|
|
A Quarterly Publication of
The American Sociological Association
ABSTRACTS
Volume 34, Number 2, April 2006ARTICLES
- Transmitting Tricks of the Trade: Advisors and the Development of Research Knowledge ..... Erin Leahey
- Competing Perspectives in the Classroom: The Effect of Sociology Students' Perceptions of "Balance" on Evaluasiont ..... Jeffrey C. Dixon and Janice McCabe
- Making Sexism Visible: Birdcages, Martians, and Pregnant Men ..... Sherryl Kleinman, Martha Copp, and Kent Sandstrom
NOTES
- Analyzing the News: Teaching Critical Thinking Skills in a Writing Intensive Social Problems Course ..... Nancy L. Malcom
- Throwing the Sociological Imagination into the Garbage: Using Students' Waste Disposal Habits to Illustrate C. Wright Mills's Concept ..... William Dowell
- Making Sociology Relevant: The Assignment and Application of Breaching Experiments ..... Adam Rafalovich
- The Importance of Place: Using Local-Focus Videos to Spark the Sociological Imagination ..... Elizabeth Hoffman
APPLICATION
- The Research Article as a Foundation for Subject-Centered Learning and Teaching Public Sociology: Experiential Exercises for Thinking Structurally about Child Care Fatalities ..... Matthew T. Lee, Julia Wrigley, and Joanna Dreby
Transmitting Tricks of the Trade: Advisors and the Developoment of Research Knowledge
How is sociological research practice learned? Because much of the tacit knowledge required to succeed in professions such as academia cannot be obtained formally, informal channels of learning-such as interaction with advisors-may be crucial. In this paper I test the extent to which graduate school advisors influence the development of their advisees' research habits, practices, and beliefs. I find that advisors' attitudes and intra-professional standing affect how their advisees view various research practices-both those that are less codified (such as how to deal with anomalous data) and those that are quite standardized (such as statistical significance testing). For the least standardized and most qualitative research practices, such as interpreting qualitative text, I find that students' experiences are more relevant that advisors' attitudes. I discuss these findings by referencing literature in the sociology of science and knowledge and relate my findings to broader knowledge about teaching sociology at the graduate level.
Return to top of page.
Competing Perspectives in the Classroom: The Effect of Sociology Students' Perceptions of "Balance" on Evaluations
"Balance" in the classroom has been the subject of recent debate in academic and public spheres, with some calling for legislation to prevent instructors from "indoctrinating" students. The debate over balance is important to sociology because the discipline is sometimes characterized as overtly liberal and activist; but the implications of balance for teaching and learning remain unclear. In this article, we present the results of a study in which we operationalized balance as students' perceptions of whether instructors discussed points of view other than their own and invited criticism of their ideas. Using OLS regression on undergraduate classes' quantitative evaluations of sociology instructors at Indiana University during the 2002-2003 academic year (N=99 classes), we asked whether classes perceived their sociology instructors to be balanced and whether positive perceptions led to better evaluations. We also asked about the relative influence of sociology classes' perceptions of balance on course evaluations compared to other influences. We found that most classes perceived their instructors as balanced and instructors who were perceived as being more balanced received better evaluations. However, we also found that balance was not as important as other factors in influencing evaluations. We discuss implications.
Making Sexism Visible: Birdcages, Martians, and Pregnant Men
This paper offers six strategies for dealing with students' resistance to learning about the oppression of women: making the familiar strange, substituting race for sex, distinguishing between intentions and consequences, imagining men in women's bodies, exposing students' claims of equal gender oppression as false parallels, and analyzing some of women's desires as instances of false power. These teaching strategies, along with Marilyn Frye's (1983) metaphor of oppression as a birdcage consisting of systematically related wires, provide a framework for pre-empting or responding to students' resistance.
Analyzing the News: Teaching Critical Thinking Skills in a Writing Intensive Social Problems Course
This paper discusses an approach to teaching Social Problems as a writing-intensive course that encourages students to have greater awareness of current social issues, to become better writers, and to develop critical thinking skills. I describe a semester-long project in which students analyze the sociological relevance of current news events as they are reported in newspapers and newsmagazines. Students complete weekly written analyses by finding pertinent news reports, relating the current events to sociological concepts covered in class, and providing "points of divergence" in which they discuss how the real-life situations reported in the news differ from the more abstract sociological concepts. In addition to discussing the details of the semester-long project, this paper offers strategies for grading the weekly assignments in a manner that is both efficient and rigorous and that provides students with sufficient feedback so that they can learn from their efforts.
Throwing the Sociological Imagination into the Garbage: Using Students' Waste Disposal Habits to Illustrate C. Wright Mills's Concept
This paper outlines a teaching and learning technique that utilizes student's waste production habits to assess environmental issues and actively apply C. Wright Mills's sociological imagination. Students collect their garbage over a twenty-four hour period and bring it to class. Students assess their waste production behavior by analyzing the contents and voluntarily share the results with the class. The discussion draws attention to the importance of personal choices and public concerns. The goal is to help students see that their actions are driven by current culture and the subsequent social issues result from their collective behavior. Understanding the personal and the public encourages them to recognize their sociological imagination and to adequately apply it to the given situation.
Making Sociology Relevant: The Assignment and Application of Breaching Experiments
The author discusses the value of Harold Garfinkel's "Breaching Experiments" for giving relevance to concepts in introductory sociology. Explaining his experiences with assigning social norm violation exercises, the author outlines some guiding principles that make breaching an effective learning tool. The author argues that social breaching should be a skill that a sociology student develops, rather than a one-time "event" that the student reports. The success of social breaching as a learning tool depends upon: a) students' repeated attempts at a specific norm violation; b) the student's level of discomfort while performing the exercise; and c) a careful documentation of how the norm violation is proceeding. The author demonstrates how social breaching can give meaning to abstract sociological concepts by explaining how such exercises help elucidate Merton's concept of anomie.
The Importance of Place: Using Local-Focus Videos to Spark the Sociological Imagination
Video tapes can augment a lecture to re-position a scholarly topic and present it in a medium that students associate more with leisure than with scholarship. This article explains how the use of videos on regional topics or on stories that take place in local areas can inspire students' sociological imagination and enable them to better and more deeply connect with a sociological topic. In particular, I discuss that, after viewing videos that addressed both course concepts and some local issues, students in my Criminology and Sociology of Law courses were able to relate the course concepts to their own lives, thus increasing their sociological imagination.
The Research Article as a Foundation for Subject-Centered Learning and Teaching Public Sociology: Experiential Exercises for Thinking Structurally about Child Care Fatalities
This paper is the latest installment in a series that is designed to bridge the gap between teaching and practice by developing classroom applications based on a current research article from the American Sociological Review. We discuss the ways in which a recent ASR paper on child care fatalities can be used to help students explore Burawoy's conception of "public" sociology in a manner that is consistent with a subject-centered pedagogical approach. To illustrate this approach, we offer three experiential exercises designed to facilitate the active engagement of students' hearts, as well as their minds, thereby linking our subject-centered approach to the increasingly popular notion of character education.
The Editor of Teaching Sociology is Liz Grauerholz.
For articles, notes, and conversations, send manuscripts to: Liz Grauerholz, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Purdue University Stone Hall, 700 West State Street, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2059. Phone: 765-494-5874, Fax: 765-496-1476.
For book, video, and software reviews, send manuscripts to: Jay Howard, Department of Sociology, Indiana University Columbus, 4601 Central Avenue, Columbus, IN 47203-1769.
For questions about manuscript processing, contact Monica Mendez, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Central Florida, Howard Phillips Hall 403, Orlando, FL 32816-1360. Phone: 407-823-2227, Fax: 407-823-3026.
The Webmaster is Pauline H. Pavlakos. Observations on form and egregious spelling may be directed to Ms. Pavlakos.
The Teaching Sociology Web Page is located at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Le Moyne College, the Jesuit College of Central New York.
Page last updated: March 12, 2006
