Introduction: Teaching European Studies – Old and New Tools for Student Engagement

Transformative Perspectives and Processes in Higher Education

“…as a continuum linking formal, non-formal, and informal learning that lies at the core of lifelong learning (Malcolm et al 2003 ). Yet many unanswered questions remain regarding the relationship between pedagogy and ICT tools for achieving successful interactive learning (Timus 2013 ), particularly in the context of shifts in the European education discourse following the inception of the Bologna process (Lightfoot and Maurer 2013 ).…”

Teaching the European Union: a Simulation of Council’s Negotiations

“…If simulations in IR started with the end of the Second World War and have become very popular, it was only by the end of the 1980s that they were developed in the context of EU studies, adapting the experience accumulated and the concepts used in the IR simulations to the EU institutional framework and dynamics (Andrews, 1993). However, more recently, simulations on the EU have received a growing attention by lecturers willing to adopt an approach based on active learning (Lightfoot and Maurer, 2013). Authors have utilised simulations to explain to their students the functioning of the EP (Jozwiak, 2013), of the European Council or Council of the Union (Jozwiak, 2013;Kaunert, 2009;Zeff, 2003;Galatas, 2006), of the Council Presidency (Elias, 2013), of the Commission's staff (Giacomello, 2012), or of some specific features of the EU decision-making (Switky, 2004;Bursens and Van Loon, 2007;Van Dyke et al, 2000).…”

“…Moreover, with this article we also aim at contributing to the growing debate about the effectiveness of instruments adopted to teach the functioning of the EU (Brunazzo and Settembri, 2012;Lightfoot and Maurer, 2013), in which special attention has been devoted to the use of Facebook and other social network, the webinars (Lieberman, 2013;Mihai, 2013), the study visits to Brussels (Roder, 2013), and the simulations (Usherwood, 2013).…”

Synchronous Online-Teaching on EU Foreign Affairs: A Blended-Learning Project of Seven Universities between E-Learning and Live Interaction

“…Following increased demand for services of digital teaching (Garrison and Vaughan 2007, p. ix), a debate has evolved on so-called innovative teaching in Political Science (Goldsmith and Berndtson 2002, Gormley-Heenan and Lightfoot 2012, Ishiyama et al 2016, and European Studies (Baroncelli and Farneti 2014, Lightfoot and Maurer 2014, Maurer and Mawdsley 2014, Maurer et al 2020. However, most of the proposed innovations such as simulations (Usherwood 2014, Guasti et al 2015, Plank et al 2017, student engagement (Lightfoot and Maurer 2014), flipped classroom (Bergmann andSams 2012, Boevé et al 2017), new media (Quaintance 2014), web seminars 53 (Lieberman 2014, Mihai 2014, field trips (Roder 2014), and distance learning (Brühl and Henneberg 2016, Bell et al 2017, Plank et al 2019 can only to some extent respond to the demands made by students in digital teaching environments and with regard to the complexity of policy issues. On the one hand, students question the learning efficiency of traditional teaching methods (Garrison and Vaughan 2007).…”