AI & Pedagogy

Artificial intelligence is changing what it means to teach political science. The tools students now bring to a writing assignment, a coding exercise, or a literature review reshape what each of those tasks measures, and they raise the question of which skills a political science education should still be producing. This page collects the materials and design choices I have developed in response.

The work is organized around three principles. Insulation identifies the learning processes that AI most directly threatens — the slow, effortful steps through which students build judgment — and designs assignments that protect them, sometimes by moving the work back into analogue or supervised settings. Augmentation identifies student experiences that AI can genuinely improve, from feedback loops on writing to reading-extension exercises that meet students at the limits of their preparation. New AI skill development treats AI literacy itself as a curricular object, taught directly through dedicated, course-specific modules rather than absorbed by osmosis from the surrounding environment.

Resources

AI constitution

Each of my courses opens with an AI constitution: a short pedagogical contract that students and I co-write in the first sessions, specifying which uses of AI are encouraged, which are conditional, and which are off-limits for the term. The constitution is revisited at midterm and amended when the class agrees a rule is no longer fit for purpose. A clean template and a sample term-end constitution will be posted here as the public version is prepared.

AI in the research process

A short explainer on where AI tools currently fit — and do not fit — inside the social-science research process, drawn from the slide set I use in With Great Powers. The deck walks through which research tasks AI can support today, which it can only seem to support, and what radical transparency about the AI-assisted process actually requires of the researcher.

Tools

Course-adjacent tools and projects I have built or contributed to:

• With Great Powers — research paper and lecture material on AI in the social-science research process.
• RealResearch — a pedagogical tool for structured AI-assisted research practice.
• Flow — a workflow tool for AI-supported writing.
• AI in Social Science Research — the parallel research project that informs much of the curricular design.

More resources will be added as the AI-in-Polisci-Curriculum work develops.