Bringing D.C. to the P.C. – Students Record Interviews with Senior Governmental Staff
February 6th, 2009 by Bennett Lovett-Graff
Students used digital voice recorders, phone controllers and even Skype to record interviews with staffers.
When Michael Shenkman, an attorney with experience in all three branches of government, accepted Yale’s invitation to teach Political Science 269, “Executive Staff in American Government,” he wanted his students to reach outside the classroom to study their subject. “For their final assignment,” he notes, “I asked students to conduct interviews with senior government office holders and staff members.” His reasons were straightforward: “I not only wanted the class to engage methodologically with a different way of learning, I also felt that in order to get a closer understanding of staffing issues, students needed to interact directly with those who had held key positions in government.”
Unlike the standard term paper, personal interviews supported the class’ pedagogical goals in ways that traditional assignments could not. “There is substantial published information on how staffing works in the White House,” Shenkman points out, “but far less on the congressional and judicial branches.” Interviewing offered students a unique opportunity to fill this gap by transforming classroom goals into scholarly ones: the creation of new knowledge in a relatively barren area of political science. Or, as Shenkman put it in the four-page instruction manual he supplied to students, interviewing presents “a rare opportunity to do primary research work in an undergraduate course.”
