Teaching International Law to Students: Traditional Teaching Methods and New Approaches

Purpose. There are practically no studies in the literature directly devoted to the peculiarities of teaching international law. As a rule, the available studies touch upon methodological peculiarities of teaching other academic courses or legal disciplines in general. The aim of the present article is to improve the teaching methodologies established in pedagogy when conducting lecture and practical classes on international law. Methodology: observation, historical, analysis and synthesis, use of literary sources and media texts. Conclusions. Conducting binary lectures on international law to the maximum extent contributes to the implementation of interdisciplinary links, and the proposed principle of the construction of lecture material on international legal assistance demonstrates such opportunities. The improvement of the practice-oriented approach in conducting practical classes on international law is seen in the selection of judicial practice from the sphere of legal knowledge passed by students. In order to promptly and meaningfully study specific court cases and develop the skill of coordinated application of the norms of domestic and international law, it is proposed to master the algorithm of commenting a judicial act. The use of the method of media text research in the educational process (on the example of documentary or feature films) forms the experience of thoughtful perception of information about the object (in our case — Antarctica) and sets up students for subsequent discussion in order to consolidate the acquired knowledge. Scientific and practical significance. The results of the study demonstrate the possibilities of using new approaches in the process of working with students in classes on international law (on the example of Tyumen State University) and can be applied in other legal disciplines.