Jocelyn Evans on Teaching American Government

Professor Jocelyn Evans has always felt at home in government. Growing up in the Florida panhandle, she remembers a childhood where everyone knew her father, a judge. As a judge, he couldn’t be partisan or show bias of any kind. He took his job seriously, representing the office everywhere he went—including the dinner table. Jocelyn credits this nonpartisan exposure to government as being “critical to my own political socialization and ethos as a teacher and a citizen.”

Those early dinner table conversations have served as a touchstone in her career. They are a reminder that “civil discourse is possible. We can learn to engage in respectful and informed conversation.”

Studying Political Philosophy

When Jocelyn was attending Berry College in Georgia, a whole new avenue of curiosity and inspiration opened up to her. For the first time, she began to connect politics with the big ideas of philosophy.

Someone had recommended she take a course with Dr. Peter Lawler, a professor of political philosophy. From the first class, she remembers, “I was hooked.” After that, she kept taking classes with Lawler, eventually creating her own interdisciplinary major.

In that first class with Lawler, she says it was the first time she’d really “encountered a big idea.” She found herself fascinated with texts like Hobbes’s Leviathan and drawn to the fundamental questions that political philosophers ask about the world. These kinds of foundational questions and the exploration of their answers informed the central ideas that lie at the core of Jocelyn’s webtext, Central Ideas in American Government.

Jocelyn’s Early Scholarship

During a fellowship at the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center at the University of Oklahoma, where Jocelyn would earn her master’s and doctorate, she began studying American political institutions in depth, especially Congress. It’s here that she began to develop a deeper understanding and fascination with the American government that would steer her teaching and writing career.

Jocelyn brings her own experiences and values to her research and scholarship. For example, it was her experience as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow in Washington, DC, during 9/11 and the following anthrax scares that inspired her book One Nation Under Siege: Congress, Terrorism, and the Fate of American Democracy. The book explores how terrorism has impacted Capitol Hill.

Among Evans’s other books are Women, Partisanship, and the Congress, which investigates differences between Democratic and Republican cultures and their effects on women in Congress, and Congressional Communication in the Digital Age, which focuses on the ways technology has impacted members of Congress and their communication with one another and their constituents.

Leveraging the Power of Personal Narratives

One of the common threads that unites all of her impressive and varied scholarship is the human element. Jocelyn isn’t just interested in the big ideas of politics. She’s interested in the people raising, challenging, and embodying these big ideas too.

In fact, Central Ideas in American Government was born from Evans’s desire to weave the stories of the real people (electors, broadcast journalists, lobbyists) behind the scenes of government with the concepts and tenets of American democracy.

For her, it was a way to “humanize what can be an inhumane system.” She enjoyed the opportunity to make the content interactive and to provide students with bite-sized information they could more readily understand and apply to their own lives.

And of course, she wanted to create a resource that would reflect her emphasis on thoughtful discussion, respect, and civic responsibility. Central Ideas gives students the opportunity to participate in important discussions about politics from an informed perspective, both in the classroom and around the dinner table.

Getting Students to do the Reading

Jocelyn was most drawn to authoring a Soomo webtext because it offered a solution to a problem she was having with traditional textbooks.

During her work with students, Jocelyn noticed that there was very little accountability with the books she assigned. “There was no way to know whether students were doing the reading—and if they were, what they were taking away from it.”

The built-in opportunities for accountability that come with Soomo webtexts were really appealing to Jocelyn. Our analytics offer all instructors the ability to oversee student progress in the webtext, so that they know for certain who’s done the reading. And students can’t “trick the system” either by just clicking through their assigned pages. Embedded multiple-choice questions on every page require that students demonstrate an understanding of the content.

Creating Opportunity for Discussion

When Jocelyn began using Central Ideas in her own classroom, she “saw immediate results.” She especially appreciated being able to spend class time in rich discussion with students rather than using the time to lecture about the reading. She’s found that the webtext gives her students a better chance to truly engage in critical thinking and complicated problems.

“We get to touch on all these important issues in class. For many of my younger students, it’s the first time an adult has listened to them and given them space for critical discussion.”

The many response boards and interactive polls throughout Central Ideas enable students to reflect on and discuss the concepts they’re learning with their peers. This opportunity for rich discussion is especially important now, Jocelyn points out, because “today’s students are facing a real lack of good role models when it comes to politics. The media they see is so polarized, with shock value and spectacle. The media events that once provided the model of civil discourse have crumbled, such as presidential debates. Students haven’t seen real statesmanship.”

Preparing Students for Civic Engagement

Central Ideas in American Government can help teach students the principles of government and prepare them for civic engagement and social responsibility. It’s this engagement and responsibility that’s central to Jocelyn’s approach to teaching. She believes the purpose and goal of political science courses is to teach students the roles, responsibilities, and limits of government and of citizens in a community.

As a professor, she seeks to share her curiosity and the profound value she’s found in asking and exploring those big philosophical questions she first encountered when she was a student. What’s the purpose of the government? And what can we do to become more active participants in that government?

She feels that students come away from the webtext with better answers to those questions and a deeper understanding of American government.

You can learn more about Central Ideas of American Government by heading over to its catalog page, where you can explore its table of contents, peek inside the webtext yourself, and hear from an instructor currently using it in their class.