’, SPAIS Senior Lecturer Jonathan Floyd has been busy sharing the key features of his pedagogy with a range of audiences. In just the last seven days, he has delivered a presentation to the University Education Committee, given a lecture to the SPAIS PhD community, as part of the regular ‘how to’ series he runs, and run a webinar for the PSA, with attendees taking part from around the world.

In each of these sessions, several themes at the heart of Jonathan’s approach came to the fore, including: Teaching students how to think rather than what to think; imparting skills through activities rather than just delivering content; and practising relentless experimentation rather than just playing it safe, even when that means failures as well as successes. Jonathan also explained how all of this rests, fundamentally, on his methodological research in political philosophy, given the material it provides for teaching students, not just the ideas at the heart of that subject, but also how to argue about them themselves. This means we get ‘research-led’ teaching, and of course ‘innovative’ teaching, but also what he calls ‘teaching without preaching’, with students becoming steadily upskilled as both philosophers and citizens, as they learn how to define and refine their own positions across a host of difficult but important political issues, producing manifestos, campaign videos, speeches, websites, and petitions all along the way.

Continuing this spirit of ‘pay it forward’, Jonathan has also now agreed to spend several days later in the summer teaching early-career researchers from around the world ‘how to do political philosophy’, as part of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Methods Summer School (https://ecpr.eu/Events/Event/PanelDetails/10896). Here again he will build on his well-known published research, together with his unique approach to teaching, but also some early material from an exciting new book he is working on in this area for Oxford University Press.

To see more about the reasons behind Jonathan’s receipt of the Jennie Lee Prize, see here (https://www.psa.ac.uk/psa/news/psa-announces-its-academic-prizes-2020-21). To read his latest account of how to do political philosophy (and why you might want to), see here (https://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509524181&subject_id=2). To see a filmed public lecture on the same theme, see here: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQJ2vwZMe4c).