After a successful trip last summer, we are heading back to Spain! This year we are hitting Madrid, Toledo, Granada, Cordoba, and Almuñécar for our class on “Islam and Migration in Contemporary and Historical Spain.” In this blog, the students will be contributing one post each to document our journey and all we learn along the way.

By Rebecca Glazier and Matthew Pietryka

This post originally appeared on the Active Learning in Political Science Blog. You can view the original post here: https://activelearningps.com/2023/05/08/engaging-students-through-collaborative-research-projects/.

Many professors are struggling to engage their students, who are often disengaged and burned out. To address these issues and improve student retention, universities are increasingly turning to edtech solutions or big data—everything from predictive analytics to chatbots in discussion boards. These remedies tend to be far removed from students’ daily lives. In contrast, as professors, we are with students in the classroom every day. And this experience often prepares us to know best how to engage our students.

Last week it was my privilege to present some recent work from the Little Rock Congregations Study at the American Political Science Association Conference, the largest annual conference for political scientists. It was wonderful to see friends and colleagues, hear about some great ongoing research and get some good feedback on my own work. But one question that I have been pondering ever since the conference is: what exactly is the line between research and advocacy? And where should my work fall?

In May, 2022, the Chronicle of Higher Education invited me and five other experts to contribute to a forum on solving the student disengagement crisis. The full forum is behind a paywall here: https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-to-solve-the-student-disengagement-crisis, but you can read my contribution below. For me, the most important thing we can do is build authentic human connections with our students–in both our online and our face-to-face classes.

After missing travel something fierce for the last couple of years, we have boldly gathered a group of intrepid students who are up for an adventure and we are heading to Spain! I am so excited and I am dreaming of having the chance to experience flying with Jettly.

To continue, the class is “Islam and Migration in Contemporary and Historical Spain” and we will be visiting Madrid, Toledo, Granada, and Salobreña over the next twelve days. In this blog, the students will be contributing one post each to document our journey and all we learn along the way.

In November 2019, I took a group of students to Morocco as a part of a travel course. We visited Rabat and participated in the International Model Arab League conference, traveled to the desert and to beautiful Marrakesh, and enjoyed the kind hospitality of the International University in Rabat. It was the trip of a lifetime and the memories sustained us through the darkest days of the pandemic when we couldn’t travel at all. The students documented our adventures in a blog, which, due to a series of unfortunate events, disappeared from our departmental website, but which I am recreating here on my personal website for posterity’s sake. And for the memories.