Although the structure and content of the sociology major has been addressed by a variety of scholars and several American Sociological Association (ASA) task forces over the past three decades, the structure, content, and even the purpose of the sociology minor has been ignored. In this article, we address this gap in the literature through two investigations. The first utilizes an examination of

Despite the centrality of data analysis to the discipline, sociology departments are currently falling short of teaching both undergraduate and graduate students crucial computing and statistical software skills. We argue that sociology instructors must intentionally and explicitly teach computing skills alongside statistical concepts to prepare their students for participation in a data-driven world

Whereas most sociologists consider sexuality a social construct, the general public tends to view it in more essentialist terms. This tendency is commonly manifested in the idea of sexual drives as internal overpowering biological forces guiding human sexual behavior. To counter this narrative, sociologists William Simon and John H. Gagnon introduced a concept of sexual scripts to demonstrate the social

Just over a decade ago, Waskul and Plante (2010) called upon sociologists to recognize the myriad of ways sex and sexualities shape and find voice within every social context, structure, and interaction. Rather than a singular or niche subject limited to specific portions of social life, they echoed prior theorizing within and beyond sociology concerning the importance of how people negotiate sexed

This article connects sociological analyses of race to sexuality to rethink the teaching of the sociology of sexualities. Through the use of the image of the sea, I locate whiteness as a root for the challenges in current pedagogical approaches at my institution, knowing that it is merely an example of multiple others facing similar problems at the structural level. Using autoethnography as a method

Teaching about sexualities and the LGBTQ+ movement today is full of pitfalls and possibilities. While growing acceptance of at least some segments of the LGBTQ+ community means students are more open to talking about these issues than ever before, two serious barriers remain: (1) The rise of Trump has empowered antagonistic students to utilize the tools of the neoliberal university to retaliate against

How can sociology instructors provide high-quality education in the sociology of sexualities that captures both the increasing need for digital pedagogical tools and sociology’s continued drive for theoretically rich course content? We present digital storytelling as a highly adaptable instructional tool that is appropriate for a range of undergraduate sociology courses. We outline one specific application

Using a collaborative autoethnographic approach, we discuss body mapping as an embodied pedagogical practice for teaching sexuality. Body mapping centers stigmatized bodies through guided visual, oral, and textual self-representation. We begin by discussing embodied pedagogies and the bind of representation (ideas grounded in the work of feminists of color) in teaching and learning about sexuality

Not only does teaching about gender and sexuality diversity lead to some very interesting and often emotionally evocative, pedagogical exchanges; it can also create challenging issues for teachers and students alike. This article focuses on what happens when a module that addresses compulsory heterosexuality and schooling is broached in an undergraduate sociology class. More importantly, it offers

Introduction to Sociology is a widely enrolled course that gives students both an overview of the field of sociology and tools to view and analyze the social worlds we live in. This course provides students new ways to see and understand themselves and the world around them. This teaching note describes ways to queer the Introduction to Sociology classroom, pedagogy, and canon by intentionally recasting

As sociology instructors increasingly include materials on sexual violence in their courses, both instructors and students express anxieties over how best to handle such sensitive conversations. This article critically examines the conventional advice to offer a trigger warning, which can interfere with student education (e.g., requiring survivors to miss out on a lesson) and does not adequately prepare

Qualitative methods courses lack tools for teaching students how to capture and analyze the nuanced ways participant subjectivity shows up in interviews. This article responds to the call for greater depth in qualitative methods instruction by offering teachers a series of discussion questions and an in-class worksheet that will help students more deeply probe and understand their data. These practical

Social movements seeking to dismantle white supremacy within academia cast long-running debates over writing instruction in a new light. This conversation approaches these critiques as an opportunity for pedagogical reinvention. I put forward new theory that centers the social performance and psychological rewards of authenticity. I first review two essential literatures on writing instruction in sociology:

This note discusses a class activity that was developed for first-year bachelor students in sociology to understand homogamy theory. Taught in a “classical” deductive way, this theory proved to be difficult to remember and describe on the examination. Starting from inductive learning, and more specifically, (structured) inquiry-guided learning, the aim of the exercise was to transcend passive learning

We investigate student listening compliance, preference for audio versus print content, and exam performance when professionally produced podcasts are assigned as “readings” and provided in both audio and print formats. Listening/reading compliance for the assigned podcasts was high compared with figures reported in previous research. The most popular format for accessing the content was listening

Prior literature suggests that self-transcendence (other-oriented) values may be a primary mechanism for moving beyond transitory feelings of empathy toward a compassionate orientation to addressing structural injustice. Active learning techniques in the classroom may then offer a fruitful platform for students to engage in the critical reflection connected to both values and compassion. This study

Efforts are underway to globalize sociology in the United States through study abroad experiences. At the same time, there is a push to extend the reach of such programs to students of color. We use student journal entries and fieldnotes from trips to South Africa to analyze how students of color grapple with a disruption of identity in a Black majority setting. Findings reveal that students were challenged

Service learning (SL) is growing in our universities and in Spain. However, still much action and research are needed with a gender perspective. This article aims to evaluate an SL project that consisted of workshops in schools on gender and technology. We evaluated the experience with a mixed-methods approach and a gender perspective. This includes qualitative self-reports of 19 university students

The current research examines whether a visual syllabus aids in information retention compared to a traditional text-based syllabus. The data derive from two lower-division sociology classes, each having a different syllabus format. Utilizing a syllabus quiz during the first week of the class provides the data about whether syllabus format matters. The data suggest the visual syllabus class retained

Teaching topics that implicate student identities, traumas, and/or activism is challenging because students often come with very personal attachments to curricular and extracurricular topics, such as in courses on sexualities, race, gender, and/or social movements. These classes may be described as “wobbly,” responding to outside events and occasionally tipping over. Wobbly classes present an opportunity

While most sociology majors must take a statistics course, the content of this course varies widely across departments. Starting from the assumption that sociology students should be able to engage effectively with the sociological literature, this article examines the statistical techniques used in 2,804 journal articles—from four generalist sociology journals from 1990 to 2019 and 11 additional sociology

This article details an exercise for the first day of class in an introductory sociology course. Students in two sections of Introduction to Sociology taught by the same professor and covering the same content, with the exception of the exercise on the first day of class, were surveyed at the end of the semester regarding the first day. Student responses in the section with the experiment reveal that

The sociology of disability has emerged relatively recently as a subfield in sociology and has seen growing institutionalization within the field, including the establishment of a section in the American Sociological Association. The field, however, is still emerging. There is not yet an American journal dedicated to it or more than a few textbooks. The small set of professors in this field, therefore

This article argues for the incorporation of library instruction into research methods courses to foster information literacy skills important to disciplinary specialization. The evidence in support emerges from a collaborative teaching and assessment project conducted by a research methods instructor and a faculty instructional librarian. The project evaluated the effectiveness of library instruction

A common learning goal of law-related courses taught in sociology classrooms is for students to gain an understanding of the sociological approach to law. This approach emphasizes viewing law as a social process and studying law by analyzing both legal and nonlegal phenomena. A challenge to students’ achievement of this learning goal is their preconceived notions of law as an inherently impartial and

Sociology faculty are accountable to multiple stakeholders to demonstrate that our academic programs are effective and that students are learning. Despite the ubiquity of mandated program review practices, which often include the assessment of student learning, research is lacking on the extent to which these efforts lead to improvements in departmental outcomes and student experiences. Similarly,

Podcasts and podcasting are not new. Although there is a surprising amount of variability in the exact timeline, there seems to be consensus that Adam Curry and Dave Winer invented podcasting (International Podcast Day n.d.). In August 2004, Curry’s program Daily Source Code drove the digital-consumption model of podcasting into the mainstream, while Winder helped create Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

Sociologists consistently try to activate students’ sociological imagination even as they focus on teaching substantive and methodological information and skills. Teaching international development...

by music and features outstanding narration by Reynolds.) The podcast 1619 (Hannah-Jones 2019) would also work well with Holy Hierarchy, since they both strongly locate systemic racism within its historical context and could provide students with opportunities to compare and contrast various influences on the social construction of race. The film, in whole or in part, is also a good fit for Sociology

Research on educational travel has shown significant student outcomes for personal, academic, and professional growth. However, there are financial and cultural barriers that make it harder for some groups of students to participate in programs such as study abroad and shorter-term educational travel. This article examines the unique challenges and opportunities for first-generation and low-income

Couch’s work has yielded rich insights into social processes, and he has been memorialized in the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction’s Couch­Stone Symposium (Gregory P. Stone from the previous chapter). Unfortunately, his many contributions remain largely unrecognized outside several of his students and internet studies, includ­ ing those by Katovich and Chen themselves. A creative deviant

As the emphasis of Cults is on “destructive” cults, the use of music and sound effects within the podcast seems to be employed in a manner that creates a sense of mystery and danger to help emphasize the distinction of the cults being examined. This is in combination with certain dialog that enhances this effect. For example, in episode 1, “The Manson Family: Charles Manson,” the narrator states, “Manson

challenge “the country’s oligarchic structure, its patriarchal authority, and its primitively fundamen­ talist moral values” (p. 207). In all, Has the Gay Movement Failed? is a his­ toric reckoning of the last half century of the gay movement and a critique of a politic of normativity that has sidelined more radical and transformative goals. Though Duberman is a renowned historian, select chapters

Students often identify research methods classes as one of the most difficult and intimidating classes of their academic career. The objectives of this study were twofold. The first was to ascertain whether the use of group-centered, collaborative learning would improve student mastery of material compared to traditional, lecture-based classes. The second objective was to examine a possible differential

The COVID-19 pandemic forced all face-to-face college courses to transition to remote instruction. This article explores instructional techniques used in the transition, student perceptions of effectiveness/enjoyment/accessibility of those techniques, barriers that students faced due to the transition, and race/class/gender inequality in experiencing those barriers. We used surveys in introductory

The instruction of classical sociological theory at Lehman College of the City University of New York (CUNY) underwent significant transformation to make it more activity-based and better aligned with departmental learning goals. The article focuses on the effectiveness of an “edited book” project that came of this endeavor, where students become editors and curate “chapters” on a topic by identifying

The introductory sociology course is typically the only course most students take in sociology; hence, the introductory textbook becomes the only sociology textbook they may ever read as college students. The textbook, however, often lacks rigor in explaining concepts. This study focused on the thoroughness of explanations of the relations of substructure and superstructure of society by Karl Max (economic

Team-Based Learning (TBL) is a highly structured, immersive teaching strategy that emphasizes active learning through peer teams. Despite its many potential benefits for teaching introductory sociology, it has been slow to gain traction in the discipline. Instructors may debate whether the value of TBL is sufficient to justify its challenges, which may include student resistance, increased time demands

We did it! Just prior to writing this comment, I submitted my final grades and let out a huge sigh of relief. I pause now to recognize the immense achievement of the collective sociology teaching and learning community consisting of faculty at colleges and universities of all types, high school teachers, graduate teaching assistants, students, and all those who have supported and enabled the continued

Colorblind ideology provides individuals with numerous ways to minimize racism. This poses a challenge for instructors who teach about race and racism as students deploy this ideology to derail classroom discussions. Student resistance may be amplified when discussing microaggressions because students often characterize focusing on microaggressions as being “too sensitive” or trying to see racism where

Teaching race and ethnicity in various sociology courses, we found students in our classes can be very reluctant to approach the subject of race, discrimination, and racism. Moreover, during class discussion, they often have a hard time defining and analyzing these concepts. In this study, we examine how popular culture can be a useful tool to teach difficult subjects, such as race and ethnicity. Instead

Criticism but Silences Collective Expression.” American Political Science Review 107(2):326–43. Lazer, David, Alex (Sandy) Pentland, Lada Adamic, Sinan Aral, Albert Laszlo Barabasi, Devon Brewer, Nicholas Christakis, Noshir Contractor, James Fowler, Myron Gutmann, et al. 2009. “Life in the Network: The Coming Age of Computational Social Science.” Science 323(5915):721–23. McAuley, Julian, and Jure

This note overviews a class activity and an assignment for engaging poetic transcription. Poetic transcription is an arts-based research method commonly employed in the analysis and representation of qualitative data. The discussion provides some background on arts-based research, poetic inquiry, and poetic transcription as research practices within the qualitative tradition. Furthermore, it shows

absence is felt as they take with them their social capital and their volunteer labor. The chapter concludes by outlining four themes the authors gleaned from their interviews about why church refugees are done with church: “They wanted community . . . and got judgment. The wanted to affect the life of the church . . . and got bureaucracy. They wanted conversation . . . and got doctrine. They wanted

In this article, we propose a campus-based pedagogy to teach sociology. We offer the example of a project designed to critically assess university Title IX policy and situate it within existing sociological research on gender-based inequalities and violence. Students engage in sociological research regarding issues such as sexual harassment and assault, intimate partner violence, consent, and rape

we are referred to as “new” despite historical evidence to the contrary in much of today’s social science as eerily similar to the ways the members of the symposia at the end of The Testaments—and The Handmaid’s Tale—express confusion, ignorance, or disbelief about the women’s narratives in these two books. As such, this section could be utilized to encourage students to think about the social construction

This article analyzes the effectiveness of an activity we developed to help students better understand intersectionality. Intersectionality is an analytic concept that signifies ways that inequalities may overlap to create unique forms of privilege and subjugation. In the activity, students use assigned vignettes from the perspective of research participants in our own ethnographic data (including

someone has privilege because this gives them space and time to think. Crystal Manor symbolizes unlimited time and resources to allow the imagination to bloom and even says so in the welcome letter Peyton reads upon arrival. Leavy may wish to help us all find spaces of imaginative privilege in our own lives, however unlikely those pathways to creativity might seem to others. I also remain unsure of

Edelman, Carol, and Sam Edelman. 2010. “Sociology 153, The Holocaust: Background, Tragedy, & Aftermath.” Syllabus published in TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology. Washington, DC: American Sociological Association. http://trails .asanet.org/Pages/Resource.aspx?ResourceID=11624. Markusen, Erik. 2010. “The Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights.” Syllabus published in TRAILS:

Mastery learning approaches were designed to improve student learning and elevate the level of understanding across a broader swath of students. These approaches operate under the belief that all students are capable of learning if given enough time. Little research has examined the utility or applicability of a mastery learning approach for social sciences outside of research methods courses. This

The topic of human–animal studies (HAS) remains largely ignored within the sociology classroom. While a few sociologists have encouraged teaching about animals, none has assessed whether incorporating nonhuman animals into the curriculum is effective. In this study, three instructors at two universities incorporated animal-related materials in their sociology courses in a variety of ways. Data analyzed

principles. Each chapter is framed with narratives of teaching scenarios that instructors at the college level will find relatable. This book is not written by sociologists; Darby and Lang are both scholars of English. While written for a general audience, the online strategies would be of use in any sociology course. To complement with a sociological perspective, Small Teaching Online would pair well

I presented the 2019 Hans O. Mauksch address at the American Sociological Association annual meeting in New York City on August 13, 2019. In this address, I explore how sociology faculty perceive their physical bodies in relationship to teaching. After reviewing the literature, I surveyed a national sample of sociology faculty from diverse institutional contexts to find out how aware they were of their

The U.S. K–12 public education system is fundamentally unequal. What efforts can facilitate students to become deeply immersed in the realities of the system and to embody the need for social change? This article investigates scaffolded, semester-long writing assignments to demonstrate patterns in the three tenets of critical community-engaged learning (authentic relationship development, reducing

Although there is a great deal of available material on using nontraditional resources for teaching sociology, the pedagogical uses of science fiction have not been examined for 20 years. This essay first asserts the need for an update based on changes in society and in science fiction over the past two decades. The paper then focuses on the uses of SF to teach sociology and critical thinking by describing

Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Symbolic Interaction: Perspective and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press. D’Onofrio, Sarah. 2016. “Using ‘The House I Live In’ to Understand Structural Strain Theory.” Assignment published in TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology. Washington, DC: American Sociological Association. http://trails .asanet.org/Pages/Resource.aspx?ResourceID=12962

The solutions working mothers employ in each country are also highly dependent on the gendered work–family policies present in each context. In Sweden, government policies, like the “gender equality bonus” (p. 33), incentivize mothers and fathers to split leave time equally. As a result, mothers expect men to participate equally in caregiving and feel they can prioritize full-time employment. In former

program requirements—something that might inform conversations around mentorship and advising. In order to preserve confidentiality, Small was not able to disclose the race and ethnicity of his respondents. Scholars looking for a better understanding of how these dynamics might be shaped by race or educators looking to hear more about the experiences of graduate students of color will not find their

types published in TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology. Washington, DC: American Sociological Association. http://trails .asanet.org/Pages/Resource.aspx?ResourceID=11594. Chapkina, Nadejda, Charles Jaret, Guangya Liu, and Angela Pollock. 2010b. “Controversies about the Impact of Immigration.” All resource types published in TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library

Food Justice Now! intersects various subfields of sociology and could be accessible to a variety of courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels of course work. In its entirety, this book would be appropriate for the sociology of food and consumption and for environmental sociology as well as a supplemental book for a course in social movements and an introductory sociology course. Specifically