PLCP 4500

Professor Shen was well-intentioned when she taught PLCP 4500 Environmental Politics in China. However, her class and teaching style has a number of red flags which should inform your decision not to take this class (or any with her, for that matter) until she improves. To start, she is relatively new at teaching, and her inexperience was painful rather than refreshing. Her class consisted of long, heavy readings to which she does not give much context or even explain in class; long, relatively unstructured, and arduous lectures which involve current events, her fieldwork experience, and student-driven discussions following from nebulous prompts; and papers graded in disregard for the content and more in weight of semantics and grammar. There are no exams, but the readings can number above 100 pages a week - in some cases, she had us reading a whole book. While some readings came from significant authors in the field, others came from UNDERGRADUATE papers - hardly appropriate as reading material, even if pertinent. Moving on, her first two papers (6 pages apiece with no samples) ask you to synthesize the readings in your own way, but she is actually looking for your interpretation to line up with hers. The most egregious red flag of all, though, lies in the final paper format (again 6 pages): she asked us to write a review of her OWN forthcoming book manuscript, on a subject matter of which she is the expert and on which she clearly has her own perspective. In her words, she is a leading expert on the subject and contributes a unique understanding; this is reasonable. But the conflict of interest is blatant and alarming. On top of this, she gave only a week and a half to read the book and write our review, hot on the heels of our second paper for the term. Finally, lectures were dry and discussions were full of empty silences - not for a lack of student effort, mind you, but mostly because her prompts were too ambiguous, erudite, or simple (and frankly would have been better in the format of discussion posts). She also had the unrealistic expectation that we knew about niche political concepts (not covered in lower classes) or Chinese politico-cultural underpinnings beforehand despite our majority of nonpolitical backgrounds. Overall, I do not recommend this class or professor at all. The content is interesting, but the course hardly communicates it in the right ways.