Teaching
Courses Taught
Introduction to American Government
Congress and the Legislatures
The Presidency
Media and Politics
Political Science Research & Writing
Political Attitudes and Behavior
Parties, Interest Groups, and Elections
Politics of Game of Thrones
American Politics (Graduate)
American Political Institutions (Graduate)
American Political Behavior (Graduate)
Media & Politics (Graduate)
Congress (Graduate)
Online Political Engagement (Graduate)
*For a course syllabus, please email Dr. Evans at heatherkevans@uvawise.edu.
Teaching Statement
One of the most fulfilling aspects of an academic position is the opportunity to teach and interact with students. My fundamental objectives as a teacher are to foster students’ critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills. These objectives structure the way that I teach all of my courses. I encourage student participation through class discussion (using the Socratic Method in my upper level courses), semester-long simulations, large data collection projects so that students can get hands-on experience doing political science, breaking the class down into smaller groups for exercises, and using clicker technology in my introductory level classes.
I am a firm believer in active learning. In my undergraduate Congress course, for instance, I use a semester-long simulation. Students are each assigned to “play” a member of Congress (either the U.S. House or Senate) on the first day of class and have to assume their role throughout the semester. Students give speeches, write bills, work in committees, and try their hardest to get their bills through the committee system and onto the floor of the Congress to be debated during the week-long simulation that happens at the end of our semester. The readings/assignments in the course parallel the simulation activities that the students engage in. By structuring my course in this manner, students learn the ins-and-outs of the legislative process and remember their experiences for a lifetime.
Each semester in my upper level courses in American politics, I also try to find some hands-on group project that my students and I can engage in together. Instead of focusing only on exams and papers, my students get experiences collecting data, analyzing it, and testing hypotheses. In this way, they are learning about what we, as political scientists, do when we aren’t teaching class. Many of the students who have taken these courses with me end up going on to graduate school and have a better appreciation for research methods, which tends to be one of those courses that students dislike. I do these types of activities so often with my classes that one of my colleagues a few years ago wanted to adopt something similar in her upper level course and decided to refer to the process as “Evanizing” her syllabus.
Here is one example: Back in the fall of 2012, I taught a Media & Politics course at Sam Houston State University that had 38 students. It was a wonderful time to be teaching anything related to American politics since an election was underway. Since the presidential election was overshadowing the congressional elections, I decided to pursue a project with my class that would make media and the congressional elections come alive. In 2012, most people running for the U.S. House had a Twitter account, but no one had really sat down, collected all of the tweets from everyone running for the U.S. House (including third parties) and figured out what these people were talking about. Each student in class was assigned five congressional races to keep track of on Twitter. They had to find the Twitter pages for each person running (Ballotpedia became their friends), and then code the tweets that were sent. Tweets were coded into a few different categories based on tone and content. The first two weeks of the semester was spent training the students how to code, and then they began coding on September 6th. Every two weeks, they would send me their coding sheets (which were in Excel) and I would check theirwork. The coding ended on the November 5th, the night before the election.
Students were graded throughout this assignment in a couple different ways. First, students received grades for turning in their coding sheets on time. Students were also assigned to come up with a research question they would like to have answered about how candidates for the U.S. House use Twitter (For example: Do women and men tweet differently? Are Republicans more negative on Twitter?). They then had to turn their research questions into workable hypotheses (competitive races will be more negative on Twitter). When the data collection was finished, students then wrote a research paper incorporating all of the data from the class and testing their hypotheses.
There are so many positives that came from this project. First, these students became very excited about seeing politics actually in action. They wanted to talk daily about what was happening in the races they were following. They became more engaged with the materials we were reading in class, and made connections between what they were reading and the Twitter project. We read a few books on campaign advertising that semester, and many students began to see tweets, and social media use generally, as a form of free advertising. A few students presented the findings of their papers at our undergraduate research symposium. A couple others continued working with me on a paper related to Twitter and elections, which was published in a peer reviewed journal. I’ve taken various undergraduate students to the SPSA and MPSA conferences to present our work. This project was so successful that I have repeated it in different classes (Congress, Media & Politics, and an Honors Seminar). This also was the beginning of a wonderful line of research that I continue to the present day. Having my students collect and analyze tweets is the best academic and teaching decision I ever made.
In my introductory courses, I also incorporate active learning wherever possible. One of my goals as a teacher is to encourage my students to become active, engaged citizens and understand how the political world works. My past teaching experiences have shown me that most introductory-level students do not understand how politics influences their lives. To foster this understanding, I use many in-class activities to help students see how politics affects everything in our world and I incorporate service learning projects in my courses when possible.
Curriculum Vitae * Teaching * Research * Congress & The Legislatures * Media & Politics