Gallery Walk Seminar: Visualizing the Future of Political Ideologies

Abstract

This article shows how a gallery walk exercise can be used to encourage broad participation and higher-level thinking among undergraduate students of political science. Asked to visualize the future of different political ideologies, the students work together in groups to create posters that they then present for each other during a vernissage-like event that includes a Q&A session. This seminar format enables an iterative, adaptive, and reflective approach to learning that stimulates higher-level skills such as synthesis and evaluation. As such, the gallery walk exercise can be seen as a useful complement to more traditional didactic learning activities aimed at the lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy (e.g., knowledge and comprehension). Based on written course evaluations, the students seem to appreciate not only the novelty of the gallery walk seminar format but also how it prompted them to see the different ideologies in a new light and that it significantly deepened their understanding of the subject matter.