Teaching International Relations Program—TIRP
- TIRP outreach is designed for USC students to team-teach interactive lessons at local high schools.
- Sessions are limited to 1-hour class periods, once a week for 4 weeks.
- TIRP materials must be “self-contained” with the goal for TIRPers to plan a cohesive series for high school students to practice using analytical tools.
- A special set of TIRP tags below are linked to a starter set of materials to design a team plan. The first search result is an overview that can facilitate how to organize a TIRP series of lessons.
- Guides provide teaching notes and usually point to related materials as further options. For example, “political economy” incorporates several analytical frames that each go in different directions.
For other users, database materials go beyond TIRP to support grades 5-12 across a variety of events and topics. Note the search tags listed for a selected database item and use the tags to find related materials.
| TIRP Topics | Tags | Analytical Frameworks / Tools |
| globalization | 4ir | four worlds – trace dynamics of actors & factors across political, economic, social, and cultural worlds to analyze policy options — a basic tool for most cases and issues |
| climate change | gcp-set | policy options continuum — What are the trade-offs between government and market solutions? |
| political economy | ipe-basic | several analytical frames are used for overlapping topics with a wide variety of cases in political economy: |
| glo-labor | … globalization of labor | |
| glo-dev | … development | |
| glo-trade | … trade | |
| causes of war | loa-war | levels of analysis – establishes a wide variety of variables and distinguishes them across three levels: human, national, systemic |
| equality & identity | equal-id | the equality continuum — an A-B-C continuum series — distinguishes views of “the other” and relates to evolving equal rights policy |
| ethics & human rights | ethics-hr | ethical principles & value paradigms – outlines ethical dilemmas (right vs. right) and “equally important competing values” |
| nation building | gvnc-basic | functions of government – three functions provide criteria for failed states or good governance |
| environment | environ-set | policy options continuum — policy decisions reflect political culture |
| security | world-vw | worldviews – distinguishes sets of assumptions and uses the DEPPP analysis to trace how each view determines different policy choices |
| foreign policy | fopo-basic | to be used with worldviews and levels of anaysis |
| human security | change-sec | changing nature of security – |
| identity | identity-sec | identity & security – subcultures are distinguished to consider each person’s multiple identities, and the basis for common culture, unity & diversity |