Teaching the unknown: A practical pedagogy for uncertainty and indeterminacy in International Relations

Contemporary global politics confronts students with ambiguity, incomplete information and irresolvable tensions that resist linear explanation or definitive policy solutions. This teaching note examines how deliberately designed exercises can cultivate students’ capacity to hold uncertainty as an ontological condition rather than a temporary obstacle to analytical mastery, treating it both as a feature of world politics and as an experience students meet in their own thinking. Presenting pedagogy from a redesigned module in International Relations, the paper reflects on two structured non-assessed exercises built on distinct modalities: a dialogue assignment that uses question-generation to hold a position open, and a world-imagining task that uses prefiguration to displace the state as the organising principle of global order. Each exercise asks students to sustain indeterminacy rather than resolving it and to turn the discomfort of not-knowing into introspection. Analysis of student work shows both exercises producing the difficulty they were built to surface. Students reached beyond settled positions and inherited forms and came to a point where the discipline’s habits reasserted themselves in what they built to replace them. The exercises create sustained pedagogical spaces between informal discussion and summative assessment, in which frustration, indeterminacy and epistemic humility become productive elements of learning.