A growing body of literature has emerged over recent years, focusing on how European Studies is taught and how learning and teaching practice can enhance students’ and wider citizens’ awareness and understanding of the European Union. However, much of this learning and teaching scholarship is focused on undergraduate and postgraduate students, enrolled on traditional bachelors or masters degree programmes. Relatively little attention has been paid to learning and teaching in a continuing education context, where students are usually studying later in life and often part-time alongside other commitments such as employment or family caring responsibilities.

Such students are often highly motivated learners, and offering university-level education to this audience presents an opportunity to broaden understanding of EU politics beyond traditional cohorts of students, as well as meeting universities’ wider societal objectives around facilitating access to higher education and promoting public understanding. However, it also comes with challenges given the diversity of these students’ backgrounds, existing knowledge, motivations for study and life circumstances.

This paper discusses the considerations involved when teaching EU politics in a continuing education context. Drawing on the author’s educational practice, it presents three models of how university-level education in European Union politics can be delivered to a continuing education audience: a week-long course as part of a wider summer programme, an intensive weekend course, and a six-week online course. In all cases the need to adopt a student-centred approach, which is aware of the unique needs of lifelong learners, is emphasised.

Universities and lecturers are now dealing with the direct and free availability of such learning and studying tools relying on large language models as chatbots, paraphrase and summary tools or scholarship review tools. While universities and faculties engage in a slow and complex process of developing policies and guidelines, lecturers are called on facing this new availability autonomously. This paper grapples with this challenge by accepting the impossibility to ban, consistently restrict or fully discourage students from using chatbots for their assignments and learning. It addresses the possibilities accessible to lecturers at their level of responsibility and control. Specifically, it looks at the ways they can introduce students to the benefits and limitations of chatbots for such key learning tasks as analysis and reflection. It argues that a productive way for lecturers to acknowledge and include chatbots in course assignments is by inviting students to test and evaluate chatbots as interlocutors or “study buddies” rather than as search engines. It claims that when used as search engines, chatbots are likely to be seen by students as encyclopedias or unquestionable experts rather than fallible and biased sources and thus can reduce the quality of analysis and weaken incentives for reflection, central to university learning. If students approach chatbots as eye-level interlocutors, though, such risks can be reduced. The paper offers a few assignment designs that integrate the use of chatbots in student work in this way.

This paper provides a hands-on conceptual guide to interdisciplinary research in European Studies. It emphasises the added value of integrating insights from more than one discipline to enhance the depth and relevance of research findings and their communication in and beyond academia. Through its step-by-step approach, the paper encourages interdisciplinarity in small- and large-scale projects alike, taking shape in the incorporation of merely one interdisciplinary element, in the set-up of an entirely interdisciplinary project or any scale in-between.

The guide is structured around three dimensions of interdisciplinary research: input interdisciplinarity focuses on the production of new insights by incorporating elements from more than one discipline. Output interdisciplinarity aims at the communication of findings as well as the research process in ways that are accessible for scholars from other disciplines and for practitioners. Finally, throughput interdisciplinarity addresses strategies to set up and communicate one’s own research in a way that it can be used by scholars from other disciplines as starting point for their own interdisciplinary projects. By discussing these three dimensions, ways to achieve them, and pitfalls to be aware of, the guide offers practical steps for incorporating an interdisciplinary approach at various stages of the research process, from project planning and data analysis to the communication and further use of findings. The guide aims to lower the threshold for adopting an interdisciplinary approach through concrete recommendations for both individual researchers and collaborative teams. By fostering a more profound dialogue among disciplines, the guide seeks to contribute to the advancement of European Studies, making research more accessible and impactful across different scholarly and practical contexts.