About

About

Nick Clark, Professor of Political Science at Susquehanna University (Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania), created and manages this site. His own site, with his research and courses, is at nickjclark.com.

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Where this comes from

He competed in debate and speech in high school and then in college, and later coached college debate. That is where he learned what competitive formats actually do to students, and also what they fail to do. For the last twenty years he has coached students who compete in European Union simulations, and he uses simulations in his own classes every semester. Most of what is on this site started as something he had to figure out for a room of his own students on a particular Tuesday.

Research

His research is on European Union politics, political knowledge, and electoral behavior. With John Scherpereel he has studied the Mid-Atlantic European Union Simulation, including what students gain in knowledge, engagement, skill and empathy from taking part. Some of those hypotheses were supported. Several were not, and Why Run One says which.

He also built the Eurobarometer Representation Dataset with Robert Rohrschneider.

The rest of the day job

At Susquehanna he is Department Head, and he directs the Public Policy program and the Innovation Center. He created the Public Policy, Legal Studies, and Criminal Justice programs. He also serves as Chief Reader for the College Board’s AP Comparative Government and Politics exam, which is why AP guidance appears on several of these pages, and why it is written carefully.

Who this is for

Simulations are not for everybody. They do not suit every course, every room, or every teacher, and a teacher who decides against one is not making a mistake. This site is for teachers who want to try one and would rather not start from nothing: the designs, the scripts, the running orders, and a straight account of what the research does and does not show. Where the evidence is thin, or null, or comes from a different field entirely, these pages say so.

Pop Culture Politics

With Matt Rousu and Janice Clark Duchene he launched Pop Culture Politics, a free library of film and television clips for teaching politics. Each clip carries a description of the scene, the concepts it illustrates, discussion questions and an assignment, and many carry a separate section written for AP classes. The site also sets out where fair use sits for showing video in a classroom, which is the question most teachers actually get stuck on. It is a different kind of resource from this one and built on the same principle: free, specific, and ready to use on Monday.

Corrections

Every citation on this site was checked against publisher or repository records, and every link was loaded before it was published. If something here is wrong or out of date, he wants to hear it.