Reaching Beyond the Ivory Tower: Early Career Instructors and the Pedagogy of Policy Relevance

In this chapter, I explore my experience as an early career instructor (ECI), beginning as a graduate student at a large public university in the United States, and later transitioning to a permanent teaching position at a private R1 university. In doing so, I consider the tension between, on the one hand, the discipline’s tendency to incentivize research at the expense of teaching and, on the other, the reality that the political scientist’s principal impact on the world is via the students they teach.