Dark Horse Didactics: Design Thinking in the Teaching of International Relations

Teaching International Relations (IR) today takes place in a challenging context. While the international community appears disoriented in formulating effective answers to the overall destabilization of the world of global affairs, students of IR may feel increasingly lost applying their heavily standardized grids of analysis to a confusing and ever-changing realm. In light of significant global challenges like global warming, opening up the syllabi to new and creative approaches seems overdue. In this paper, I provide in-depth observations of an alternative approach to teaching IR, based on the innovation method Design Thinking. The insights are based on two experimental seminar style courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Over the entire duration of the respective course, the students were invited to tackle specific international problems such as migration governance in the Mediterranean, making use of the full creative potential of Design Thinking tools. The hands-on character of the method helped translate complex social or political issues into tangible ones and inspired the students to enlarge their perspective. The positive outcomes in terms of both the quality of resulting work and active student participation show that creative methods, while not in and of themselves able nor sufficient to fully replace more established concepts of teaching IR, can and should play a greater role in encouraging a more hands-on approach to understanding the international context, in which we live.