Teachable Moments

 

 

‘A teachable moment’ is a phrase familiar to most, I think. An expanded definition can be helpful, however, and teacher Beth Lewis offers this: “A teachable moment is an unplanned opportunity that arises in the classroom where a teacher has a chance to offer insight to his or her students. A teachable moment is not something that you can plan for; rather, it is a fleeting opportunity that must be sensed and seized by the teacher. Often it will require a brief digression that temporarily sidetracks the original lesson plan so that the teacher can explain a concept that has captured the students' attention.” (Lewis, Beth. "How to Create Teachable Moments in the Classroom." ThoughtCo, Apr. 30, 2025, thoughtco.com/what-is-a-teachable-moment-2081657.) There’s a bit too much “teacher” in here for me (lest we forget, the student- as-learner is the focus of it all), but the “opportunity”… to understand a “concept” is worth the verbiage above.

 

This year has presented a parade of teachable moments, specifically if one is teaching a course in International Relations. Sure, daily lesson plans have been formulated, but contemporary, real world, world politics have been presenting a veritable mile-long freight train of teachable moments to seize upon in the classroom and gain insight from. Not that I am prescient, but I saw this coming for the class because this teachable moments line of elephants began in the last school year, so I knew I had to try to get ahead of it when class began this fall— actually, I knew I had to get behind it, so to speak, for this year. One needs to know the past to know the future. 

 

The journal, Foreign Affairs, offered me some help with this in the form of a July/August 2025 article written by Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane (two big names in IR scholarship from the 1980s to the 2020s) entitled, “The End of the Long American Century.” Those enrolled in the class had this as the first piece of reading for the course (before anything in the textbook and before anything “lighter”) because they needed to see what the previous structure of the international system was—the one they still had one foot in— so they could understand how it was changing into—the one they had the other foot in. So the left foot tentatively planted in the 70+ year-old rules-based international order and the right foot, stepping down into the quaggy self-interested / self-helped / realpolitik-rules-the-world world order. 

 

From the planned moments in the course, the students would come to know better the specific terms and concepts included above. Because the “teachable moments” in the course were just going to be popping up like the gold coins in the Super Mario Bros. world, the students needed to recognize them, know their value, and learn how to “grab” them. Effectively, I wanted the students to see and understand that they are living in a time when economic and political change in world is, well, historic. They aren’t reading history; they are living it—big history, (Alvarez becoming the youngest Tennis Grand Slam winner, which is still historic, but not quite at the level of the say, the end of NATO…)

 

At Davos recently, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney captured the change in the international system that we are living through in his speech at the World Economic Forum when he stated, “Let me be direct: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition” (in the world economic order). Generally, incremental change is hard to notice, but a rupture is hard to miss. Thus, my assertion to my students: ‘You are living in an historic time; no, really, you are living in an historic time.’ And while technically every new moment in time is an historical moment, not every moment is a “rupture.” This rupture brings to mind Olduvai Gorge or the San Andreas fault or The Grand Canyon…(Yikes?)

 

In a lot of ways it's as easy as it ever to teach IR because of the rupture and the availability of so many teachable moments. Right in front of us we have the old system juxtaposed in real time with the new: somehow side-by-side and one-on top-of-the-other simultaneously. It’s hard to miss what’s going on— especially, if you have a reasonably clear conception of both. So back to the beginning (is history circular? does it repeat itself? This is a big bite; let’s hold off on that.)

 

Back in October, students in International Relations class were introduced to these words spoken by the Athenians to the Melians in the Melian Dialogue and quoted by Carney in his Davos speech as well: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must…” (Thucydides, The Melian Dialogue in The History of the Peloponnesian War, 411-400 BCE). Timely, yes, in our studies but The Melian Dialogue has been a core reading in the course since, well, since the course came on the books in 2009, the inaugural year of Brimmer’s Global Studies Diploma Program.

 

This quote captures the essence of Classical Realist Theory (though IR theory didn’t actually exist when Thucydides was writing in 400 BCE; it came into scholarly existence with Hans Morganthau’s Politics Among Nations written in 1948). The quotes at the beginning of this piece from Stephen Miller, a policy advisor and practitioner for a great power and Mark Carney a leader of a middle power, also identify this law-of-the-jungle canon. In class, students watched/heard videos of both of these remarks, recollected their reading of the Melian Dialogue, and recognized something conceptually familiar—teachable moments converted to a higher value currency, learning moments. That’s a day-in-the-life for our students at Brimmer and May, ’and the rest is history…’