Decoding Political Thought

A Fresh Take on What’s Holding Students Back from Learning

Abstract

The responsibility for overcoming learning barriers in universities is too often placed on students. The framework of Decoding the Disciplines calls for a change of perspective by focusing on implicit knowledge as a learning obstacle. This Scholarship-of-Teaching-and-Learning study is dedicated to the decoding of political thought by conducting the first five steps of the decoding wheel. The steps are illustrated with a concrete example in a political theory seminar on the subject of power as a central concept in the work of Thomas Hobbes. As a tool, Conceptboard was used.