This paper provides an introduction to the symposium on teaching European Studies. It draws out a number of common themes explored in the papers and places these within the context of wider debates relating to both the teaching and learning of European Studies.

This article analyses the impact of the use of synchronous e-learning tools on educators, in terms of achieving their teaching goals, taking as a case study the webinar series on current European Union affairs of the Institute of European Studies in Brussels. There is currently a gap in researching the use of technology-enhanced learning in social sciences, and this article aims at filling this gap by evaluating the pedagogical experience of teaching European Studies, a complex interdisciplinary field, through web-based seminars (webinars).

This article asks whether student peer advisors can contribute to curriculum ‘internationalisation’ through their role in promoting and supporting student mobility. We conducted a single case study of Erasmus student mobility at Loughborough University between 2010–2012, and our experiment offers a perspective on the possible futures of European Studies, where the decline of foreign language learning may find compensation in the internationalisation of the curriculum via the opportunity for study mobility abroad.

Over the past decade, the use of web-based learning has increased, as has reliance on internet-based communication tools and learning environments. On the basis of a short study at Canterbury Christ Church University, this article will look at student use of Blackboard and the potential use of Facebook in higher education.

Skills and employability are increasingly viewed as crucial issues in curriculum design and teaching, while simultaneously perceived as potentially detrimental to academic standards. This article comparatively analyses the current European employability agenda and how it was implemented in Britain and the Netherlands. In addition, this article critically reflects on the challenges and opportunities of integrating such an agenda into an EU study curriculum, by drawing on practical examples from the universities of Maastricht and Newcastle.

‘Multi-disciplinary’ field trips to Brussels to accompany undergraduate courses on European political and economic integration are of exceptional academic value. This article offers ideas on how to plan such trips – which people to meet, how to prepare for meetings, reflections on the instructor's role – and suggests how to measure study trip outcomes. The author argues that study trips are a resource that should be more commonly utilised as they are highly beneficial to student learning outcomes.

The use of simulations in European Studies is becoming more widespread, given the possibilities of immersing students in complex issues and building substantive knowledge and affective understanding. We identify a number of barriers to the full realisation of this potential. Drawing on observations from various games, it is suggested that for a successful simulation there must be: learning objectives clear to all participants; alignment between those objectives, game play and assessment; and a meaningful feedback process.

Studying interest groups in the European Union (EU) over time has proven difficult because of the lack of the critical data necessary for studying changes in interest group population dynamics and behaviour. In this article, I explain how data has been gathered, coded, and combined to create a data set worthy of population ecology studies vis-à-vis interest groups in the EU. I provide details of both the data-mining experience and some of the theoretical bases for coding decisions. In addition, I explain what new contributions this data set makes to the established data sets in the field and offer ways in which it enhances the potential for more valid research in the future while also discussing its shortcomings and possible methods of improvement.

This article discusses the challenges of moving towards student-centredness in East-Central Europe through the example of Hungary’s subject-focused academic culture and the (re-)design of a political science research methods course at the University of Szeged for Spring 2012. Although countries participating in the Bologna Process undersigned the importance of student-centredness, few countries have actually yet moved in this direction. In addition, we know very little about how these instructional methods work outside the Western democratic context. I show that research into teaching is an important means to improve the process of education and that there are specific problems in transferring student-centredness into post-Communist higher education settings. Finally, I argue that knowing one’s teaching context is vital for planning student-centred courses effectively, which would be greatly fostered by experiencing other teaching contexts through early-career teacher exchanges. The European Commission has recently affirmed its commitment to staff exchanges, but such opportunities are only likely to be beneficial if they go beyond the current 6-week long exchange scheme that the Erasmus programme offers.

The article deals with the question if the cleavage concept of Lipset and Rokkan can be applied to the rise of National Socialism at the polls and as a mass-integration party. Voter fluctuations within and between political camps are analysed by means of ecological regression analysis as well as the social composition of the NSDAP electorate. Furthermore the social fabric of NSDAP party members between 1925 and 1933 is decribed in terms of the cleavage concept.