China and the World in a Changing Landscape: Exploration and Reflection on International Teaching Methods for “Situation and Policy” —With a Focus on the “South China Sea Topic”

The “Situation and Policy” course is a pivotal ideological and political theory course in higher education, featuring timeliness in theoretical guidance, targeting in problem-solving, and comprehensiveness in educational orientation. International topics form a core component of this course, focusing on China’s commitment to peaceful development and its new vision for building a community with a shared future for mankind. Taking the South China Sea topic as a case study—covering topic selection, lesson preparation, instructional design, teaching delivery, assessment, and feedback—this paper proposes four reform approaches for international topic pedagogy: First, optimize course management and teaching methods to enhance course quality and teaching effectiveness; Second, adapting to the growing disciplinary diversity of faculty in Schools of Marxism; Third, promoting the integration of “ideological and political courses” and “curriculum-based ideological and political education”; Fourth, pioneering a “1+N” chained teaching model for international topics.